Quest of the Phoenix 2017 (3)

The clock in my room had not been adjusted for Daylight Savings Time and I forgot to correct it, so I thought I was getting up at like 6:30 but actually it was 5:30. So when I went out for continental breakfast 15 minutes later (they’d said that breakfast started at 6:30), I was actually 45 minutes early instead of within the proper range. The Spanish speaking guys were hanging around the lobby ignoring me and talking to each other as I wondered why the bread products were still half-frozen and why I could smell eggs but not see any yet. At least I got a bagel and some coffee.

After that, I turned on the fan in the bathroom and then forgot to turn it back off due to getting distracted by other shit, and then while in the shower someone called the landline phone in my bathroom. I picked it up and said “Hello?” No answer. I tried pushing the hook-button-thingy in case you needed to do that to use the thing properly; no difference. When I hung the phone up it started ringing again. And again no one answered. So I just left it off the hook on the toilet and decided to get the hell out of this place quickly. Perhaps the fan and shower had woken up another guest and they were calling my room to counter-harass me (especially since it was an hour earlier than I thought it was)? I quickly dressed and packed.

As I went out into the hallway to take my stuff to my car via the side door, I saw a cop standing at the front desk and nodded to him politely. NOW what was going on? I loaded my stuff in my car and then came in the front door to turn in my key. The police officer was now saying to the girl at the desk, “So, if someone walks right out without paying, what are you gonna do?” I interposed myself, said I was checking out of my room, handed over the keycard, and when asked if there was any deposit, said “No, I paid for the room in advance” so the cop could hear me, before leaving. No one mentioned WTF was going on with the phone, so it clearly wasn’t the front desk calling me. Perhaps it’s best this mystery goes unsolved for eternity.

Now, last night it had occurred to me that I was near Denver, and Denver supposedly had a view of the mountains, but I hadn’t seen a damn thing. Then again it had been gray and sleety. This morning as I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, the sky was clear and sunny as could be.

I glanced to the west, and my brain shut down for a moment.

The horizon was covered by, well, the Rocky Mountains, jagged peaks of white and blue which seemed enormous even from this great distance, phantasmal and hazy even in conditions of such excellent visibility. I had never seen anything like this before. It was difficult not to stare at them as I drove west, into the actual city of Longmont (I was kinda out in the commercial-sprawl exurb area or something), and to concentrate on driving.

At first, I had some trouble finding the tire place I was looking for, so I pulled into a Firestone that suddenly appeared instead. They were booked solid and wouldn’t be able to even get to my car for at least two hours, so the guy kindly suggested another place and I went on my way. Shortly after leaving, I found the place I was looking for originally anyway (another chain where I’d gotten my tires previously in Michigan).

After explaining the situation, the guy examined my other tires and informed me that two were in mediocre shape at best, and two (including the flat, unsurprisingly, which I still had in the trunk) were downright bad, with very pronounced cracking. So, I decided to just replace them all since I would shortly be driving through those… THINGS… on the horizon over there. The cost of this was beyond what I could really afford on debit, so I instead put it on my credit card, gritting my teeth and reminding myself that I had been strongly considering replacing my tires before the trip, anyway.

It only took them maybe 40 minutes to get me taken care of — it was now a little past nine in the morning — so I stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee (people like to talk shit about McD’s, but one unassailable factor in their favor is that you can go into practically any town in the U.S. and be guaranteed a decent cup of coffee from them) and then stopped at a nearby department store (some chain I’d never heard of) for gas and bladder relief. It was maybe 35 degrees (1 or 2 C) out, yet thanks to the dryness and lack of wind I didn’t feel particularly cold — and evidently neither did anyone else, since the department store did not have DOORS on its front, just a sort of open entryway leading directly from outside to inside.

Then I got back in the car and drove back the way I’d come, towards the freeway which would take me first south into Denver, and then west into America’s premier example of the most intimidating type of geography on the planet. This was the single part of the trip that I had most worried about when planning things (though I was also kind of excited). My asthma wasn’t giving me problems at a mile above sea level, but would that change as I approached two miles into the sky? What was this thing I’d heard about how “vehicles must have chains on their tires”, again, exactly? I knew nothing about that and did not have “chains” of any sort. Would the authorities be checking things like that, and how would they punish stupid Midwesterners found to be in noncompliance? Would I be on narrow, winding roads that curved around steep cliffsides, and would there be snow and ice on said roads? All of these thoughts kept jabbing me in the brain like little pitchfork-wielding imps.

As with every other major city, the freeway in and around Denver was dense with traffic and lane-shifts and all that fun stuff, though what I could see of the city itself looked clean and impressive. As I exited right and merged onto I-70 West, the lanes grew fewer and the mountains closer — I could now see the pine trees sprouting from their slopes — but traffic didn’t really die off that much. An awful lot of people seemed to be going the same way I was going: up.

Eventually, there came a point where it was kinda like I’d passed through a giant looming gate, and then I was there, In The Mountains. The scenery was incredible and is best left to speak for itself through pictures, though photos usually have an unfortunate “flattening” effect that cannot do justice to the sense of depth, space, scale, and distance one perceives in real life.

The road, on the other hand, sucked. As I kept driving up increasingly steep inclines, my car started to have difficulty ascending, to the point that I was pretty much flooring the gas pedal just to hit like 45 or 50 mph. Not that I wanted to go much faster since the course of the roads looked like it had been planned by squirting Silly String all over a map and there was a disturbingly large amount of traffic even well outside Metro Denver. There were HOUSES way the hell up in the mountains, too. People actually LIVED in this crap. How did they even GET up there? With a CAT with spikes on its tires that could also use the steam shovel to hoist itself upwards? And for that matter, was I supposed to like, “shift gears” or something when ascending a 6% grade slope? I’d never even used those little “1” or “2” positions on my gear-shift thingy, and didn’t know what they were for. However, I decided that now was not the time for experimentation, since this was the sort of place where one wrong move would probably result in, you know, a fatality. At least I had nice new tires.

Signs along the road kept saying really disturbing things, like “BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS” and “UNLAWFUL TO PROCEED WITHOUT REQUIRED EQUIPMENT”, though they didn’t bother to say what the equipment in question was. Fortunately, though there were also ones which said “CHAINS REQUIRED WHEN FLASHING”, and they weren’t flashing. So that’s good, I guess? There was also a digital sign on one of those arch-things which helpfully informed us that there was a “ROCK SLIDE AHEAD -- EXPECT DELAYS.” I’d thought traffic was getting awfully thick. And slowing down. And soon it came to a complete stop. I then spent the next hour in a traffic jam during which we moved maybe two or three miles, in short lurches, until eventually, the local road crew succeeded in bulldozing the pieces of FALLING MOUNTAIN out of our way. Thanks, guys.

I was, meanwhile, listening to Dr. Jim’s “Iceland Special”, commemorating his trip to said country, in which he played mostly grim black and Viking metal from said country, which seemed appropriate to the landscape around me; the temperature had dropped below freezing by now, though there was only a little bit of frozen water on the roads. Thankfully. I pulled over at another of those weird Colorado rest-stops-that-are-attached-to-a-town and took a much-needed piss. Shortly after getting back on the road I found myself in ANOTHER traffic jam. I forget what caused this one, but it lasted almost as long as the first. There were also more signs saying “AVALANCHE AREA” in case anyone who’d never been here before wasn’t already sufficiently, uh, concerned.

Following Traffic Jam #2, I continued my ascent into the stratosphere, eventually going through some tunnels (which created an almost shocking contrast between the extremely bright blue-and-white of the mountains’ exterior with the black of their interior, illuminated by dim orange electric lights) and reaching the highest point of the Vail Pass, where a sign informed us that we were now at 10,662 feet above sea level. So yeah. I felt a bit light-headed. No asthma attack, though.

After the high point, it was literally all downhill from there, mostly. Which ended up being even worse than going uphill since it’s hard to control the speed of your vehicle and you end up riding the brake while rarely having to use the gas, focusing 100% of your mental energy on staying in your lane while the gigantic semi truck right next to you struggles to stay in his lane as both of you go around a really sharp curve, stuff like that. Signs continued to taunt and harass us. “WARNING - 6% DOWNHILL CURVES AHEAD” complete with a picture of a semi truck tipping over. “RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP ½ MILE AHEAD,” in case that happened. “72 HIGHWAY FATALITIES THIS YEAR.” In case we missed it the first time, “BEWARE OF FALLING ROCKS.” “TRUCKERS DON’T BE FOOLED -- USE 2nd GEAR”, or something like that. “ROADS MAY BE ICY.” Every minute or two another sign would pop up promising death, destruction, horror, etc. Meanwhile, pretty little mountain towns that looked like they consisted of nothing but rich ski-tourists passed serenely by.

Then I came to an area where one lane was closed ahead, leading almost to a third traffic jam, but actually it was just more like a five- or ten-minute slowdown, so I could deal with that.

And then, suddenly, it was over.

I was still in the “mountains”, but the really steep grades, the excessively-winding paths, and most of the snow and ice disappeared. The landscape-vistas “opened up” somewhat, so that I was no longer being hemmed in by what looked like the frozen bodies of spiky-armored ancient frost-giants that might awaken at any moment, angered that we humans were trespassing in lands we clearly weren’t meant to inhabit.

Here the mountains turned red and green, occasionally speckled with a bit of leftover white. Instead of pine trees, there were cedar shrubs and what might have been sagebrush or something comparable, marking the rust-colored rock with dark emerald hues and advertising that yes, I had passed through the worst part of The Mountains and was now about to enter The Desert. Jim was now playing “Brennivín” by Tyr, a rare case of a song that might be described as an “epic dirge” and is apparently about a type of liquor used to neutralize the taste of hákarl, a food which even some Icelanders refuse to touch or think about or speak of. It seemed oddly appropriate.

In Glenwood Canyon, which was absolutely gorgeous (pics below), I stopped again at a scenic outlook that doubled as another rest stop and glanced a bit at the informational plaques and stuff. This canyon had been carved by the Colorado River, which I would cross at different points a few more times throughout the trip; it is also responsible for the Grand Canyon and flows all the way to the Gulf of California in the northwestern corner of Mexico.

I proceeded west through the remainder of the state, marveling at the natural beauty of western CO and the Colorado Plateau, though most of the human settlements here looked relatively impoverished. At least they lived amidst the full beauty of the West. Eventually, I passed through Grand Junction, Colorado’s only major city on this side of the Rockies. Traffic had lightened up, though, and would not thicken for the remainder of the day. Here the landscape almost looked like something from Africa; the Savannah or the Horn, perhaps, rocky and scrubby with odd gnarly trees of a sort I hadn’t seen before. The temperature had climbed back up to around 50 or so.

The topography grew a bit flatter and more open (though there were mountains in the distance and even a few canyon-wall-like hills and mesas starting to spring up), and I entered the real desert right before I crossed the state line into Utah.

The first thing I noticed was that the freeway speed limit rose to 80. 80! EIGHTY MILES PER HOUR. Here you can drive EIGHTY and it’s completely legal. Instantly I kind of liked Utah. The reason for this autobahn-like excess was clear: In eastern Utah, there is basically nothing for miles around; nothing save lots of beautiful, stunning, empty wasteland. I felt like I was driving into the background of a Boris Vallejo or Frank Frazetta painting. Awed, I pulled over at a scenic-overlook type spot on the cusp of a rocky cliff overlooking the desert and called my dad to let him know I was okay, as he had requested. Then browsed around the area a bit and took pictures, obviously.

As I drove first west, and then south on Highway 191 (which was no longer a freeway but still had a speed limit of 65), I saw in the distance a cluster of three mountain peaks, orphaned from any particular range, just sort of hovering blue and misty-looking over the treeless red-golden rock-plain. It was as if the mountains had died and I was seeing their ghosts. It was all so different from anything I was used to as to be nearly surreal; even the Rockies were basically just like the Appalachians, only bigger, bluer, and with more snow. Jim was meanwhile now on Episode 6 of H.O.R., which focused on important songs and albums released in years ending in zero, and I believe we were at 1980 at the time.

Soon I came into the vicinity of Moab, a popular base-camp for people wanting to visit Arches National Park a bit to the north and Canyonlands National Park a bit to the south. Striated low mountains of bright orange rock were the dominant feature here. Moab itself was a rather nice town but seemed verrrrry touristy, with a lot of people everywhere. I stopped for gas just to be safe, since for the most part, I’d spend the next 24 hours in areas of only minimal human habitation.

Past Moab the land grew more elevated, such that I found myself going up, down, and around fairly large hills (though nothing like what I’d dealt with a few hours ago), and also more fertile — occasionally there would even be land tilled for agriculture, and actual “trees” became sort of common again. Jim had moved on to 1990 and capped off the evening with “One Shot at Glory” by Judas Priest. After that, I shut the CD player off for a bit. As I neared the far southeastern corner of Utah, I descended through a small canyon and there, suddenly, was the little town of Bluff, where I’d be staying.

Bluff was quite charming, as was my motel, an independent inn run by a local Native family who included in each room a placard-thingy describing the background of the Hopi/Pueblo mythic figure Kokopelli. On the downside, the room lacked its own microwave, but otherwise, it was quite nice (including the aroma, which I couldn’t quite identify) and I wouldn’t mind returning if ever I was in the region again. I had another small dinner and again checked miscellaneous stuff via my phone’s wi-fi before passing out, again quite early. It had been an interesting day.