As we pulled out into the soft, early-morning light, Raz remarked on our late start. In my swing-shift working world, 0600 is not late unless you’ve stayed up all night to see it. However, there is practicality behind the comment. After all, if the sun is above the horizon in a cloudless sky, the world heats up. We apparently had high temperatures in Albuquerque around 100° the afternoon prior, so we had some concerns of overheating before we climbed high enough in the Rockies for the mountain forests to cool us off.

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Santa Fe, NM

While 0600 might be late for getting out the door to travel, however, it is still much too early for breakfast. As has become our new tradition, we pulled out of Albuquerque already searching for breakfast options an hour or two down the road. Or up the road as the case was today, since we were both going uphill and North. Santa Fe is approximately an hour’s drive north of Albuquerque, and has a world-renowned food scene. We picked a locally owned bakery just outside the Plaza area. We figured on skipping the drive through downtown traffic. Though vehicle congestion is no usually an issue at 0700 on a Saturday, Santa Fe, like many New Mexican towns, has an “old town”, or historical district which is basically 1-3 century old labyrinth of meandering streets that make sense only if you are a drunken mule. Santa Fe’s layout is particularly tangled, so even with no other cars on the road, it’s truly impossible to get through quickly. While Raz and I thought we could get to the bakery easily without a foray through old town, the GPS disagreed. This, of course, meant further on-the-fly redirection due to one of the special events being set up on the plaza that seem to happen constantly during the tourist season in Santa Fe.

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We found ourselves at the intended bakery about 5-10 minutes after its posted opening time. Alas, BoulTawns’ Bakey & Café was closed, dark, completely unoccupied, and lacking any posts explaining why. Both frustrated and confused, we opted not to loiter about and moved to the second option on our list, Palacio Café, also noting an opening time of 0700. The second establishment was every bit as dark and silent as the first, also with no posted explanation. Raz, who is actually a morning person was bordering on famished at this point, otherwise known as “hangry” in the parlance of our time. Not wanting any chance of further unpleasant surprises, we plugged in the address of Clafoutis. By 0730 we were ravenously downing one L’assiette Francaise each. The perfect baguette matched with the ideal cheese and charcuterie succeeded in rebalancing the world and restoring our good humor.

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Tres Piedras, NM

Well aware that we would be in a mad rush against the daytime heat, we planned our first caching stop well north of the Colorado border. An unplanned break was necessary in the little town of Tres Piedras, NM, however. As far as we could tell, Tres Piedras consists of a few ranches, a sprinkling of single family residences, and the Chili Line Depot. Rather than a general store or a gas station, Tres Piedras has a hotel/restaurant/bakery/coffee shop. After handling the necessity that forced the stop, we picked up some cupcakes and a hazelnut macchiato to go. We had the carrot cake cupcake on the way to our first cache and found both it and the coffee drink to be of excellent quality.

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Rio Grande County, CO

Our first stop was a “virtual” or containerless type of cache. This is a type of cache that was intended to draw attention to interesting or important sites without creating any potential for damage to the delicate site by placement, removal, and replacement of even a small container and log. The number of this type of caches is limited, as the ever-increasing volume of information readily available on the Internet can invalidate the process of verification of the claim of finding the virtual “hide” through trivia available only at the site. Virtuals existing at the time of the moratorium were kept as active as long as the owner was still regularly verifying the logged finds.

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This particular virtual cache brought us to an interesting display of carved stone sculptures celebrating the earliest European-American settlers to make permanent homes in Colorado. It turns out that a good hundred years prior to any wild and wooly ranchers or gold prospectors, a handful of New Mexican families came north, fleeing drought. That heritage remains in place names like “Antonito”, “Alamosa”, “Colorado”, and “Monte Vista”. It also exists in the state’s rediscovered love of green chile, picante salsa, and tacos … I do wonder if Coloradan school children have to learn that they were once simultaneously claimed by Spain and France without actually having direct governance in place from either country. Do they learn that America bought the bulk of the state in the Louisiana Purchase, only to have that purchase re-classified to include only the Northeast quarter so that US could buy Florida from Spain? We don’t have to learn that down south in New Mexico, after all it isn’t our state’s history, and our is a bit more straight forward and easy to remember.

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We gathered the answers for the trivia to post our find, though we could not post from the field to claim our find due to non-existent Internet connection. I guess our cell provider determined this region too sparsely settled to be worth covering. Some deeply primitive part of my soul that agrees with the rantings of Theodore Roosevelt on the necessity of wild spaces to fully develop the human spirit rejoices in the enforced separation from my usual digital tethering to my every-day life. I recall a childhood in which a detailed travel plan was given to friends and family before a vacation, and no one expected a call or message until the trip was complete and the traveler returned home. That world seems still to exist in the small, scattered towns of South-Central Colorado, but I find myself equally comforted and unnerved by this fact.

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The next few caches took us through forests in varying levels of regrowth. The intended theme of this chronicle is not a charting of forest devastation, but viewing it and recording it seem to be inevitable. As we approach Slumgullion Pass, acres and acres of grey, skeletal pines stretch up the surrounding hillsides. These are not result of fire as we saw in southern NM. These are the work of an insidious beetle that burrows beneath the bark and kills the tree, leaving its carcass to stand, zombie-like, awaiting time, weathering, or fire to finally give it rest. I think of these silent, dead stretches as ghost forests.

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Hinsdale County, CO

Here and there new seedling pines can be seen, peeking their green crowns up through lower branches. The bright green foliage of aspen trees intermittently sprinkled throughout the lower forest border further mutes the somber air of the standing dead. Over it all, though, the sky is a near-uniform grey. These are not rainclouds that gather over us, shading the sun. This is the heavy pall of smoke from the 90% unconstrained 416 fire blazing near my childhood home. The smoke here originated 60+ miles southwest. Prevailing winds have brought it over rugged mountain peaks and channeled it up meandering river valleys. Evacuations are in effect for the area of fire, and severe fire restrictions and penalties are advertised on lit, mobile displays for the counties we are travelling through. The ghost forests are at particularly high risk for deadly, unmanageable blazes. Even with the threatening, barbeque-scented skies, the valley stretching out below us from the Windy Point overlook near the top of Slumgullion Pass is beautiful. I’d call it breathtaking, but I’m already afraid to breathe due to the smoke. The air is flavored with the musky sweetness of burning ponderosa. It’s the scent of a thousand campfires of childhood, and even knowing that my smelling it here means destruction on a near incalculable scale, the taste and scent evoke not fear, but melancholic nostalgia.

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I shake my head clear of the thoughts and approach the information signs which detail the history and geology of the mountain pass we are crossing. Slumgullion is an interesting and mostly unsavory word. I have not been able to determine if it was miners or whalers who first coined it, but one group shared it with the other, and from then it entered the general lexicon to describe a viscous stew of scrounged items. In whaling it was the bloody mess left upon the decks after skinning the catch. In mining it is the ruddy mineral deposit left at the bottom of the sluice. The stew arising in name from either of the sources has a tomato stock, potatoes, and additives of “whatever meat and vegetables are just lying around”. The streaked face of the slowly disintegrating mountain flowing into the multicolored trees below fits the image of this dish exactly. The living and dead pines creak and moan in heavy winds rushing up the valley. The name of this overlook is also well chosen. Interestingly, the shifting smoke drifting between me and the information signs processes in my brain as my own movement. I am not one to generally suffer vertigo, no matter how high the look-out point. Vertigo on solid ground without even being able to see a cliff is a truly strange experience.

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Lake City, CO

I’m still pondering this as we drive down one of the steepest roads in all Colorado to the tiny town of Lake City below. The town is somewhat famous for ironic and darkly humorous reasons. Our next cache was another virtual at the site of the event which made Lake City famous. Remember for a moment that the mountains behind us were named for a stew of whatever is laying around. They were named such when Alfred Packer and the five men he was guiding became hopelessly lost in a snowstorm just this side of the pass. It was still named such just months later when Mr. Packer was put to trial for killing and eating those five men. The hill behind Lake City was not named at the time, and now bears the moniker “Cannibal Plateau”. The trial was a sensational event, and throughout the summer, residents of the town put on a weekly melodrama to reenact it. We did not arrive at the correct time to see the production, though we did take lunch at The Packer Saloon and Cannibal Grill. We did not find any Long Pig on the menu, and we are quite sure certain the bison was really bison in the burgers.

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Gunnison, CO

The pall of smoke dropped behind us as we travelled north along the Lake Fork of the Gunnison River. We found ourselves stopping to take photos of the forests, mountains, and majestic beauty of the river in its gorge far below us. Caches or not, the scenery here was glorious. "Colorado" was named for the red pigmentation of the great river that runs through its iron-rich hills, but its second appellation of “Colorful” came from the remarkable greens of its forests and the blue of its wide skies. Though I guess that appellation might also have arisen from the rough-and-tumble characters that settled here during the mining boom. Colorado history is absolutely rife with larger-than-life personalities and their tales of epic glory or tragedy. The state is also speckled liberally with ghost towns where mining claims were struck and played out, or everyone just up and left when roads replaced the rails. Gunnison kept its place here on the western slopes of the range because it held the normal school that eventually grew into a liberal arts college, and then a university. Mining boom towns and college cities hold an essential wildness and spirit of unfettered passion/pioneer progress in common. Gunnison is no exception, and is also the first town we have passed through on this trip to have stable mobile service coverage. This and significant amounts of architecture more recent then 1915 speak of continued growth and a thriving community. The town is charming, and every interaction we have with locals is quite friendly. Happily, the skies are also completely clear of smoke, and we take our first deep refreshing breaths in several hundred miles before bunking down for the night in a lovely little motor hotel.

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Dawn brings a breakfast of our tasty, imported, New Mexican treasures from Clafoutis, and an early start for our way back through vast forests and high mountain passes. We take the fast track home, which is not in any way direct, since we have to skirt some massive mountain ranges. We do take our time to appreciate lush, green valleys fed by perfectly picturesque meandering rivers. A few small ranches dot the landscape here, but there are very few permanent settlements of any significant size. The truth of Colorado is that the winters are too harsh, and the soil too rocky to foster large-scale, self-supporting human habitation. The cities in this state exist where they do because the mineral wealth was so impressive that mankind reshaped the very surface of the planet to extract it, refine it, and trade it with distant communities for everything necessary to sustain settlement here.

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Saguache, CO

A short, quarter-mile climb up a forested hillside at a temperature minutely above freezing on a morning in June is enough to convince me of why the native populations here were mostly nomadic. If this is summer, how cold winter must be! It is the harsh Colorado mountain winter that I realize is used as a reference point when describing our own winters in Albuquerque as "mild". Truly, they are, and I think I would not give them up for anything, though I can see why the practice of owning a summer home in Colorado and wintering in New Mexico, Texas, or California has been common ever since the mineral wealth was discovered here. We stop only briefly to eat as we exit the rugged mountains. We try the local veg & potatoes at the 4th Street Diner in Saguache, CO. This is an adorable town, with a good deal of apparent personality, and well worth a longer pause sometime in the future.

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Tres Piedras, NM

We stop for a few mountain caches, and a couple more as those mountains fade into the high northern planes of New Mexico. We stop for green chile cheeseburgers at the Chili Lime Depot. We have a side-quest of finding the best green chile cheeseburger in the state. This one is not it, but the restaurant is the only spot with a functional bathroom between Antonito, CO and Espanola, NM, so there is likelihood of needing to pause here again should we further explore Southcentral Colorado on future trips.

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