On the Road in the Rockies - Part 1

.

1-  OODLES OF AWNINGS AND A FISTFULL OF VICODIN

Funny how vacations don’t always start how you envision them.  It was late Friday afternoon.  We were FINALLY getting out of Dodge, motoring over Cajon Pass into the high desert—along with four million other people, all of them desperately vying to flee the L.A. Basin in a mass exodus.  We had originally planned to leave town mid morning to avoid this typical Friday night crush… But you know how it goes sometimes, when there are “unexpected obstacles” to overcome at the last minute. It was stop and go, bumper to bumper.  Our average speed from Yorba Linda to the Nevada border: 38 miles per hour.  But hey… We’re on a road trip.  What’s the big hurry?

After deliberating for two years, we had finally purchased a camper van: a 16-year-old Sportsmobile with low miles; clean as a whistle; spent most of its life parked in a garage.  Last winter and spring, weekend camping trips had provided us time to sort out what features we wanted to add before the big summer road trip, and this had come down to two essential things: 1) The capability to take hot showers, and; 2) a roll-out awning on the passenger side of the vehicle.

Since the van has a small water heater and a secondary faucet in the rear, we fashioned an outdoor shower enclosure off the back doors, using a shock-cord tent pole from REI and a shower curtain from Bed Bath & Beyond.  As for the awning, we selected the Fiamma model that the Sporstmobile West website recommended.  Terry ordered it from a local RV dealer/repair shop about a month before our vacation.  They said it would take two weeks to get it, and then they’d install it, no problem.  It was as good as done.

But three weeks after putting in the order, the awning had yet to arrive.  “Tomorrow,” we were told by Russell, the friendly service manager.  And the next day it was “tomorrow” again.  We were literally departing in two days, and STILL no awning.  Russell blamed the Fiamma factory in Florida, and lamented that he had called up and down the West Coast and was unable to find anyone who had that awning in stock.  That’s when Terry sprung into action.  She called the Sportsmobile West factory in Fresno—and yes, they had Fiamma awnings coming out their ears.  Oodles and oodles of awnings.  So she left the house at zero dark thirty the next morning, drove 260 miles to Fresno, bought the awning, and then delivered it to the RV shop by the end of the day.  Russell was bowled over.  Speechless.  And he installed it, free of charge.

Meanwhile, as my wife was talking to the Sportsmobile folks, making plans to pick up the awning, I was nursing a toothache at a business conference in Glendora.  The pain had been a minor distraction in the morning, but the left side of my jaw was expressing considerable anguish while eating lunch.  Not wanting to leave on vacation with a cavity that needed attention, I called my dentist.

“Sure, stop by on your way home,” said Dr. Lee.

So I did.  He examined me first, and then took some x-rays.  He studied the images, shook his head.

“I’m sorry, but I gotta pull that tooth. Can’t save it.”

He showed me the x-ray; pointed to the abscessed area around the root of a molar, elaborating on hairline fractures, yada, yada… Not good.  I explained that I was leaving on vacation.  Couldn’t I deal with it when I returned?

“I would suggest we extract it now,” he answered, explaining that it would only get worse.  I could either have it done now, or wait another week, until it became an emergency, and then have it removed somewhere in Colorado.  It didn’t take long to make up my mind: after numbing me with lidocaine, Dr. Lee went to work.

I didn’t feel a thing, and before I knew it, he was done.  He stuffed a gauze pad into my mouth to stem the bleeding; handed me a vial of antibiotics; another vial full of Vicodin.  Then came the post-op instructions:

“Okay, take the antibiotics every day until you run out.  When the lidocaine wears off, take the Vicodin.  And when the Vicodin is gone, drink whiskey.  You’ve got some stitches in there now, very tender, so don’t chew on the left side of your mouth for a week.  Stick with noodle soup, stuff like that.  You don’t want to bust those stitches open, so take it easy.  No heavy exertion for a few days.  You’re not going mountain climbing or anything crazy, are you?”

Umm… No.  Of course not.

“Good, then.  Have a great vacation!”

Henceforth, come Friday morning, instead of us casting off for Colorado, I was stumbling around in a Vicodin haze, organizing the climbing gear, while Terry was running errands that should’ve been done the day before, but she had gone to Fresno instead, and the van was at the RV shop getting the awning installed.  By the time we had fetched the van, packed it, fed the pets, locked the house and pulled out of the driveway, it was three o’clock.

And like I was saying, it was heavy traffic all the way to the Nevada border, where we stopped at the Starbucks in Primm for a dose of caffeine.  It was ten o’clock when we drove through glittery Las Vegas, and an hour further landed us in Mesquite.  Mesquite is out in the middle of nowhere, settled by Mormons well over a century ago.  There are two casinos in town (though one is boarded up, out of business), plus nine golf courses and three cheap motels.  The Best Western there had a room and we took it.

We were back on the road first thing in the morning.  The air was sultry and it smelled like rain.  Under partly cloudy skies, we motored through the Virgin River Gorge into Utah, where thunderclouds greeted us outside Cedar City.  Intermittent showers and lightning would escort us eastward on I-70, all the way to Grand Junction, Colorado.

Continuing east from Grand Junction, the interstate curved into a valley that is flanked by high buttes and mesas, the Colorado River rippling alongside the freeway.  We were driving into the Rockies now, past the farming towns of Palisade and DeBeque.  Late in the day, we exited the freeway in Rifle, and the familiarity of the place was sort of a homecoming.  There on the hillside stood the old Maxfield House, built in 1881 and perfectly restored.  As far as I know, my cousin still lives there with his family.  In fact, I have many distant cousins who live in the area.  My mother was born near here, as well as her mother, growing up on ranches that had been homesteaded long ago by our ancestors.  Roots run deep on the Western Slope of Colorado.

We had a reservation at the State Park campground at Rifle Gap Reservoir, a few miles north of town.  We found it half empty, our site overlooking the lake.  I bought a bundle of wood from the campground host and made a fire, and while we sat beside it, the night descended.  Lightning danced on the horizon: a storm was coming.  When our campfire at last died out and our wine glasses were empty, we turned in, drifting off to sleep as raindrops pattered against the roof of the van.

Though it had been a shaky start, the trip was off and running.

2-  RIFLE SHOTS

When I was a youngster, my grandparents would sometimes take me along on their visits back to Colorado.  They had moved to California during World War II, but would regularly come back to see family.  They always called Colorado “back home.”  My grandfather grew up near Rifle, and he had taken me fishing once on Rifle Creek when I was thirteen, far upstream, at the 7,000-foot elevation, where the creek rambles through a narrow canyon.  The tall, limestone walls are vertical to overhanging, shading the wooded canyon floor for most of the day.  Deep, clammy grottos pock the base of the cliffs, half-concealed behind trees.  My grandfather had told me that, in the wintertime, curtains of ice would hang from the cliffs and fill the cave-like grottos at the base.  Merchants would then cut the ice into blocks and store them in the caves.  In the spring and early summer, townsfolk would buy the blocks for their ice boxes.  This was back in the “old days,” before electric refrigeration came to town, which my grandfather remembered as a kid.

While the canyon did offer great fishing and bounteous blocks of ice on a warm summer day, I’m certain my grandfather—or anyone else for that matter—had never thought to gaze up at the overhanging cliffs and exclaim: “Look at those sick lines! Grab the bolt kit!”

I’m told that the first climbing routes at Rifle Mountain Park were established in the early 1990s.  They were steep, long, and audaciously hard.  Routes rated 5.13 or harder are commonplace—which means this is a world-class destination for the best of the best sport climbers.  This also meant that Terry and I wouldn’t be able to touch 95 percent of the routes, because there are scant few “easy” ones.  On the other hand, I wanted to be able to say that I’d climbed at Rifle, so…

The morning was overcast when we drove into the canyon.  A light rain had fallen during the night, making the dirt road a little sloppy in places.  The trees were laden with dew.  After talking to a couple of local climbers, we settled on the Ice Cave Wall, where the routes Acquitted (5.7), Spuds in Space (5.8) and Hot Potato (5.9) resided on steep but featured limestone.  Mind you, these were some of the easiest lines in the canyon.  About two hundred feet further up the creek was the radically overhanging Bruahau Wall, where Mike Graham’s 14c test piece, Girl Talk, resided.  Though the physical distance between Girl Talk and the routes we were planning to climb was only 60 meters, difficulty-wise, they were light years apart.

We dropped our packs at the far right side of the Ice Cave Wall; flaked out the rope; donned our gear.  I took the first lead, starting with Acquitted.  It seemed 5.7 as rated, but the limestone felt greasy and was visibly wet from the rain in spots, which didn’t bolster any confidence. (Trust the feet. Trust the feet.)  Nonetheless, I clipped all the bolts, and then Terry lowered me and she climbed it.  Next was Spuds in Space, which became our nemesis.  On lead, I floundered getting through the crux overhang—though it didn’t help that the key finger hold, a sweet little pocket, was full of water.  I tried it every which way but loose.  And each attempt ended in a fall, giving my belayer at lot of action and kept her on her toes.  Before long, I was wiped out.  Pumped.  And the left side of my jaw was throbbing now.  “Take it easy,” my dentist had warned.  Hmm.  Not at all wanting to defy doctor’s orders (I’m a rule-follower, ask anyone), I duly handed the sharp end over to my wife.  Yes, she is a sweetheart.  She tied in, chalked up, and waged a good fight on that overhang.  But after a couple of good falls at the crux, she, too, asked to be lowered.  What can I say?  We got spanked by a little 5.8 route—albeit a little wet 5.8 route.

The clouds had mostly dispersed by this time, and since we were climbing on a sunny wall, it was becoming quite warm.  Too warm.  And my jaw was hurting.  A beer sounded good.  We hiked back to the van and I popped open a Leinenkugel and that was the end of that.

It would’ve been nice to spend more time here—and we could have, if not for the delays to leave home—but we had a reserved campsite in Aspen that we hoped to reach before dark, and I also wanted to show Terry a few sites along the way.  So it was au revoir to Rifle.

We drove back into town and wheeled onto Interstate 70, heading east.  Acting as tour guide, I pointed to the ancient log house sitting about a half mile out in a pasture.  This is all that remains of the Wright Farm, which had been built by my great-grandfather in 1905, and where my grandfather had been raised.  Further along was the old coal-mining town of New Castle, where my grandmother had lived during her high school years.  We exited the freeway here and drove five miles up Garfield Creek, to the one-room schoolhouse (beautifully refurbished and now a residence) where my grandmother had attended elementary school from 1917 to 1923.  A mile or so further up the road was the site of the old Starbuck Ranch, where my grandmother’s father grew up.  My great-great-grandfather, Asa Starbuck, had homesteaded the property in 1890, raising cattle and horses for sale in Aspen, which was a mining boomtown in the day.  All that remains of the ranch today are a few dilapidated structures in a cottonwood grove.

While the material vestiges of my ancestors slowly erode along Garfield Creek, the anecdotes passed on from my grandmother, Ruth Starbuck-Wright, remain etched in my memory cells: Her and her two sisters riding one horse to school; her father riding home with a Christmas tree that he’d cut from the mountainside; the first family car (1923); the rodeos; the big flood.  Like snapshots, they are fragments of stories that still lurk in this valley.  And coming here always lures them into the light.