Travels – Page 9 – State of Wilderness

A Walk In the Garden of the Gods

A piece of my heart lives here in this place. This part identifies with the Native Americans who came to this sacred spot a little over four thousand years ago. Like a beacon, this place drew me in when I lived near here, prompting me to drive through on my way home from work, to marvel with hushed thoughts at the rock formations formed millions of years ago. And this day, this third day of our vacation this summer, I brought my boys here for the first time to share this spot with them.

A fourteen year old boy has this pull on him to test the boundaries. He wants to explore his physical limits, and chafes under restriction. Mine is no different. This is the same boy who stood in a valley in Yosemite, looked at El Capitan, and decided he wanted to climb that one day. This time, he felt the same urge. But he has no training, no knowledge, no equipment, no permit. This place was not for him to explore that way, not today. He felt the denial of freedom keenly.

Sometimes, though, roadblocks exist to show us the paths we want to be on. We saw rock climbers behind the fence, working their way up some of the faces with their equipment. If being behind those fences is something this boy wants, he’ll have to work on it; get some skills, learn techniques, and someday come back with a permit and knowledge to be one of those people himself. We’re going to start working on this soon.

I can’t say that these people I live with walked away from this park feeling the same connection to it that I do. Four years ago, Jason and I came here sans kids, and he has never really gotten why I feel the way I do about it. The oldest felt like this place would have better with less restrictions, if he had been allowed to do more. It was too tame, he said. The youngest was just bored of the whole thing and moved on from looking at the rocks to pestering everyone…especially his brother. I have a feeling we’ll be back someday, though, when they are older and wiser. I am hoping by then the connection has grown, and they can see it through my eyes, or feel it through my heart.

Colorado Highlights: or, “what state are we in again?”

That last part of the title is the question my youngest son asked us every few hours for a few days. At first, we were patient, then we were tolerant, but after a while, we were neither. This question started to be answered like this: “We’re not having this conversation again”, “we’re done with that”, and “OMG enough already”. This was not a highlight of our time in Colorado.

Also, he had brought a killer cold with him, and Jason had become infected with it as we were making our way out of the Blue Lake Campground area on this third day of our vacation. By the time we got to Manitou Springs, he was no good and just wanted to be left alone to sleep. He had exhaustion for the next few days, which really put a cramp on our style, and then by the time he was feeling better, I came down with it. This was not a highlight of our trip either.

But these things were highlights:

Manhattan’s Pizza Parlor in Pueblo: after a couple of days of camping and eating out of our cooler, it was really nice to sit down somewhere cool and eat the hell out of some New York Style pizza. This is where we went after leaving GC19, after a couple of random stops in Walsenberg for gas, ice and cold medicine

The pool at the Silver Saddle Motel in Manitou: we had decided to stay at a fifties-era motel for its character and low cost. Supposedly the pool was a big feature. It wasn’t all that, but it was a good place for my younger son and I to go to let the older guys rest and get a break from him. We met a little girl there who turned out to be the daughter of the owner, and she was able to answer some questions about the history of the place. It had not occurred to me when I booked the room that the Silver Saddle would be a great name for a biker den. However, it did become clear that is what it was, at least temporarily this weekend. That gave us some interesting people watching fodder.

Garden of the Gods Trading Post: this was a place that I remembered as having an incredible selection of awesome things during the time I lived around this area, which was sixteen years before. I wanted the kids to experience it. I had been pushing them to save their money for this place all summer, despite their protests about all the other things they wanted to spend money on. Even their dad had been like, “they are boys, they don’t care about gift shops” but I KNEW the temptations that existed in this place, and I was RIGHT, because both of the boys blew their money in this place within thirty minutes.

A brief hike in the Gold Camp Road/Bear Creek area to look for an old cache (hidden in 2001).

Manitou Springs Penny Arcade: even though I lived right above the arcade in the four months I lived in this town earlier in my life, I had never once come down and spent any money or time here. However, I knew that my sons would like this. My youngest son especially had a good time, and our leaving was much too quick for him. He could have spent hours. They had all kinds of games to play; so many, it was overwhelming to make a choice.

The Springs and the shops of Manitou: my little one got it into his head that he wanted to taste all the natural springs in Manitou (there are about ten of them), so we stopped at a few so he could use his little “Pikes Peak” cup he had bought to drink some of this water that supposedly had healing powers.

Later, we went over and spent some time walking through the Garden of the Gods, but that deserves its own post and some of Jason’s photos posted with it. More on that later.

Art Interactive: Cadillac Ranch/Blue Lake Experimental

For forty years, an audience-interactive art project dreamed up by a San Francisco based art group Ant Farm has been on display in a pasture in Amarillo. This iconic stop off Route 66 invites people to get out of their cars, walk a bit to the row of rusted out Cadillacs half-rising out of the earth, and put their own form of embellishment on them. That is, as long as they brought their own spray paint (or there was any left in the hundreds of bottles that gather by the end of the day). Every once in a while, the cars are freshly painted specific colors for various advertisements and special occasions, and yet, within 24 hours, the graffiti returns, each visitor intent on leaving their individual mark.

On this day, the second full day of our summer road trip, we stopped here to let the boys experience this (my only regret is not buying them their own can of spray paint before we got there). It was hot and windy, as it seems to always be here. After this, we headed out of Texas and into Colorado, heading first north, then northwest along the Highway of Legends.

Night found us at Blue Lakes Campground, part of the San Isabel National Forest. This place excited my older son’s senses. It was his favorite campground ever, he told us. I asked him if he wanted to join me in writing something about it, and he agreed. I decided to try an experiment where we co-wrote a free-verse piece together. This is our little dedication to this favorite campground of ours, with his participation in italics:

Blue Lake: crisp, clear, cold

Sea grass sitting still under silent water

Mysteriously hidden from us on nighttime entrance

To epic campground

Pretty awesome campground

Intoxicating you with the fresh, clean mountain air

Entrancing you in a place so far away

From the industry of the city

Flowers bloom in patches

Dark looming trees

A creek gurgles; a calming, constant sound

Trails beckon you, calling out

To the wild in your soul

Other highlights of this day included: two extremely creative caches in Dalhart, a picnic lunch watching horses swat flies, a walk in a secluded area of a state park to get an earthcache that taught us about an asteroid impact, chicken pitas cooked over the campstove, and the boys exploring the Blue Lake trail. I wish we had more daylight or time to explore the trail system, but as always we were trying to do too much and just skimming the surface.

Setting Forth: Dallas area Grandfather Caches

We thought we had a good system. We thought we had figured things out. J is an expert packer, and he had a four day weekend to think it through. When we finally got the Subaru loaded up, though, with the kids, dogs, us, our camping gear, and clothes for the next few weeks arranged tetris-style on the luggage rack and cargo basket, it seemed that we were just a little overloaded.

We tried to make it work. We made it about twenty minutes down the road before J decided he needed to test out some parking lot speed bumps to see if we were so low that we were riding on the bump-stops of the car. Turns out we were, so while we stopped to feed everyone dinner, he called his parents to help bail us out by passing off what we could most do without…the dogs.

So now we were headed south instead of north, to drop the dogs off in Sugarland. Then we had to head home to rearrange the entire she-bang. We got rid of the luggage rack entirely and lightened up the vehicle’s load by about two hundred pounds or more when it was all said and done. So, my initial plan was for us to leave right around four in the afternoon and find a hotel in Arlington, having put some good hours in between us and Katy. It was very late by the time we actually left, and we only made it as far as Fairfield.

The next morning, the youngest child lost a tooth over a pastry at the continental breakfast at the Days Inn. There was some anxiety over the Tooth Fairy, who was actually short on cash at the moment, and we assured him that the Tooth Fairy would eventually find him. I need to remember to ask when he gets back from visiting his dad, because we thought maybe the Tooth Fairy could find him there. J struggled with the cargo bag in a hot parking lot, and everyone was a little grumpy and frustrated by the time we set out to make it to Caprock Canyons that night.

The good thing about being behind schedule was that it meant we were pulling into Arlington in time to have an early lunch at Chophouse Burgers, a place I read about on a Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives information website. We think it was worth the hype, very good. J and I both ordered the signature “Chophouse Burger”, while the kids got just regular stuff.

The reason we were headed to Arlington was to find this cache: GC62, Tombstone, the 35th oldest active cache in the US and the oldest active cache in Texas. It’s a short multi-cache located in a park/cemetery area just outside the University of Texas-Arlington campus. Even though it was 92 degrees outside, it wasn’t too bad going after this one, because we approached it from the campus side, which was quite shady.

After this, there were some hiccups getting out of town (gas, bathroom break, cache stop etc) and then we finally started to head northwest, with our sights on the next “grandfather” cache in Texas on our agenda: Texas Double. This cache is the 59th oldest active cache in the world, and the second oldest in Texas. It is located in the LBJ Grasslands, which I sort of imagined to be some amber-waves-of grain benign meadowlands. It wasn’t like that at all. It was hot, rocky, prickly, and full of scrubby trees and chaparral style foliage. It was quite a bit of a deviation off the main highway, too. We did enjoy the backroad journey out to the location, and the solitude of the adventure. We didn’t see any other vehicles out that way. There was a trail, and it didn’t seem that far to the cache from where we parked, but with the afternoon sun beating down and the bit of a climb up a hill, it was more difficult to get to than we anticipated.

On the way back down the hill, my younger son hit a mental roadblock in figuring out how to deal with the terrain. There was a long period of time where we were all trying to teach him how to walk sideways and make his way down, and during that time I got bit by some bugs and got an unexpected sunburn. This was around the time that we first started to realize that the Single Most Valuable Item that we packed was one I incidentally just grabbed on the way out the door – Band-Aid brand Anti-Itch Gel, providing “immediate cooling relief” as the label says, to all our bug bites and plant-induced itches.

Finally we were on our way to get to the state park before nightfall, stopping just one more time to grab a cache and some drinks. I will post later about what Caprock Canyons State Park is like. It was such a cool place that it deserves its own post.