I see no reason why any reasonable person needs to visit the bowels of the earth. In my first report I ended by mentioning that we'd be touring Glenwood Caverns. This didn't particularly excite me, but I figured it was par for the course, as it was another challenge to my comfort zone.
To get to these caverns we had to drive up and UP and around hairpin curves; places where you can look out of the bus window and see the ground THOUSANDS of feet below! If you spit your gum out the window, it would land on the BACK of a soaring bird - most likely a vulture. The cowboys,
pioneers and Indians were smarter to take mules - they're a lot skinnier than the tour buses.
Our tour guide was a high school cheerleader, who punctuated facts and stories about the cave with a high-pitched little “YAY!” and a flutter of hands in the air. Example: “The entry to the cave when it was first discovered was a tunnel 8 inches in diameter - you had to expel all the air in your lungs in order to move a few inches at a time in the pitch darkness! YAY!” (Flutter hands.) This did not encourage me.
We were spelunking because of the generosity of Glen's Aunt Donna and Uncle Bruce. These are people that you cannot keep up with - you know - mountain biking types. Everybody in Aspen is this type of person. The air is thinner there, so people are more inclined to be crazy...
We entered the cave with family: Donna and Bruce, Donna's sons Chris and Todd, and Chris's wife, Kasuma - who was pregnant, which made me feel better. If she could do this, I most likely could, too. Her baby was quite literally being "woven together in the depths of the earth..." (Psalm 139:15b) The cave was cavey - lots of dust and dark, drippy stalactites and ribbons of stuff that looked like bacon. I felt like we were being digested.
I thought of many psalms as we descended, especially, "If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you." (Psalm 139:11-12) That verse was especially comforting when the power went out and we had to stand in pitch black musty old air for eons of seconds! I felt like God was pulling a practical joke on me at that moment. We made it out alive, with no hordes of tourists trampling over us to claw their way through the steel doors designed to keep the good clean fresh air out of the cave. I practically kissed the ground when we got back to civilization.
We made it all the way to Leadville the next day (the highest incorporated town in the USA!) as
part of a huge loop we took to tour the Rockies. Don't publish this abroad, but none of us would recommend Leadville as a tourist destination. We kept looking at each other and saying, "This is LEAD-ville, all right..." (Now remember - we are from Potsdam. If anyone from Leadville ever reads this, they will have a good laugh.)
The rest of the trip was fascinating - especially the ghost town at Independence Pass. I could make this report really interesting if I told you about the ghost we saw, but I would be abusing my artistic license, and it might be revoked.
That night Karen and Chris (our family that we'd left in Fort Collins) joined us at Bruce and Donna's. It was good to be able to spend more time with them - it's been so rare for us to see them!
After that we breezed through dinner, a concert in the Benedict Music Tent (Donna works for the Aspen Music Festival and School), and fireworks in the park! Did I mention that Bruce and Donna are hard to keep up with? But it was a GLORIOUS 4th - one that we'll always remember!
Christopher and Sean hiked up into the scrub the following day to see what they could see. Mostly they saw a little mouse that was dying, and they spent a good deal of their time burying it and composing its eulogy. They took 11 photos of the little thing before it expired. And they brought home some whitened bones from a deer. Alyssa stayed home to play with Coco, Bruce and Donna's wonderful dog. She was pretending to BE a dog most of the time we were there, so it was a good thing that I washed the bones Sean and Chris brought back - because later in the day Alyssa came into the kitchen on all fours with one of those bones IN HER MOUTH!
On Friday we swam at Glenwood Springs with Chris and Karen while Bruce and Donna were at work. The last time I was there I was thirteen years old! Some of the surrounding buildings have changed, but the look and feel of the mineral-coated sides of the pool and the whiff every so often of sulfur were just as I'd remembered them. As I swam I realized that Sean and Alyssa are at least the fourth generation of Simpsons (my side of the family) to swim in this pool, and I smiled.
My big adventure at Glenwood Springs was a sparrow attack just as we were getting ready to leave. He actually attacked from the rear - literally - which afforded comic relief as we said goodbye to Karen and Christopher. We'll miss them - we had a great time with them!
That night we attended another concert in the Benedict Music Tent with Bruce and Donna - in the middle of the front of the orchestra section! Again I just couldn't believe all the magic of this trip... I don't remember who the first composer was, but we were seated directly in front of the pianist, who was everything a pianist should be! He had long wavy locks, which he shook generously with each measure he played. He shook his cheeks, too - if you can imagine that (his FACE cheeks - just so you have the right image). He was an artist! I was almost afraid he'd explode with emotion because the music was so stirring! The next composer was Mendelssohn - I remember because they attached literature to the music (or the other way around). It was his music for Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The narrator was AMAZING! Between the music, the narrator, and the singers, you could see the whole play in your mind!
There were even more wonderful times with Bruce and Donna after that - which made leaving on Sunday very difficult. The kids enjoyed sleeping out in the pop-up with Coco every night, and were hoping she could come with us. She was hoping so, too, and had to be lifted out of our van by Bruce as we prepared to pull out. Thank you, Bruce and Donna - we love you! We've got you with us in our hearts!
From Aspen to the canyon lands, and on our own now for many days until we stop in Pebble Beach to see my cousin Jim and his family. Our plan was to head for Farmington, NM to spend a few days with my Uncle Jack and Aunt Ellie. Because Ellie is so sick, we had to change that plan so we wouldn't possibly infect her further in her weakened condition. This has been the one heartbreak of the trip. The other blow was learning of the death of a dear family friend - Herb Barrie - when we arrived at Bruce and Donna's. Our prayers are with Mrs. Barrie and her family.
Now we were off. (Alyssa punctuates her journal with the phrase, "Now we're off...") Driving through an ever-changing land of vast mountains and mesas, boulders, buttes (maybe the sparrow that attacked me in Glenwood Springs thought my backside was a butte?) and spires. Reds (iron) and greens (copper), tawny yellows and browns (dirt). We drove through Grand Junction, because my dad spent much of his youth there, (I wish I'd paid more attention, Dad, when we drove through when I was a child, so I could have shown the kids your house!) up to Colorado National Monument - where we caught lizards.
The landscape changes, and the landscape within the landscape changes. The mountains become mesas, the mesas become buttes, the buttes become spires, and the spires crumble into piles of rubble. I am reminded that the only permanence is to be found in God.
The desert looks like a vast ocean floor, and in some of the canyons the rock even looks like great sunken hulks! It's so easy to imagine the sea covering the west, and then the dinosaurs roaming the
land. It's immense. Even as we explored Arches National Park last Monday the landscape was changing - thankfully we did not become a permanent part of it! Glen and the kids hiked up under an arch so I could get a picture of them, and as I focused the camera we all heard a great boulder fall into the canyon from somewhere on the arch!
Sunday and Monday nights we spent in Moab, Utah. It was there that we learned that we'd arrived during an early monsoon season. One thing I've always appreciated about being an American is that I didn't think we HAD monsoon seasons anywhere! But we watched the sky turn livid and lightning strike the mountains all around us before we scurried into our microscopic camping cabin. We made it inside just before the wind picked up. I thought for sure the van would blow away! At least it cooled things down a bit - that day we saw the temperature hit 110 degrees!
While in Moab we explored Dead Horse Point State Park. Legend has it that the cowboys left their poor ponies up on a point a mile above the Colorado River, where there was no water. Fenced in and desperate, the ponies tried to take a drink from the Colorado, and fell to their deaths. Stupid cowboys! Nowadays they have a shelter for shade and water fountains up there so the tourists don't make the same mistake the ponies did.
We visited Canyonlands National Park the same day. It was easy to imagine that we were in a little red submarine there because it all looked so underwater and other-worldly! It was hot still, so we had ice-cream for dinner. We've been doing this often lately - we're going to have to take our multivitamins faithfully when we get home!
When we left Moab Tuesday morning we took another little side trip (with Glen a side trip can sometimes mean 200 miles - this time it was only about thirty) to see some petroglyphs. They
really weren't marked, so they weren't touristy - which, again, is what we like best. We found
them in Sego Canyon. I was awestruck! These beautiful paintings were made thousands of years before Jesus walked the earth! Some were younger - made about the same time as when Jesus was here. This has been one of the best things I've experienced on the whole trip! I felt like we were in a temple - or the way I feel when I'm in Trinity Episcopal Church or St. Mary’s in Potsdam... Reverent. Not because I attach religious significance to the petroglyphs themselves, but because they bear testimony to the fact that humankind have always been "makers," creators made in the image of the Creator. Artists, all of us, from the beginning.
That day we drove through Capitol Reef National Park and had just time to see more petroglyphs quickly before a lightning storm broke over us. When the storm passed we picked apricots, which we ate by sandstone sculpture gardens created by floods and winds and time. We drove route 12 much of the day, and decided that it must be the most beautiful drive in the whole country - right through Escalante National Monument, which looked like the surface of the moon. We spent the night in a KOA just outside of Bryce Canyon; the nicest KOA yet, surrounded by mountains and juniper trees.
We visited Bryce Canyon the next day - hiked down and enjoyed the hoodoos (sandstone spires) from below as well as above. Bryce is probably the most beautiful of all the canyons - light seems to emanate from the stone itself. There are spires, arches, and windows wherever you look - as well as the twisted fragrant junipers everywhere. “I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive. I will set pines in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it.” Isaiah 41:19-20.
We crossed the Glen Canyon Dam that day, and took a quick detour to swim in Lake Powell (which some people call "Lake Foul," I found out later, to my dismay). On our way to Flagstaff, where we spent the night, we passed through the Navajo Indian Nation - stopping at a roadside stand to buy some pottery. This was another memorable experience - the owners of the stand were so kind that they even gave us a traditional wedding vase for Alyssa for free!
An Elk by the side of the road greeted us Thursday morning as we made our way to the Grand
Canyon. We were glad we went, but have to say that, after all the beautiful canyons we've already been through - especially Bryce and Arches - the Grand Canyon is just BIGGER.
Wherever you look is a VIEW – a panorama, but you can't really touch it. It's too big to encompass by experience. What you can touch are the ubiquitous ground squirrels, who are bold beggars – but you really aren’t supposed to…
Next day we slid down Slide Rock in Sedona, AZ. Truthfully - Glen and the kids slid through the frigid water down the rocks while I took photos and prayed urgently that nobody would get a
concussion. It was gloriously beautiful - and the last of our cool experiences for a while.
After eating at the same Mexican restaurant in Prescott, AZ that Mom and Dad and I ate at last November (Bill and Annie Simpson's wedding), we headed out for Needles, CA - where it was 110 degrees at 10 PM! (We did get to see Saguaro Cacti en route, which was very exciting for all of us! But we also boiled our break fluid going down steep grades in the mountainous country, and felt
somewhat hesitant about being stranded in Needles!)By Grace - we're in Bakersfield as I write. Our break fluid has been changed - we're safe - and it's only in the high 90s at 8PM. The kids have spent the afternoon playing in the pool with a boy and girl their age from the Netherlands. Tomorrow we'll visit the sequoias, and the next day, Yosemite! The children from the Netherlands said we could get bears to come to our cabin in Sequoia by leaving sweet-smelling things like marshmallows or bananas out on our picnic table. I'll have to watch Sean - he's caught fish, lizards, a dying mouse, and a chipmunk so far. He'd be pretty pleased with himself if he could add a bear to the list!
Now - we're off!
Love,
Glen, Beverly, Sean & Alyssa
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