Sites of Insight: A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places - Softcover

James Lough; Christie Smith; Sueellen Campbell; Fred Baca; Kristen Iverson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870817442 ISBN 13: 9780870817441

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2003

Synopsis

Co-Winner of the 2004 Colorado Endowment for the Humanities Publication Prize. In these eighteen illuminating essays, some of Colorado's most accomplished novelists, essayists, and poets write in intimate detail about their most poignant experiences in the Colorado wilderness. Readers are given access - both physically and spiritually - to settings that inspire reverence for and contemplation about one's relationship to the land. From above tree line in the Rawah Mountains down into the broad San Luis Valley, from the Western Slope to the high plains in the east, the reader is taken on a vivid journey through a rich assortment of Colorado's awe-inspiring landscapes. Essays by Tom Noel, Fred Baca, Kristen Iversen, and Reyes Garcia are historical in makeup, while those by Sangeeta Reddy, Merrill Gilfillan, and Amy England feature engaging spiritual and philosophical explorations, even epiphanies. Reg Saner and Nick Sutcliffe share experiences of pitting themselves against nature. And in the tradition of Thoreau, John Muir, and Annie Dillard, all of these essayists explore the intense and vibrant relationships people have with the wilderness. Sites of Insight belongs on the bookshelves of tourists, outdoor enthusiasts, and Coloradoans - both longtime residents and newcomers - who seek to apprehend something in nature that is larger than themselves.

About this title

About the Author

James Lough is a lecturer and writing consultant at the Colorado School of Mines. Christie Smith is engaged in numerous Colorado history projects and teaches composition at Denver area colleges.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sites of Insight

A Guide to Colorado Sacred Places

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

Copyright © 2003 University Press of Colorado
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87081-744-1

Contents

Introduction............................................................................................viiWestern Wind (Glacier Gorge)-REG SANER..................................................................1Chatelaine (Leadville)-KRISTEN IVERSEN..................................................................18Little Bethlehem (San Luis)-FRED BACA...................................................................31Mists of the Huerfano-THOMAS J. NOEL....................................................................37Walking in Yampa-KATE KRAUTKRAMER.......................................................................44Pawnee Buttes-MERRILL GILFILLAN.........................................................................59The Bear (Nederland)-JANE WODENING......................................................................63Meditacin en Dos Ojos: Garca Lake at Cumbres Pass-REYES GARCA........................................69Gore Canyon-NICK SUTCLIFFE..............................................................................87Their Place, My Place (Ward)-ALEXANDER DRUMMOND.........................................................102Pastoral Emergence (Mount Evans)-ALEXANDER BLACKBURN....................................................114Written on a Piece of Butcher Paper: El Rancho, Antonito-MARK IRWIN.....................................129Where Form Meets Flux: Soft Eyes and Boulder's Four Cardinal Directions-JAMES LOUGH.....................138The Road Through San Luis-SANGEETA REDDY................................................................158Into the Rawahs-SUEELLEN CAMPBELL AND JOHN CALDERAZZO...................................................172Blanca Peak-CHRISTIE SMITH..............................................................................178Lumpy Ridge: Buson in the Rockies-AMY ENGLAND...........................................................189Belmar Park: Where the Sidewalk Ends-ANITA HARKESS......................................................199About the Contributors..................................................................................217Index...................................................................................................223

Chapter One

Western Wind REG SANER

It's snowing sideways. My skis leave a trail, blown over in minutes. Good.

"Let me get this straight," says the mind's other side. "You like mountains best in December and January? When there's nothing up here but sudden weather and snow?"

"Yes."

"And another thing. Why so keen on skiing alone? The obvious motive is fear, isn't it? Alone, you're afraid, a little. You know you are. Admit it. Isn't that the attraction?"

The mind's other side has that twentieth-century quirk of supposing base motives are truest.

No use replying that a taste for the out-of-doors isn't always juvenile. Against one's own brain, what defense comes to more than a shrug?

"Seems to me," says that brain, "what you're really fond of is bad news."

"You mean the truth? Really, isn't that what we're here for?" No end to self-skepticism. Out of its duet for one have evolved the power and tediousness of our species, so my in-progress last word to myself on skiing up here alone is only part confession: Colorado's backcountry in winter is tricky indeed. No secret. But when we look honestly at this world, maybe the greatest risks take place inside us.

Last week, near timberline, I skied into a high country made of exactly its own black islands of towering fir, exactly its own snow cornices curled fantastically over thick ledges, exactly its own snowfall of fat flakes. Because the gray sky was stalled, as close to motionless as Colorado wilderness ever comes, its snow floated down almost vertically. Rare. No wind, just air leaning slightly, gentler than breath. Against dark firs, each flake descended apart from the others, a tuft of clumped crystals, a once-and-for-all of intricate stillness made visible.

Any "This, Here, Now" so entirely taken with being exactly itself can't help arresting a lone skier, just as any mind that arrives there takes one look and stops mumbling. Stops cluttering itself with thoughts. Hasn't a name, isn't anyone. Becomes what it hears: snow falling through the very mountain silence it ripens.

But today, as I ski Glacier Gorge, weather tries to tear off my head. Failing that, wind settles for my knit cap, hurling its burgundy wool like a limp blossom into a naked clump of dwarf willow. Fetching headgear from willow twigs while wearing skis seven feet long will improve anyone's sense of being the unknown Marx Brother. By the time I get my cap back, snow blown into my hair has already clotted, complementing the crisp feel of January's edge at the rim of my nostrils. Oh well. I'm out for whatever. Today, whatever is wind, wind, wind.

Owing to chill factors, mountain wind can seem triple-sinewed, hyperactive, fanatic. Isn't it this minute dilapidating the mountains themselves? Even without ice for an ally, it could do the entire job, and has, on summits ground down to prairie before these mountains first lifted. A chip or sliver here, a grain there. Wind and rain have all the time there is. In the central Sahara are mountains that wind has brought down to the humility of floor tiles. Their so-called "mosaic" remnants stretch as if hand-fitted-like wind's anagrams, or a code without messages-level to every horizon. Given air's origins, that seems ironic. When stone invented atmosphere, how could it have guessed the strongest force on our planet would one day turn out to be air.

That same air whose weathers now intend to level the Rockies? Oh, yes. And shall. Nothing can stop it. Meanwhile, our part of North America may not contain upthrusts more naked than these granite faces forming headwalls in Glacier Gorge, whose hierophantic jut rises ahead of me: the cliffs of Longs Peak, of Pagoda, The Spearhead. Against them our life spans have no chance at all, just as their own slab-sided ramparts, against wind, have none. This, too, is where gods live. Minor deities, it may be; forces dumbly, humbly immortal. But godlike in one thing at least: unable to lie.

Near Mills Lake, tiny white mushrooms of snow pique my curiosity. Some coyote or fox must have trotted past, compacting the snow just enough. Now wind undermines those tracks till each paw pad stands pedestaled, two inches above the surrounding crust. Amusing. I've heard of wind blowing bark off the trees, blowing chickens into the sea-white chickens, in the Hebrides, as it happens-but never of this. Yet the likeness between these ice mushrooms and pedestaled stones in New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona bespeaks inanimate nature's versatile monotony: two or three ideas, varied perhaps less than a dozen ways.

The altered state is one. Mills Lake is now a long pool of fluid gone rigid. Over its milky, wind-polished ice there's a skinny line of ski-packed snow that, like the paw prints, has managed to stick. All the rest, blown clear. I choose the lake's locked edge, its snow so wind-packed you could quarry or saw it-a crust my metal edges barely incise.

Wind, wind, wind. "Restless" doesn't touch it. The sky, however, has cleared except for rags of fast cloud that quickly veil the sun, quickly strip it naked.

That day, wind slowed Ruth Magnussen till it killed her. I was a few miles east, 2,000 feet lower in the same weather. My friend Ron and I were trying to ski up an old mining road to Buchanan Pass. We did okay till our twisting, forested route entered a clearing. There wind had a straight shot at us. We leaned forward, fought with it, tottered comically in it, made headway more and more laboriously against it. I remember how angrily the bee sting of snow peppered my face, and how, shoulder to shoulder, Ron and I heard each other's torn shouts as noise, not words. In fifteen years of our fairly pedestrian mountaineering together, we hadn't let weather deflect us, nor have we since. That day we did.

Next morning, under "Divide Winds Charge Ultimate Price," I read how in that big blow, Ruth Magnussen's climbing party had let her lag behind, then on their descent from the summit of Mt. Alice found her "not moving." I knew it wasn't just any wind; it was that wind. Even so, the incident puzzled those of us who knew that her group was not only experienced but included biologists. They of all people.

We like to believe in the avoidable. We? Not those who describe this world as machinery. The Marquis de Laplace boasted that if he could know for one moment the exact position of each particle in the universe, he could predict everything from there to edge of infinity. If. A very big word. Needless to say, he lived in the era of Newtonian physics. In any case, it's an omniscience most of us feel blessed in not having.

To see the wind purely as a jostle of gas molecules de-animates even its most baroque whims, makes them mere products of solar rays heating Earth, and of our planet's rotation. Which they are. But if our future is physical laws, have we one? We'd prefer weather whose quirkiness is odd as our own minds-random, capricious. Otherwise, strange to say, we can't take ourselves seriously. The world wouldn't be real enough.

If, meanwhile, the laws of astrophysics have a steely, predictive glint to them, living matter is-happily-a truant to prediction. Our biological past is an unbroken record of the slightly off-center, the slightly imperfect. Praised be imperfection for it! If we owe ourselves to evolution, evolution owes itself to that one continuous, omnipotent glitch. Mere physical laws might have wanted living stuff to repeat itself with cookie-cutter perfection. Nothing doing. Only the flaw, only the glitch in repeatability seems flawless. Its perfection is that nothing repeats, not exactly.

But almost. A nudibranch designed to recur without bumps somehow acquires one. The bump somehow gets passed on. Imperfectly, though, because that bump gets another-a bump its DNA hadn't been encoded to ask for, but simply got. And that bump, another, and so on, till bumps grow ruffles, ruffles grow gills, brains blunder their way into eyes. We ourselves are anthologies of birth defects that proved workable-like every creature that is -because life is "error tolerant." Hence "junk DNA," a nucleic acid that neither promotes replication nor deters it, just floats around uselessly in our cells. Through the necessity of chance-and perhaps through oddments like junk DNA, whose potentialities can as yet only be guessed at-the small, still wind of minutest difference "blows where it pleases to blow." Thus the great ash tree Yggdrasil ramifies. Thus the fruit eaten by Adam and Eve sows within living cells its escape properties, their enabling imperfections.

A fortunate fall, that. It released us from the tyranny of perfect replication to the creatively flawed: nature alive and ever so slightly askew. Whose creatures we are. But why do these natural quirks become laws while others do not? Among worlds that never happened, I often ask myself, as the soul of certain chemicals made mortal, why exactly these limits and mysteries?

Air, for example, has one-sixtieth the viscosity of water. But mightn't wind have run as rivers now do, in fixed channels? Streamlines. If you didn't live near a wind's flow, you'd miss out altogether. Meanwhile, water in its usual state works that way already, a wind too heavy to fly.

On the other hand, wind isn't wholly amnesiac. Lacking fixed channels, it nevertheless shows preferences verging on habits. Winter to winter, my return past particular snowdrifted ledges, boulders, and overhangs reveals air-carved forms I remember because wind remembers how it made them. Each year, it reshapes them so much the same way that I've come to rely on and use for landmarks their mimed turbulence.

I know, too, that though I'm now damp with sweat from kicking side steps up the deep powder of the last steep ascent over a frozen watercourse, there's a most chilly blast expecting me at the lake's lip. No matter how extravagantly the here-there-and-everywhere winds lurch or wheel, one special air torrent, assigned as if by decree, pours down over that lip like the waterfall's winter ghost. Ordinarily, I'd be braced for it, but the ascent has so belabored my breath I forget. As Colorado altitudes go, 10,600 feet is nothing; however, what with skis, ski boots, a winter pack, I notice my lungs have lower standards. Over this wind-crusted snow just below the lip of Black Lake, my metal edges barely keep me on the slope. But the sole risk is looking silly, sliding helplessly down about 100 feet and having to reclimb the same snow.

Then it attacks. Air's avalanche. Like thunder, a wind mightier and older than life itself suddenly lunges past me, hurling, screaming, charged with snow billows like stampeding herds of white bison. My wool headband isn't enough, needs help from my parka hood-which seems entangled by pack straps. I fumble frantically, because the wind-chill is instantly serious.

With that hood finally yanked over my head, I watch Niagaras of snow boiling past. Between me and the black-green of fir forest below the lake's glacial shelf, I see the frantic writhe of white crystal, as of some creature spasming. I feel I'm inside a comet, robed with its broken ice and cold gravel. In such wind, even granite might wish for life enough to die, to be killed, "once and for all. To get it over!" No such luck, not for granite. And that may be the sadness of stones. Lives briefly intense as our own can at least expect an oblivion-endless, durable-which the life of granite is far too dim ever to hope for.

As the berserk current abates to mere weather, I realize it was the wildest turbulence I've ever been out in.

Anyone new to Black Lake might turn back here and now; however, long acquaintance has taught me that by skiing another fifty meters farther, apparently into the teeth of the wind, I'll clear the worst of it. The lake's outlet being a granite gap in high cirque walls, its breach simply funnels cold air falling off the peaks, and, as from a funnel, those currents stream fastest at the spout.

In the great cirque above the lake's own far smaller cirque, vagrant wind cells lurch around like bullies. Exposed fir trees grow gnarled and twisty, lower to the rock the higher one goes, till, past timberline, their final clumps grovel and surrender completely: wind's abjects.

By now I've reached the half-naked banner trees verging on Black Lake's east shore. Owing to wind, they dare not branch out on their west side, so their leeward-streaming boughs give an impression, even in calm, of speeding in place. I pass among them, and through, up a steep rise that keeps my skis pretty much out of sight, powder-whelmed, but the cliff I'm intent on comes into view: an icefall whose half-acre plate of gray-blue runoff has wept down over tawny bulges of granite and frozen like armor, or the ever-thickening shards of a beetle. By edging a few meters forward, I cause the ice's gray-blues to tinge with five-fathom green, with zones of turquoise, subtle and eerie. The shifting colors fascinate, as if hinting at a world in which the whole spectrum could be frozen.

The granite wave they embellish so arrestingly is itself the size of intimidation. Megalithic, tremendous, it rises just 300 or 400 feet above the white plateau of Black Lake. Gawking from its base, I feel the ice-and-stone presence of numb forces crushing my next thought so completely it becomes a barely inhabited stare.

I decide to boost energy and morale with a few hunks of milk chocolate. As has happened before, however, the cold makes it wholly flavorless. My mouth must be nearly wind-temperature. Though I chew and chew till the squares feel like sawdust, they don't melt or release the slightest taste. I tell myself, Wait, it'll warm, and I do wait-a reasonable while-but to no effect, so I lose patience and swallow. Chocolate incognito, I find, isn't chocolate.

Not having seen another soul for hours, my earlier self-interrogations now recur to mind; I realize that along with good old everyday animal fear, what I love about skiing alone in Glacier Gorge is the abyss between me and its presences. The more distant the nearest things are, the more dubiously I'm tangible. Or even here. Yet I know their grandeur is me. Has to be. I who am minuscule. Without my endocrinal secretions, however, and the neural responses they trigger, all blue-black cliff shadows and white sheernesses remain a closed circuit. Poised on skis, finding no signs now of animals-human or otherwise-where my own tracks disappear, I scan panoramically while mulling that over. The feel is of being in the world alone. And not as if.

High in winter mountains, our spontaneous awe makes a gift of itself to what caused it: snowfields whose whiteness is absolute and untracked emotion-even if spattered with rock-and-ice Gothic. And light that can't make up its mind, shifting all day through cloud, and through the snow-shouldering, sun-starved forests. Gargoyle crags where silence and wind are never home at the same time.

But ice-quarried rock, we know-or believe we know-is only the random effect of cold and crustal upheavals. Why should raw bigness summon the deepest, oldest feelings we life-forms are heir to? Perhaps by the very size of indifference. Because mountains scorn the astonishments they give rise to, because they pretend to live entirely within the limits of the visible, because they despise our memories, we respect the hugeness of their refusal to confide. Which awes us. And we say so-inwardly. Meanwhile, snow and rock read our minds perfectly. To show their contempt for our least selfish thoughts, they ignore them. Whereupon we're awed all the more.

And we're grateful. Among fellow humans we're superfluous at best; at worst, part of the competition. But winter mountains enlarge the needle's eye of our tiny brains and their labyrinthine trivialities. Thanks to the rude unity of winter's 14,000-foot peaks, we feel our insignificance expand like a strange prestige-which makes being alive a kind of magic, easy as being not quite real. Small wonder that wherever terrain permits, primitives go around filling their habitats with mountain gods. As for such earth spirits, we moderns-we whose houses are built of retired forests, we whose bodies are made of matter everlasting, and who each night before bed may drink a few sips of cloud-never think of them.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870817442
• ISBN 13: 9780870817441
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240