OK, so it's not that great. Its the highway that carves its way through the Rockies, skimming off the side of cliffs and at times blasting right through the undersides of literal mountains. And that's it - it extends beyond Colorado via Kansas and Utah, but what it leads to I'm not totally sure - nor care.
But I think I've done a little more road-tripping than much else most. Jack Kerouac wannabe I am not, but thanks to my family's constant movings from all sorts of places in California (Lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand; Pretchaburi, Thailand; Mill Valley, California; Tracy, California; Tehachapi, California; Aurora, Colorado; Denver, Colorado, and - oh- here, in Glenwood Springs....Colorado) I'm somewhat used to getting affiliated with a place, getting comfortable with my neighborhood, meeting people, making friends - and then leaving.
I don't want to get sentimental here and drop some ridiculously corny quote like, "Life is a highway", but really, truly, I feel as if I'm more affiliated with highways than most people I know, like a lot of my friends in Denver. They've lived there their entire lives, never leaving, never straying - staying. Even now, I have friends who refuse to leave the city, too unready for change, and too loving of their native grounds. I'd love to go back (and am, come Xmas break/summer/etc) but thanks to my gypsy-lifestyle cities tend to bore me after about a year - it's like growing up watching nothing but commercials, I think an actual feature-length movie would drive me nuts, if you get my metaphor.
But anyways, what I was getting to: I70 is the highway of highways. Anyone who’s driven anywhere in Colorado has taken it, and usually has to if they want to ski at any of the numerous, numerous resorts (Winter Park, Steamboat, Copper, Vail, Aspen a little off-bounds) or to escape the state east/west-bound. It’s the main vein that feeds from Denver into the mountains – cutting it off would kill entire cities (deprived of exports/imports of food, you know what I mean). It’s essential to Colorado – oh, and it’s absolutely f*****g beautiful.
A lot of the highway runs directly adjacent to the Colorado River (“I know the human being and the fish can coexist peacefully” – GWB), providing a nice little glittery scene to glance at as you drive west-bound. The last time I was on the highway was on a Greyhound (for the tragic 6th time – you always get off those buses smelling like a cigarettes and protein powder), which are nice when empty, miserable when full. Taking the bus really provides you to actually just look at stuff – when you’re in the car you’re able to glance at whatever’s directly ahead of you, but seeing that you’re speeding 70mph for most of the way, it’s hard to really get a nice concentrated look at just about anything unless you want to, you know, die. Being on the bus allows you to just stare at stuff, totally undistracted from gas pedals or current gears or battery meters or amount of gas left or speed limits or lane changes or rearview mirrors or how tight your seatbelt is and how readjusting it might lead to a car crash – and absorb, because there’s no other seat left on the bus, the luxurious scent of dried and crusted-over baby puke you happen to be sitting on. For every high is a low, for every low a high –for every middle-ground, nothing.
The highway starts off from Denver going past the dog-food plant (no matter how tight you roll up your windows, how high you turn on the air conditioning and the car fan, and how many gas masks you have on, that smell is getting in), off and around the near-defunct Lakeside Amusement park (the security provisions are so ancient that if you really wanted to, you could jump off 95% of the rides, for, you know, a real kick) , and slowly escalating past Morrison into the high-rises that are the Rockies. Nothing particular interesting happens for 40-50 miles (except, you know, the biggest mountains in that continent called North America) until you hit the high Rockies, where the sight of blindingly white mountains is seen dominating the horizon, and the side of you, and behind you – you’re not driving by them, you’re going through them.
After a while you hit the Eisenhower tunnel, which is under the Continental Divide and the longest mountain tunnel ever built (on an interstate, anyway). The tunnel itself is nothing special – it’s a big-long white tunnel stained yellow from decades of smog-spewing cars passing through it’s arteries twenty-four hours a day. But going westbound, as soon as you clear the tunnel it’s a real thrill – you shoot out for over twenty miles of downhill entertainment. This might’ve been a little funner for me than other people, as the cars I’ve driven into the Rockies tend to scream for their lives going up the most basic of mountain hills, sans snow, and pedal to the medal (achieving an impressive 25mph going up – I always get the beaters).
Fast-forward through a couple other town and a hundred miles and there’s a point where you seemingly clear the majority of the mountains/ski resorts/aspen trees and come off into a near-plain that looks the majority of the rest of America: cow farms, dinky gasoline-marts (My favorite: “ Kum N’ Go ”….. OK, that was immature. But it’s real.) and places where people are living their lives just like how everyone else is living their lives with their own scenarios of boyfriend-girlfriend drama and the kids who despise their town and want to get out and move to Manhattan and the old folks living the rest of their days in them because they’ve already done that and hated it and the girl who texts too much and the old woman who knits far too often and the cows living out their monotonous lives of eating grass and staring at you as you pass and waiting to be executed eventually so that I can pour barbecue sauce on their ribs and – you get it.
And then you hit the Glenwood Canyon – which – is – beautiful. Emphasis on: “Is”. I already wrote something about hiking it, but driving it is equally satisfying. The things are huge, putting it bluntly. You have to stick your head out the window to see the tops of them, and they top anything humankind has made in terms of tallness. I mean personally I’m not much of a nature-freak but sometimes it blows my mind (I kind of hate that term. What the hell does it mean? Is somebody opening my skull and actually blowing onto my brain? Or am I supposed to imagine my brain being ravaged by a beautiful woman and…. OK, I’ll stop.) to think that thousands of years of erosion and unsettled plates underneath the surface suddenly sprouted these jagged masses of land and that they’ve been here since the dinosaurs were still chilling in their hammocks and totally unaware of the asteroid/meteor/plague/Mayan apocalypse that would eventually destroy them in an entirety.
It’s a great highway. A highway isn’t exactly something you just “do” on a Saturday night, and I doubt trips are ever made just to experience a highway (Well, maybe Route 66 has that privilege – but people are always going somewhere if they’re on it. It’s not as if somebody will drive it, and then go Well that was fun, and turn around to go back home), but all I can really say if you have some sort of check-list in your life (You know what I mean: “Eat a Chipotle burrito in one sitting” - Check. “Go skinny dipping” – Check. “Spontaneously combust inside a retirement home” – In progress.) I70 should be somewhere along there, at the top or bottom, as someplace you’ve got to drive. After driving on so many dull highways across America (and Mexico as well – road-tripped twice now from Denver to Puerto Vallarta, which is excruciating painful for the buns) I can easily say I70, Colorado-wise, isn’t just a road you have to take to get somewhere: It’s fun stuff unto itself. You just don’t get bored driving it.
I have a book called "501 Things To Do If You Dare" and one of the "daring" things to do is to "Drive Interstate 70, from Denver to Grand Junction".
ReplyDeleteThe description of why you should do this is "You get to go into the mountains, then through the mountains, then down out of the mountains. .... One more thing: Try to remember that every single stretch of road in the world is a potential falling-rock area; the ones with the signs are those places that have already proven to be falling-rock areas. Don't get cocky."
For real? Sounds like they hyped it up a little... last time I heard about an accident concerning falling rocks was probably something like three years ago, and no cars were even hit. But maybe it happens a little more often than I'm aware, I dunno.
ReplyDeleteSomebody's destination being Grand Junction is scary enough...I70 or not.
That book actually sounds cool tho, I'll check it out - thanks.