Day 9: CO Monument to Utah Line

Miles traveled: 27.6
Ride Time: 1:36
Avg Speed: 17mph

The Utah and Colorado border along highway 6 lies out in the middle of nowhere marked only by a stone pillar and a cattle guard. The pillar, in true American fashion, has been vandalized by spray paint and shotgun shells. Little is sacred for us these days. But to me this past week has been somewhat of a sacred event, an exploration of physical, mental and emotional limits. No I didn’t climb Everest, and no I didn’t ride across the country, but I did venture out in a spirit of discovery and find new places, meet new people and learn a bit more about myself and my home state.

One gains an intimate appreciation for the landscape traveling by bike. When not racing by at 75mph on an interstate one can appreciate both the largeness and smallness of our more remote places. While many of the little communities along my route are in decline if not outright extinguished, there is a life to these places and a history still vivid in the structures and faces that call them home. I think we take these small places for granted in our rush to convenience and ease, sealing ourselves up inside our small, perfect neighborhoods. A hard scrabble folk still make their living from the land in our country and others, closely tied to this existence, support them by running and maintaining stores and restaurants, shops and services. These small communities are ones of a quaint interconnectedness. People who still say good morning and wave as they drive by, who know each other by name and have a general concern, if not direct dependency, on each other’s well being. There’s a lack of anonymity in these smaller communities, which makes it harder to hide as well as harder to avoid the interpersonal contact one has with everyone else in the town. That person you snub or cut off on the road may very well be the person teaching your child or ringing up your groceries. Its harder to just brush off the casual stranger as someone you will never meet again, and in that sense an accepting welcome greets those who would take the time to head out of their way and venture into these rural locales. For those who drop the pretense and sense of expectation, one can find a more rewarding destination in a small community than in some 5 star hotel or resort. And yet for all the smallness of the back corners of this state there are great vast expanses to behold as well.

The enormity of our great mountain ranges, the vastness of our plains really only sinks in when physically confronted by them. The landscape of Colorado is formidable and at times hostile, yet it offers a rich and diverse range of scenes and climates for everyone to explore. I started on the plains, traveled through great wide, dry hills to stony mountains cut by roaring streams. I climbed high peaks and saw the ferocity of the high plateaus and windswept valleys and have now descended down to red rock desert vistas and sweeping prairie of tumbleweed and junipers. I saw all these things and soaked them in over a single week of pedaling my bike.

I don’t know all that I have gained from this experience on a personal level. There is a tremendous amount of physical accomplishment and understanding at what all I can endure and persevere. But there’s also a point at which the noise and distraction in my head finally shut off and quieted itself. I don’t know at what point this occurred, perhaps when being baked by the sun on the plains near La Junta, or battered by the winds in canyons and valleys towards Gunnison or maybe it was the cold and wet of Kebler that wrung it out; in any case it eventually stopped. And this noise, this incessant chatter which continually provides the background track for my thoughts left in its absence a calmness. Last night sitting out under the stars in the cool wind of Colorado Monument my head and my thoughts were clear and simple. No anxiety for the future, no questioning of decisions in the past. Just a cool wind and wide open sky. I know that as soon as I delve back into the ‘real’ world of obligations, expectations, anticipations and stress my thoughts will again cloud over with self-conscious chatter and obsession; my compulsiveness fed by an unsettled state of being. And yet perhaps when this starts to happen I’ll think back to that night on the red rock with all on earth at that moment exposed and opened wide to the star filled heavens. And I will contemplate the lone serenity of that cool, desert night and I will remember. With the impressions of this trip so richly felt and intimately experienced, in truth I believe it will be difficult to forget.

My cyclist flag and manifesto to motorists.