Day three was a border.
Nicholas has been to Colorado before. Pokin has not. Chestnut has not. I had not. So three quarters of the vehicle were about to unlock a new state, and that is the sort of thing you pull over for.
The sign is not subtle about it. WELCOME TO COLORFUL COLORADO, in white letters on black, bolted between two stone pillars in the middle of nothing.
Two states in three days. I am collecting them now, apparently. That makes two of us with a collection.
Mug Number Two#
First stop in the new state was Colorado National Monument, and my bud walked into the visitor centre and bought a mug before he had looked at a single canyon.
I raised this in the last post as a possible one time event. It is not a one time event. It is a policy.
The Man With The Shovel#
Here is the part I actually liked.
This place exists because of one deeply strange man. John Otto walked into these canyons in 1906, decided they were the heart of the world, and then stayed. He lived out there alone with two burros. He cut the trails himself, by hand, with a pick and a shovel, so that other people could come and see the thing he had found. He named the formations after patriots and historic events, which is why the big one is called Independence Monument and not something sensible about geology.
Then he wrote letters. Hundreds of them. To newspapers, to politicians, to the actual President of the United States, all of them saying the same thing, which was roughly you need to come and look at this.
It worked. On 24 May 1911 Taft signed it into being, and Otto was made the first custodian of the monument at a salary of one dollar a month. He did the job for sixteen years.
A month after the monument was created he married a Boston artist called Beatrice Farnham at the base of that tower. She lasted a few weeks. Her explanation on the way out is one of the best sentences ever written about a marriage:
I tried hard to live his way, but I could not do it, I could not live with a man to whom even a cabin was an encumbrance.
Otto climbed his 450 foot tower every Fourth of July to plant a flag on top of it. Climbers still go up and do it for him every year. He died broke in California with forty four dollars to his name and was buried in a pauper’s grave, and it took local people fifty years to get him a headstone.
A man who spent twenty years hand digging trails so strangers could enjoy a view, and got paid one dollar a month for it. I have opinions about monuments, mostly that I deserve one, but I will step aside for Otto.
Too Hot To Walk#
The plan was a hike that afternoon. The plan died.
We were up on the rim at nearly six thousand feet (1,800 m), which is meant to be where the heat gets better, and the heat did not get better. It sat on the whole valley like a hand. Nobody was hiking anywhere.
So the afternoon got written off, which made the night the only thing left. Unfortunately the monument faces the wrong way for astrophotography. The canyons open north over Grand Junction and its lights, and the Milky Way core sits low in the south. Beautiful in daylight, useless after dark.
So we looked at the map and found something forty minutes further out, on Glade Park, called Miracle Rock.
The Potato#
Miracle Rock is a boulder eighty four feet tall (26 m), weighing a claimed twelve thousand tons, sitting on a piece of sandstone about a foot wide.
It is on the edge of a canyon. It has been there a very long time. It will presumably not be there forever, and everyone who visits works this out within about four seconds of arriving.
Locals also call it Potato Rock, because it looks like a potato. I want it on record that a rock this dramatic was named twice, once by someone with a sense of occasion and once by someone who had just been to the shops, and both names stuck.
We got there with the sun still up, which is the correct way to arrive at a night shoot. You want to see the ground before you have to walk it in the dark.
I supervised from a juniper. It was a good juniper. I had a clear view of the rock, the camera, and both humans, and I did not have to hold anything.
The Light#
They had also downloaded the trail on AllTrails before we set off, because the word from other people was that finding your way back from this rock in the dark is genuinely hard. Remember that. It comes up later.
Camera went on the tripod. Sun went down. Everything was going well.
And then a light came on below us.
Somebody had decided to camp down in the canyon, which is entirely their right, and they had a lamp, which was also their right, and that lamp pointed directly up into the one bit of dark my bud needed. He did not say very much about it. He did not have to. I have known him fourteen years and I can hear the exact quality of silence that means a man is recalculating an entire composition around a stranger’s tent.
Then came the part of astrophotography nobody photographs, which is the hour and a half of standing on a plateau in the dark waiting for a specific arrangement of the sky. Back and forth. Back and forth. Two adults pacing a slab of sandstone with their hands in their pockets, waiting for the galaxy to get into position.
Worth It#
Look at the colour low in that sky. The green and the faint pink are not light pollution and they are not the camper. That is airglow, which is the upper atmosphere quietly giving back energy it soaked up from the sun during the day. The whole sky does it every night. You simply cannot see it, because your eyes are not a twenty second exposure.
He got the shot. Then he wanted one more shot. Then it was very late and everybody was blinking slowly, and we gave up while we were ahead and put the headlamps on for the walk back down.
The Drive Home#
Then, on the road out, in the headlights, there was a bear.
A real one. Wild, black, unbothered, trotting down the centre of the road ahead of us like it had somewhere to be.
We could not get round it. So for a few minutes we simply followed it, at bear speed, in the dark, accidentally herding a large wild animal along a road in Colorado, until it worked out it had options and went off into the trees.
I have been in a lot of photographs and nobody ever asks about the bear. That night there were two of us and I still did not get asked.
And Then The Insult#
The next day, in a shop, Pokin bought bear spray.
For bears.
Having spent fourteen years travelling with one.
I am choosing to take this personally, and I intend to keep taking it personally for the remaining six days of this trip.
Although.
We had been standing on a dark plateau forty minutes from anywhere, an hour after sunset, and then walked back to the road by headlamp on a trail that people specifically warn you is hard to find in the dark. That bear had been out there the whole time doing its own thing in the same handful of square miles.
So I will allow it. Once.