Wednesday 19 November 2014

Autumn Trails in Boulder Colorado

Musical Pairing - click here




I hitched a ride out of Jackson Hole from a stoplight on the outskirts of town. It been hailing whilst I had been waiting, and the windscreen on the jacked up pickup slowly began to mist up. 

The snow was close and it was time to get out of Wyoming and get as far south as possible. I had fallen out with the bike which bobbed around in the rear view mirror now, accusingly, from it’s precarious position on the bike rack.


Pete Maniaci was driving 600miles in my direction and he said he would take me all the way with him. I was off the Divide trail after a month in the mountains and now sitting there in the sprung sits, pulling the grey smudged scenery towards us at 100km/h, it felt easy. The day slipped away and we drove on, adjusting our conversation to the time that spread out for hundreds of kilometres infront of us.


In the early hours of the morning we crossed the state line and I stepped out into Colorado for a toilet stop with the engine rumbling away behind. I had left my shoes in the car and my wallet. I looked over my shoulder into the blinding headlights towards the invisible driver and imagined the pickup rolling away for a moment. And what I would do next.



But the headlights burned steadily through the darkness until I climbed back in. And we drove on.


I took possession of the car in Denver the next morning and promised to drop it off in Boulder for Pete who was flying out to a job in Santa Fe.



I spent the night in the Downtown streets exploring the heady dive bars and playing pool with heavy drinking strangers. It was enough to remind me of how little I had missed. I shook it off over the first few kilometres of the Flatiron Mesa Trail the following day and my first run on the American continent.



I shared my reflections so far on Boulder’s Trails that evening with  Simon from the running store after he caught me idling with Ultrarunning magazine and invited me into the back room for a beer. The weight of responsibility for explaining Boudler’s story and the runners it has produced fell heavily on Simon as he detailed the achievements of individuals and created a picture of this town at the foot of the mountains as a hub for training and serious endeavour.
Two more days of adventures on mountain trails and then I made the journey up into the Nederland ski area. I walked up narrow gravel roads from the bus stop to the remote house of Paul Maude; surrounded by limber and lodgepole pine - shrouded this evening in a cool Autumn chill.


Further still from Denver, this household runs in synchronicity with the passing day rather than artificially continuing it with electric light bulbs. I interrupted their routine however for an hour or so as we stood talking. Paul, his housemate Jenny and I, took quiet pleasure in welcoming mutual strangers into our lives over hot tea in the dim light of the final dregs of the day.


And then with the light again, Jenny and I were out of the house and into the morning, driving deeper into the Eldora mountains and towards the Great Divide. ‘Lord Huron’ played on the stereo and it was a moment where the music not just enhances the experience but describes it.
As the sun came higher and the road ended, we worked ourselves into a jog in the thin air, and the deepening snow. After an hour or so of effort we had climbed above the tree line to a desolate lake at the foot of a startlingly steep ridge that led the final few hundred feet up to the Divide. Hunkering down beneath a rock, we put on more layers and considered breaking trail up to the high point. It felt good to be out - to be feeling the cold - to be in the Rocky Mountains - to feel comfortable in the surroundings. It felt good too, to have conversation again. We saved a brave face adventure on a slippery icy ridge for another day and ran instead down the valley again, wooping and breathing in the steadily thickening air.