In spite of realizing at the moment it happened that it was wholly irrational, I found myself surprised to not just go directly to mountain vistas the minute I crossed the state line from Kansas into Colorado on I-70.

This is where the road dog in me started drooling...I'd never seen REAL mountains in my memory. I went out to Colorado with my family when I was like two years old, but I have zero memory of the trip (although my earliest memories can't be much later than that).  All my life I’ve enjoyed making pencil sketches of landscapes with mountains and cliffs and trees.  I feel full and powerful looking at things that are bigger than me – thunderstorms and mountains and hurricanes and tornados and teenage daughters in bad moods – and this is one expressive mode of a deeper, less-understood part of my personality that gravitates and responds toward “big” and “profound” and all that boring self-indulgent claptrap that nobody wants to hear about anyway.

It wasn’t until I was within a half-hour of Denver that I first saw the ridgeline of the Rockies.  I had to look at it several times to be sure it wasn’t clouds.  When I was a little tiny kid I remember thinking the clouds were mountains…that may be a mistaken identity created by the trip I don’t remember taking.  Of course there are mountains in North Carolina (as well as Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia on the way to NC from MI, and in TN and KY on this trip), but those aren’t mountains like these are mountains.  These are MOUNTAINS.  Great heaved rock from the belly of the earth rising into the sky to the left and right as far as the eye can see, capped with a permanent topping of snow and ice.  The kind of mountain you can’t get to the top of except by helicopter, and when you get there you’d better have good balance. 

These are the Purple Mountains Majesty that we all hear about, with great golden fields of wheat leading up to it.  I could spend months just travelling back and forth along the edges of this range, taking pictures.  Unfortunately, some of these photos, like “Mountains…” above, were taken through a windshield that had wiped out about 1900 miles’ worth of highway-dwelling insect species.  Many, many others just didn’t turn out, but that’s also why I took a couple thousand pictures – and at that, I was about fifty thousand short of “enough.”  This is a beautiful planet, and a beautiful country, and I could think of worse ways to spend my life than driving around and experiencing it.

But, on this trip I was trying to make the best possible time on a shoestring budget, so nearly all the photos are from the car.  That said, many of them are very good, some quite beautiful, and a few are really neat due to the optical illusions created by movement.

The world is big here, much bigger than ‘back east.’  I had the good fortune to catch great spring weather all the way across the country. Although, if I ever get skin cancer, it’ll be on my left arm – I had to buy sunscreen somewhere back in Kansas because my left arm was painfully burned from hanging on the edge of the window all the time.

I spent a lot of this space videotaping myself ramblng along about the trip and life and my family and so on.  I had a lot of hope at this point, a lot of big energy that was unfortunately to find itself frustrated in California, but that knowledge didn’t color this trip.  Regardless of what I think of being abandoned and left on the streets, I’ll always appreciate them for the fact that I made this trip.  I’ve always enjoyed natural beauty, and while I deeply love southwest Michigan, I saw a lot of things on the road that I’ll never, ever see there.

Coming in to Denver on I-70 is just a beautiful ride, there’s no way around it.  Once in Denver, I hit I-25 northbound for Fort Collins and Laramie, WY.  There were times when it felt like I was coming back down out of the mountains again, but also some beautiful photos along this stretch.

Denver itself, like so many of the cities I drove through, was a bit of a non-event because I made no effort to stop and see anything.  One of the odd things about Colorado that I did start noticing around this point is that there are no gas prices visible from the highway.  You have to actually exit and stop at a station to see their prices.  Why?  No clue.  Again, I wish I’d stopped here longer and really had the time to take in the sights and history of the place.

This is where the photos start to get interesting, for me anyway.  Coming up:  Rocky Mountain High…