Author Archives: Chameleon22
September 22nd – Milford Lake
I woke up to find that, in daylight, there was a beautiful view outside my windows. I also found that the sun, which highlights the landscape so well, heats up the air also. Especially the air in a confined space, like my car. So I got out of heat box and took a short walk, then returned to my car, started up the air conditioner, and drove toward my next destination.
That destination wasn’t very far away. It was a basketball court in Hill City, Kansas that I’d found online last week. When I began my trip, I intended to do basketball drills twice a week as I had done with my brother during the summer, but it has been more difficult than I anticipated to find courts. Well, here was one in the middle of Kansas, and I was going to use it. Even though the sun was hot, and even though the court was on a street corner so that every driver probably stared at me as they drove past and said, “Doesn’t he look funny, doing all those weird jumpy thingies!”
I think I did look funny doing my jumpy thingies, but that is okay. I finished up my drills and got ready to get back on the road. Before leaving, I pulled some food out of my stash. I used cajun deli turkey, Muenster cheese, and tortillas to make a delicious wrap.
One hundred fifteen miles later, I was in Junction City, driving around Milford lake in search of a shady spot to park and camp. It took me two loops around the campsite to find the only tree in the area that provided decent shade. It wouldn’t cover my car, but it did cover a grassy spot so that I could inflate my balloon chair underneath it and spend the rest of the afternoon reading comfortably.
And that’s what I did. I continued reading A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. This book is an autobiographical narrative of Peter Jenkin’s trip across the country, a little bit like the blog that I am writing. There are a few differences though. Peter didn’t have a cozy car to hide in, and he didn’t spend afternoons reading under shade trees. He started his walk in 1973, in upstate New York and traveled about thirty miles a day in his quest to cross the continent. It has been fun to read this account of another traveler, even though we’ve had different paths and approaches.
I stayed happily in my spot until the sun met the horizon. Then I got up, took a few pictures, and put my balloon chair back into my car. I finished the evening with a call to my family, then climbed into bed.
September 21st – Monument Rocks
My nine-day stop at The Mansion is over and I am back on the road. It was a fitting day to start driving again; today marks the beginning of my second month on the road!
So I’m back on my own. Today, I spent most of my time behind the wheel. I drove about four hundred miles through Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas. I took state highways and found that, once I could no longer see the Rocky Mountains, the scenery of both states blended seamlessly together. The landscape was dominated by empty fields and rolls of hay from the fall harvest. Farmhouses, junkyards, old cars, and people popped into the picture from time to time. Other times everything would disappear, leaving the land empty except for rocks and scraggly bushes.
I took a detour from my route east on Kansas State Highway 40 to drive south and see the “Monument Rocks.” I found them without any trouble. They are the only things that stick out against the horizon in the flat expanse of the Kansas plains. I got out to take pictures and noticed the wind and heat that my car had protected me from all day. It was about ninety degrees and humid, with a warm wind blowing over the plains.
The sun began to set as I left the rocks. It took me another hour and a half to reach the Sheridan State Fishing Preserve where I planned to camp for the night. So again I pulled into a campsite in the dark – but this time it worked out well. There were no other people around, so I used my high beams to find a spot. As I pulled in, I heard the wind still going strong, gusting through the leaves of nearby trees.
I opened the door and was greeted by the warm air and my new least favorite sound – the buzzing of flies. There were just a few flying around the area, but their presence meant that I couldn’t open up the windows to let in fresh and hopefully cool air while I slept. Oh well. I prepared for bed while managing to keep the flies out of the car, then settled in to sleep through the humid eighty-degree night.
September 20th – Pike’s Peak 2.0
All week, I’ve had the idea of hiking Pike’s Peak in the back of my mind. I have already hiked one mountain on this trip (Buck Mountain), so why not make it two? That’s a great idea!
I knew this would be a serious hike though. It is a thirteen mile hike up Barr Trail to the top of Pike’s Peak and a thirteen mile hike back. That’s three miles less than what I did at Buck Mountain, but I would be gaining seventy-three hundred feet of elevation instead of thirty-five hundred. It would also be colder; the air would be forty degrees instead of sixty-five.
So last night, I made sure that everything was in order. Lou generously lent me a Camelbak so that I would have a real hiking backpack instead of the bulky school backpack I lugged up Buck Mountain. He also lent me a set of two-layer gloves. The black outside layer had special fingerpads so that I could use my phone while wearing them. The white inside layer had silver in the weave to help retain heat.
Into the Camelbak, I stuffed Cliff Bars, trail mix, a bagelwich, sunglasses, an extra shirt, and the gloves. I used the straps on the bottom to hold my windbreaker.
I set all of this out last night (except the bagelwich, which I left in the fridge) and went to bed early so I’d be rested up for the big hike. I wanted to get going as early as possible. I’d found free parking in Manitou Springs several miles away from the trailhead. A shuttle goes between the parking and the trailhead once every twenty minutes from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. I wanted to get on the first shuttle of the day so I’d have plenty of time to finish my hike and be back before the last shuttle left.
I slept peacefully, knowing that the preparation and planning were taken care of. All I had to do this morning was wake up and go. There turned out to be a slight problem with that though; I slept an hour past the alarm I set for 5:00 A.M. Oops! I jumped out of bed, picked up my pack, grabbed my bagelwich from the fridge, and rushed out the front door. I made it to Manitou Springs by 6:40 A.M., in time to catch the third shuttle. Not a perfect start to the day, but not a complete failure either. There would still be thirteen hours for me to finish the hike.
I had five fellow hikers for company on the shuttle. One was a middle-aged man, here for his annual hike up the mountain. He had a ticket for the COG rail so that he wouldn’t have to hike back down. The other four were together – two guy friends and their girlfriends. They hoped to make it up and back today like I did.
I stepped onto Barr trail at 7:02 A.M., after a short walk from the shuttle stop. The trail started out tough – two miles of switchbacks and semi-steep climbing. My sleepy brain wondered if I really wanted to do this thing. Yes, I did.
The gloves Lou let me borrow were a lifesaver. I hiked for five minutes without them and my hands started to feel like swollen pincushions. I pulled the gloves out of my backpack and put them on. My hands felt a little better immediately and after several minutes they were perfectly normal.
The hike up was long, and not as scenic as Buck mountain had been. Green trees and brown rocks are nice (I suppose), but after staring at them for a few hours, they became extremely boring. I started to wish for a change. The landscape must have heard my wish. I passed the treeline and all the green disappeared so that I was left I was left with brown all around. Be careful what you wish for…
With four miles to go, I stopped for a bagelwich lunch. Several birds joined me. One of them seemed especially interested in me. I held out a little piece of bagel and the bird hopped up onto my leg, flew away, then came back and snatched the bread out of my fingers.
As my journey continued, another creature joined me. I wasn’t sure what it was – it looked like a beaver and a squirrel put together.
At about twelve thousand feet, the view improved dramatically. I was high enough to see all around, and I found that brown rocks really can be picturesque with the proper background. I passed a hiker who was on his way down and we took pictures of each other.
At one point, I looked back over the last bit of the trail I had followed. From where I stood, it was faintly visible on the mountainside as a sweeping curve headed toward the far ridge, a series of switchbacks zig-zagging down that ridge, and a long straight line moving away from the ridge again.
The last two miles stretched on interminably. I stepped off the trail at 1:02 P.M., exactly six hours after I started the hike. As I reached the top, I was glad to just be done. In the big picture, I was only halfway done; I still had to go down. But I didn’t let myself think about that. I let myself enjoy the feeling of being done and of surviving.
I walked through the doors of the Summit House and saw, to my relief, that there were two water fountains waiting just for me. I still had water in my Camelbak, but I was trying to drink it sparingly. At the water fountains, I could drink as much as I wanted. Except for one tiny problem. They didn’t work. Argh! Who puts water fountains at the end of a thirteen-mile trail without any water in them? Cruel people, that’s who. People who laugh at the suffering of parched hikers like me!
So much for quenching my thirst. I decided to just drink a little more from my Camelbak, buy a hot chocolate, sit down, and eat some of the trail mix I’d brought with me.
A few minutes after I sat down, a middle-aged man walked by my table. He had a Nikkon camera with him and he looked familiar. Suddenly, I remembered why.
“Hi sir!” I said. “We were at the Molly Kathleen mine together yesterday!”
“Oh yeah!” He replied. “What a coincidence! It’s good to see you again. Did you hike up the mountain?”
I told him that I had indeed hiked up the mountain, and we chatted for a couple minutes. He told me that he took the COG rail and was there with two friends. As we talked, I showed him a few pictures I had taken. Finally, I came to the mystery animal that I had seen; the beaver-squirrel.
“Hey, I saw this animal on the trail today. Do you know what it is?”
“Sure, that’s a marmot.”
Instantly, my mind flashed back to the scene where I met this man yesterday and I started to laugh at myself.
Yesterday, Marie took us to the Visitor’s Center at the Molly Kathleen mine, where we learned that the mine itself was closed. It was here that I met the man. I was standing in front of an exhibit that showed animals commonly seen in the Rocky Mountains. There were pictures of eight animals. I was able to identify seven of the eight, but the last one gave me trouble.
I wondered aloud, “What is that last animal?”
A man behind me spoke up. “That’s a marmot.”
I turned around to see a middle-aged man carrying a Nikkon camera.
I said, “Thanks!” and walked to the next exhibit.
I talked with the man at a couple other exhibits in the Visitor’s Center and, at the time, forgot all about that first conversation – until today, when I asked the very same man the very same question. Thankfully, while we were talking today he did not seem to remember that particular conversation from yesterday.
After this man left to get back on the COG rail and go down the mountain, I wasn’t quite ready to resume my hike. I stayed in my seat and looked for more people to talk with. I ended up meeting a real, live knight and dame! Their names were Bill and Eileen, and they were part of the Order of Malta – the oldest surviving chivalric order (begun in the eleventh century), whose motto is, “Defence of the Catholic Faith and assistance to the poor.” Bill is a retired Air Force pilot. We chatted until they had to catch their ride down the mountain.
Now that two groups had left in the time that I was sitting, I decided that I should get moving too. I made sure everything was stuffed back into my pack, put on my gloves, and walked out the back door of the Summit House.
Before I got back onto Barr Trail, I was arrested by a thought. Wouldn’t it be cool to do pushups fourteen thousand feet above sea level? I decided to find out.
After doing twenty-five, I came to the conclusion that pushups feel exactly the same at sea level as they are on top a mountain. But I had gotten a start on the two hundred pushups I had scheduled for the day, so it was a good experiment.
I stepped back onto Barr Trail at 2:02 P.M., which meant I had a little less than six hours to make it down before the last shuttle departed. And I did make it. I stopped at several places to do the remaining hundred seventy-five pushups over the next three hours, and had a mostly unremarkable hike down the rest of the way. I did see an F-16 fly quite close overhead. And I narrowly escaped being run over by mountain bikers who were zipping down the trail. And managed to get lost for twenty minutes. But my mind was focused on getting down and finding somewhere to sit down, so I barely noticed those things. Finally, I finished. I walked off the trail at 7:01 P.M., eleven hours and fifty-nine minutes after I started.
I got to the shuttle stop before 7:20 P.M. and called home while I waited for it to arrive. The shuttle dropped me off at my car, I drove back to The Mansion and freshened up, and then I went out with Lou and Valli to enjoy a wonderful Mongolian Barbeque dinner. When we returned to The Mansion, I went straight to bed and enjoyed a glorious night’s sleep.
September 19th – Gold!
Marie used to drive tour buses around Colorado Springs, and one of her favorite spots to highlight was the old mining operation in Cripple Creek, which is about forty miles west of Colorado Springs. She still loves sharing her knowledge of this area, so I got a free tour! Lou drove as Marie narrated, and Valli and Lou Sr. joined me in listening.
We started by driving to the town of Cripple Creek, parking, and taking a short walk. The town was founded in 1892 by the gold miners who started flooding in after gold was discovered in the fall of 1890. Now the town is a small-scale tourist attraction. Because of its status as a historical site, it is allowed to have casinos – and it does. I skipped past those and went straight to the real attraction – the candy store. I picked up a small bag of gummy coke bottles and another of gummy cherries. They also had a wide variety of truffles. I picked two: cinnamon and cappuccino.
With the essential candy stop taken care of, the real tour started. Marie explained that gold mining still goes on today, but it has changed over the years. We started off by learning about the old style of mining and finished the day by visiting a modern mining operation.
We visited the Molly Kathleen mine, which is one of the most successful historical mines in Colorado. If we’d come on the right day, we could have gone on a tour and descended into the mine shaft to see the branching tunnels where miners blasted and chipped ore from the walls. We did not come on the right day though, so we had to use our imaginations.
We did find several pieces of mining equipment displayed above ground. This dumper car was used to pick up loose ore and put it into the ore car, which then traveled along the railway to reach the mine shaft elevator.
In the pictures below you can see the tower that stood above the mine shaft, and to the right, the cable room which housed the ropes and motors necessary to raise and lower the elevator.
These buildings were the first stop on a great walking path that looped around and through an assortment of old mining equipment. We found storage buildings, insulated dynamite sheds, and a beautiful view of the countryside.
Gold mining still alive and well at Cripple Creek, but it is now done primarily at an open pit mine which sits on the backside of the hill we were walking on. During our walk, we heard an explosion and saw smoke float over the ridge.
When we finished our walking loop, we drove to the other side of the hill and observed the huge mining pit that has been blasted out over the past twenty-two years. The enormous area dwarfs the huge ore trucks that are used to transport the blown rocks up to the processing site.
The ore that comes from operations like this is an extremely low grade, usually resulting in less than one gram of gold per ton of ore. The extraction process involves crushing the ore and mixing it with water and cyanide, then allowing this solution to leech the gold out of the ore in a liquid form.
And that was the end of our tour. We drove back to Marie’s house, then went back to The Mansion and lived happily ever after!
September 18th – Settled Down
I’ve been at The Mansion for six days now! Life almost feels normal, even though I’m a thousand miles from home and I still have three months of travel ahead of me. It is a bubble of routine in a bathtub of adventures.
Since my days have become so normal, I won’t bore you with the details. I wake up, eat, and sleep in normal patterns now; I don’t have to drive in circles looking for a place to park at night. On days like this, where most things are routine, I will just pull out a couple details to share.
Work
The slope is progressing wonderfully. Marie (Lou’s sister) came over and lent a hand today. Actually, she lent two hands, and they were both greatly appreciated. She used her two hands and a shovel to dig trenches in the slope at the spots we’d spent so long marking out last week. Lou and I came behind to level the dirt in the trenches and to start laying the steps.
Food
Valli made Colorado Green Chili for lunch. I didn’t ask a whole lot of questions about it, I just know that it was a very good stew and that the dish gets its name from the Colorado Green Chillies used to make it.
At dinner, I enjoyed my first calzone. We went to a restaurant called Old Chicago, which is a pizza place/brewery that reminds me of BJ’s Pizza back home. My delicious calzone had ham, sausage, and three types of cheeses inside the crispy folded crust.
Home Video
When we were working on the steps today, we had to split several stone blocks in half so that our stairs would fit into the spot we had for them. We used a chisel that seemed pretty normal to me, but Lou said that there was a story behind it.
In the evening, he brought out an old home video that showed the story. When Lou was young, his family lived in Colorado Springs (not in The Mansion though). His dad, Lou Sr., decided that he wanted a basement in his house and that he wanted to construct it himself. So he set up a conveyor belt to carry dirt out to the yard and started digging. When the family finished clearing out the dirt, they started working on the walls. Lou Sr. still had a job during the day, and often went on business trips. That left his wife to keep working on the project in the “spare-time” she had while raising Lou and his siblings. That’s where the chisel comes into the story. After putting the children to bed, she went downstairs and chiseled away at the walls until Lou Sr. called home around 10 P.M. and made sure she stopped for the night.
September 17th – Backyard Visitors
Today was full of many good things; church in the morning, lunch at a Chinese restaurant, rest in the afternoon, a phone call with my family, and a chance to play my guitar and sing with Lou and Valli in the evening. There were two extra good points in the day though.
First, I saw two deer in the backyard of The Mansion. I was talking to my parents on the phone and walking around outside when I saw them. Lou and Valli had mentioned that their backyard was a popular hangout for deer, but seeing them right there, so close up, was another thing entirely.
I got the impression that one of them didn’t like me and the other one didn’t trust me, but they continued eating contentedly as I walked to the edge of the porch and took pictures of them. I left them alone after that and noticed that they were gone about twenty minutes later.
Second, I got to make sushi to go with our delectable dinner of miso soup, rice, and curry chicken. This was the first time I’ve made sushi, so Valli showed me how to do it. We placed a seaweed sheet on the cutting board, covered a section with sticky rice, then put cucumber, pickled plum, and shiso leaf (also called beefsteak or Japanese basil) inside, then rolled it all up and cut it into two-inch pieces. This kind of sushi is called an ume roll.
During dinner, I tried a tiny dab of wasabi on my first piece of sushi. Wasabi is so strange – the way it burns upward through the nose instead of burning the mouth like most spicy foods do. Looking at my next piece, I thought, “Well, if a little wasabi is interesting, why not try a lot?” So I put on about five times as much. Whew! This time the burn flared all the way up my face, blowing through my nose and getting my eyes on the way up. Another experience to remember!
September 16th – Pike’s Peak
Louis and I planned to drive up Pike’s Peak this morning, so we were excused from helping with the yard work. I suppose we abused our freedom though because we spent the morning sleeping in rather than driving. Finally, a little before noon, we got into the car and started on our way.
We enjoyed a beautiful drive to the base of the peak. The leaves have just started changing on some of the trees around here, so the sun makes the hillsides glow green with streaks of bright yellow cutting through.
At the bottom of the peak is a toll booth. I knew we would have to pay to get in, and I figured that the fifteen dollar vehicle admission fee was better than the forty-four dollar fee to ride the railway up the mountain.
At the top, Louis and I put on our heavy winter coats before getting out to explore. The wind whipped right through my coat as if it weren’t even there. My car said that the temperature was only forty-two degrees, but the wind made it feel at least ten degrees colder.
Eventually, the air got too cold for me and we went back to the car, ready to begin the descent. And then we changed our minds and got back out. There was one store at the top, called the Summit House, and we wanted to check it out. We found that most things were expensive (of course), but we were hungry. We passed up the seven dollar chicken sandwiches for one dollar “world famous” donuts and three dollar cappuccinos.
After enjoying these goodies, we began our descent for real. Well, we did still have one more stop to make. Marie told us we should take a walk on the Elk Park Trail which is about a mile down the road from the top of the mountain. We had looked for it on the way up but didn’t see it. Her description hadn’t done much to get me excited about finding the place. She said, “You’ll see a white marker sticking up out of the ground slightly to the left of the road. Drive straight toward that marker until you drive off the edge of the mountain. Once you’re over the edge, you’ll see that there’s actually a dirt road under your tires, and you won’t fall thirteen thousand feet to the ground.”
Those were her directions for approaching the trail from below. Finding it from above turned out to be very easy and much less terrifying. As I drove around a bend in the mountain, I saw the dirt road connect to the main road that I was driving on, and I just had to do a quick U-turn to get onto it.
A few hundred feet down the road, we saw the trailhead and found a place to park. Louis and I got out and followed the trail for about three-quarters of a mile. I didn’t notice that the path sloped downhill until we started back uphill to return to the car. It was just a short walk, but by the time I made it back to the top, I was winded. Maybe it was the thin air, or maybe I need to start exercising again!
We made it back to The Mansion around 3:30 P.M. Louis had to be back at the airport at 5 P.M. tonight for his flight back to Brea, so we went out for an early dinner at Culver’s. I’d driven past a couple of these fast-food restaurants so far during my stay in Colorado. Their advertisements highlight their “frozen custard” and “butterburgers.” I tried a butterburger. It was good but tasted just like any other decent hamburger to me. I still want to try their frozen custard though.
After dinner, we made it to the airport on time and dropped Louis off at his terminal. Lou, Valli, and I went back to The Mansion and concluded the night with two games of Sequence (a board game where you place tokens on the board based on the cards in your hand and attempt to be the first player to make a row of five tokens), and two games of Cribbage (a card game in which you gain points from various combinations of the cards in your hand, and try to be the first player to a hundred-twenty points).
Tomorrow is Sunday, so we won’t be working in the morning. I won’t sleep in quite as late as I did today though.
September 15th – Movie Night
Back to work! This morning, after waking up a little later than I had intended, I joined Lou in the backyard to see what our tasks would be. I was not thrilled to find out that we would spend the day redoing yesterday’s work. We would be positioning the stakes about eighteen inches further back toward the house. That means Lou won’t have to buy as much dirt and the steps will sit more naturally in the existing slope.
Since I woke up late though, the work day was pretty short. It felt like I’d just gotten outside when Valli started making apple pancakes for lunch. We cleaned up the tools around noon so that we could go eat them. They were wonderful!
Our afternoon was spent at Marie’s house, where we joined in with a weekly game of Blitz (a card game I had never played before) between Marie, Lou Sr., their friend Ed, and Ed’s caretaker. When we weren’t busy playing, I heard a little bit about Ed’s experiences in the Air Force. He served during WII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. His favorite plane to fly was the F-4 Phantom. After he retired from piloting, he continued in the military as a flight instructor for several years.
Marie won the first game of Blitz and I won the second, After these games and a snack, Ed and his caretaker returned home. The rest of us talked for another half hour at the table before deciding to go for a walk around the neighborhood. Along the way, I met two dogs that looked like Alaskan Huskies. From the howls and growls that this one made though, it may have been a wolf instead.
Back at Marie’s house, Louis and I were interested in watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since I am interested in Sci-Fi, I’ve heard of both the book and movie quite frequently. It came up in conversation again earlier this week, and I figured it would be fun to finally see it.
I was wrong. It was not fun. Most of the movie was slow, boring, strange, and confusing. There was one fun part in the middle though.
The middle part of the movie focuses on a colony ship that is headed for Jupiter. Most of the colonists aboard the ship are in artificially-induced sleep, but two crew members remain awake to take care of necessary procedures. They are aided by a supercomputer named Hal – the newest and most reliable version of artificial intelligence yet made. In the end, he turns out to be a bit too smart and decides that he (and possibly the universe) would be better off without the humans aboard the ship. So turns against his human masters, kills one of them, sends the other one spiraling off into space, and then turns off the life-support systems on the ship, thus killing the rest of the colonists.
Other than this interesting interlude, the whole movie was spent on drawn-out scenes of apes jumping up and down, spaceships flying slower than snails creep, and colors strobing across the screen in strange psychadelic patterns.
We finished the movie and discussed its obscure and confusing plot. Then we drove back to the Mansion and went to bed.
September 14th – More Work!
This morning I met Lou’s sister, Marie. We drove over to her house in the Black Forest at 7:30 A.M. to help her with the arrival of a new refrigerator. The fridge situation was rather complicated and didn’t turn out too well. However, after this slight ordeal, we got to enjoy Chile Rellenos and sausage for breakfast.
I also got to meet Lou and Marie’s father and enjoy a walking tour of Marie’s beautiful gardens. All of the garden landscaping was done by Marie, her father (Lou Sr.) and her brother (Lou Jr.). In addition to being beautiful, this garden also helped protect Marie’s house when a devastating fire swept through the Black Forest and destroyed many of her neighbors’ houses several years ago.
