Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 21
I SHOULD HAVE known better, but I had it in my mind that Colorado was nothing but
mountains. Somehow I thought that the moment I left Kansas I would find myself amid the
snow-topped Rockies, in lofty meadows of waving buttercups, where the skies were blue
and the air was as crisp as fresh celery. But it was nothing like that at all. It was just flat and
brown and full of remote little towns with charmless names: Swink, Ordway, Manzanola.
They in turn were all full of poorlooking people and mean-looking dogs nosing around on
the margins of liquor stores and gas stations. Broken bottles glittered among the stubble in
theroadsideditchesandthesignsalongthewaywerepockedfromshotgunblasts.Thissure
wasn't the Colorado John Denver was forever yodeling on about.
I was imperceptibly climbing. Every town along the highway announced its elevation, and
each was several hundred feet higher than the previous one, but it wasn't until I had nearly
reached Pueblo,150miles intotheinterior,that Iatlast sawmountains. Suddenlythere they
were, blue and craggy and heavy with snow.
My plan was to take State Highway 67 north up to Victor and Cripple Creek, two old gold-
mining towns. The road was marked on my map as scenic. What I didn't realize was that it
was unpaved and that it led through a mountain pass ominously called Phantom Canyon. It
was the most desolate and boneshaking road I have ever been on, full of ruts and rocks-the
kind of road that makes everything in the car dance about and doors fly open. The problem
was that there was no way to turn around. One side of the road hugged a wall of rock, rising
up and up, like the side of a skyscraper; the other fell sharply away to a creek of excited wa-
ter. Meekly I pressed on, driving at a creeping pace and hoping that things would improve
in a while. But of course they didn't. The road grew ever steeper and more perilous. Here
and there the two sides of the canyon would narrow and I would be hemmed in for a while
by walls of fractured stone that looked as if they had been struck with a hammer, and then
suddenly it would open out again to reveal hair-raising views down to the twisting canyon
floor far, far below.
Everywhere above me house-sized boulders teetered on pinheads of rock, just waiting to
tumbledownthemountainside andmakeadoormatofme.Rockslideswereevidently com-
mon. The valley floor was a graveyard of boulders. I prayed that I would not meet another
vehiclecomingdownthehillandhavetoreverseallthewaytothevalleyfloor.ButIneedn't
haveworriedbecauseofcoursenotasingleotherpersoninthewholeofNorthAmericawas
sufficiently moronic to drive through Phantom Canyon at this time of year, when a sudden
storm could turn the road to mud and bog the car down for months-or send it slipping and
