COLORADO: Days 5 and 6

Kebler Pass

This scenic byway has its own Tripadvisor page: 5-stars. I had wondered if I should really take the camper up and over this winding road, but after I learned that the Cottonwood Pass was closed for repaving (a different scenic byway I had wanted to take), I decided I'd do it. I headed up to Crested Butte, a quaint town at 8,300 feet. I grabbed a coffee and some Ibuprofin to stave off the altitude-induced (or was that alcohol-induced?) headache that was coming on, then headed out. Not far outside Crested Butte, the paved road turned into a barely-paved road and grew more and more narrow. I was having serious second thoughts when the song “Try Everything” came on my playlist. I decided I would.

The views over this pass are absolutely breathtaking. There were times that I came around a bend in the road and just had to stop the truck right there (luckily, it is not a well-traveled road). The snow-capped mountains, the blue sky with puffs of white clouds, the meadows of yellow and orange wild flowers, and the forests of white-barked trees…. It was as though an artist had painted a masterpiece of color and composition and then waved a wand so that it appeared before my eyes. A true masterpiece. Well done, God. Well done. I wish these photos did it justice.

  

Life at High Altitude

The entire trip has been between 8,000 and 12,000 feet. Turquoise Lake and nearby Leadville, where I spent two days, are at 10,000 feet. Leadville is an adorable mining town, with a mining museum, cute shops and historic buildings downtown, and also an Oxygen Café. I know this has been a fad in the “lowlands,” but here it actually makes sense. Crested Butte, at only 8,300, also boasted oxygen: "Don't let the altitude ruin your trip!"

Turquoise Lake

One thing I've learned about: High-altitude diuresis. That is a thing. I couldn’t understand why I had to pee every 30 minutes. And, like – NOW. I needed to pee now. It’s a good thing I have a toilet essentially in the back seat of the truck! So at a point when I had an Internet connection, I looked it up – overactive bladder at high altitude. Yes, it’s a thing. Apparently it is a sign that you are acclimatizing well. But when you can’t even hike for 45 minutes without having to squat behind a tree, that is extremely inconvenient! And when you are at an altitude where the trees are sparse, and they are really just tree trunks, with no branches or foliage at “squatting” level, you have to apologize to man and beast who might have the bad luck of passing by at that moment. “I have high-altitude diuresis!” I say into the wilderness. “It’s a thing!”

Today I arrived at the second of the two national parks I’ll visit: Black Canyon of the Gunnison. It is an extremely deep and narrow gorge carved out by the Gunnison River. The rim is at about 8,300 feet, but the gorge drops by a couple thousand feet at points. I've yet to drive past all the vistas, but a short hike upon my arrival was impressive enough.

Lying and Stealing

When I was in Kuaui with my 5-person hiking group, we made the somewhat snap – but also completely reasonable – decision to pool our grocery expenses and do an accounting at the end. However, that meant that if you were the only person who wanted something, there was a kind of peer pressure not to get it. So when I learned I was the only person who takes sugar in her tea or coffee, I felt peer pressure not to spend the pooled money on it. And so began my criminal activity of quietly putting sugar packets in my purse when we stopped at cafes or coffee shops. I mean, we were buying coffee and pastries there, so is that really stealing?

Traveling alone now, it has just made sense to engage in similar criminal activity – I buy a coffee, and then slip a couple extra sugar packets in my purse for my tea the next morning. Then a couple of those tiny salt and pepper packets. Then at the Safeway deli section, some packets of gourmet mustards to have on my campfire-grilled sausages later (which I did purchase at the Safeway). I'm traveling alone, so... it just makes sense, right?

I typically don’t advertise that I’m traveling alone. When I ask for directions or mention which way I’m headed, people will say, “Oh, are you guys going to do X, Y, Z.” Or, “How did you guys like X, Y, Z?” Well, “we guys” liked it a lot. I have in my backpocket the fact that my brother, who just got out of the Marines, is asleep in the camper. You see, he doesn’t sleep well because of the PTSD he suffers from the time he beat someone up for harassing a woman who just wanted to travel around Colorado by herself. So he takes a lot of extra naps in the back of the camper. But he doesn’t take sugar in his tea, so I don’t need to steal too many extra sugar packets for my ex-Marine brother.