Colorado: A Journey Through Memory

A Visit to Grand Lake, Colorado, 2004

Today I am staying in Colorado in a little rented studio on the banks of the Tonahutu River which cascades through glistening rocks and lichened boulders until it dashes into Grand Lake only a short distance from the historic lodge where I’m staying.

Grand Lake is the largest natural lake in Colorado, created by glaciers 30,000 years ago.  It is over 200 feet deep, and it was originally called Spirit Lake by the Native Americans who once lived nearby.

I came here late yesterday afternoon, after a long day of driving from Ft. Collins.   I had stopped briefly for a walk in the town of Estes Park.  Then I had crossed through Rocky Mountain National Park, driving for several hours over Trail Ridge Road.  This white-knuckled drive had propelled me over one of America’s most amazing roads, which sidewinds its way through and over an upthrust of dozens of mountain peaks.  The tallest is higher than 14,000 feet.  The highway itself crests at more than two miles above sea level.

I stopped at the crest, which is above treeline and is in an eternal grip of glacial cold.  With the icy wind piercing through my summer wraps, I walked around briefly in the parking area that is perched on the edge of the tundra. I looked momentarily at the sparse, grey-green vegetation, at the barren rockscape dropping off on every side, and at the fat little marmots that make this spot their summer homes because they are fed so freely by tourists.

Then I got back into my truck and made my way cautiously down the steep switchbacks of the western slope.  I came to rest at last, out of the Park, near the picturesque little town also called Grand Lake, still at 8023 feet above sea level.

The streamside room I’ve rented is a treat, complete with kitchen, television, Murphy bed, and a fireplace.  There is no phone service.  But being beside a singing mountain river for several days, while I nap, paint, or just sit quietly absorbing the magical sound of water over rock seems like heaven.

I am in an annex of the old lodge, which was opened in 1915 by John Lapsley Ish and his family. Ish constructed the building from lodgepole pines he milled himself at his own sawmill right here around Grand Lake.

He was quite a fellow, this Ish. He was three months old when he and his parents came from Missouri in a covered wagon, and he was six months old when they reached Denver in 1863.

When Ish was eighteen, he came from Denver to the Grand Lake area, mining for gold or silver.  When the mining failed to enrich him, he held a variety of other jobs, including carrying mail all over the area, going in winter on skis or snowshoes. He said that the 8′ snow pole he carried often would not reach the bottom of the deep snow on his mountainous journeys.

It is said by his family that he thought it was a mere hike to walk from Teller over Cameron Pass and down the Cache La Poudre Canyon into Ft. Collins (a drive that took me more than five hours, partly because I stopped at every overlook to view freshly fallen snow, deer, and a huge bull moose that a park ranger said was the biggest he’d ever seen and must have weighed over 2000 pounds).

Later Ish ran a stage coach line and built this lodge in Grand Lake.  When he died in 1943, his obituary in the Middle Park Times read: “J.  L.  Ish did not experience pioneer days as hardships and privations, for life was teeming with enthusiasm and thrills, with hard work thrown in. He loved the open country and driving a car did not give him any more pleasure than a walk among the pines and the creeks of his beloved mountains.”  I would not disagree with that last sentiment.

As I sit here today in Grand Lake, studying the cliff faces where I can see the layers of geological strata laid down over eons of time, I am strongly aware of the layers of my own experiences here in this area, laid down periodically throughout my own lifetime.

For example, I first learned about the area’s geology from a young man who had been a geology student in college and who was the one who first brought me to Grand Lake in 1959.    It was the summer before my junior year in college.  He and I had been dating almost since the first day I’d met him, shortly after I had arrived in Colorado.

I had come from Texas for a summer of work in the then charming little town of Estes Park at the eastern gateway of Rocky Mountain National Park.   I’d come with a couple of other college friends that summer to discover the mountains, to have a good time, to work enough to pay for my summer’s expenses.   Amazingly, I’d gotten a good job working for the Estes Park Chamber of Commerce Information Center, telling tourists where to go and what to see in the area.

When I came through Estes Park yesterday, I stopped at the Chamber of Commerce’s new Information Center where I told the man behind the desk that I had had his job 45 years ago. He was, however, older than I am, tired, and unimpressed.  He just handed me a map without smiling. My nostalgia deflated, I went on my way to discover that much else about Estes Park had changed.  It now looks to be a minor member of the Aspen, Vail, and Steamboat Springs set.

But back in 1959, the town was still small, rustic, and welcoming.  One of my friends with whom I had come from Texas that summer had gotten a job as a cocktail waitress in the legendary Dark Horse Saloon, and it was there that I had met Don, the geologist, who eventually brought me to Grand Lake on one of our many outings.

He and I had a passionate summer romance, and toward the end of the summer, he wanted us to get married. But I, for once, had the good sense to know I wasn’t ready for such a big step, and at summer’s end I said goodbye to him sadly, carrying away with me a heart full of sweet memories, one being that of having been proposed  to on a clear, star-sprinkled night, parked at a scenic over-look on Rainbow Curve, high up along Trail Ridge Road..

I drove by Rainbow Curve yesterday without stopping, unable to bring myself to disturb the perfection of my own memory of that place at that other time.  I did glance in the direction of the vista of mountain peaks that had been topped with moonlit glistening snow on that magical night more than forty years ago.   Yesterday, there was very little snow to be seen, and I just smiled to myself, and kept on driving.

When Don and I had come to Grand Lake that summer, he had driven us on a pebbly dirt road around to a remote corner of the lake, had put on his dark green waist-high waders, and had sloshed his way out into the lake, fly fishing.  He had worked for the Park Service for several summers and knew the best places all over the mountains to fish.  I didn’t fish.   He always laughed at me because I couldn’t be still long enough to fish.

That day at Grand Lake, after lying on my back for awhile, hidden within a meadow of amber colored waving wild grass, watching the puffy white clouds that, most afternoons, startle against the vivid blue skies over Colorado, I got up and started exploring.  I headed off up a slope that was scattered with perky wildflowers. Then I plunged into the shadows of a grove dense with fir and blue spruce trees.

I had already, by then, a special thing for blue spruce.   A few afternoons before, in another beautiful spot in the Park, I had mentioned to Don how much I loved these trees, as I touched the needles of one tree that was perfectly shaped and was, at that moment, powdered with snow.    Don had then and there quite magically made a little formal speech, pronouncing for all of creation to know that this particular blue spruce tree belonged to me and to me alone, from that day forth.  I laughed and cried and hugged him, and he swung me off my feet in a swirl of joy.

So, a few days later in that other spruce grove near Grand Lake where Don was fishimg, I had smiled as I headed up out of Don’s sight.   I meandered peacefully through the forest, this way and that.  Some time later, I heard a sound I thought might be a waterfall.   I went in the direction of the sound, climbing over rocks and pushing my way through bracken, until eventually I came out of a thick grove, this time of aspen, to discover an incredibly beautiful cascade of water, tumbling down and around large boulders. It was breathtaking.  Over the whole was an arc of a small double rainbow, created out of the mist of the turbulent waters.  Not for the first time nor the last time in these mountains, I felt as though I was the only human who had ever been in that magical spot, that I might just as well be the original discoverer of this waterfall.

Only later, after I had sat on a boulder with the rainbow grazing my shoulder, waded in the water and clambered over the rocks all around, did I happen, to my surprise, upon a Park Service wooden signpost, beside an unimproved hiking trail, that announced that what I had “discovered” was well-known as  “Rainbow Falls.”  A bit chagrined, I hiked back down the trail, a much shorter but less enchanting way than I had come.

A few days afterward, Don brought me my own personal little official Park Service sign he had made, rounded and stained, with my name mitered out and stained in yellow, just like the rest of the signs in Rocky Mountain National Park in those days.  (I still have that sign that reads “Glenda Fuller,” sitting proudly on one of the bookshelves in my house at Earthsprings.

Seeing that sign there recently, a  friend whom I had known for several years, but who was visiting my home for the first time, discovered that my maiden name was Fuller by the still carved and stained yellow sign, was the same name as her mother’s maiden name, and after a barrage of questions, we learned  that, in fact, we are cousins!  Maybe we all ought to have signposts, totem poles, shields, or tee-shirts that reveal our origins; who knows what cousins we’d turn up!)

That was a long time ago, when Don made that sign for me.  This afternoon, going for a drive here around the town of Grand Lake, I saw a highway sign directing tourists toward Rainbow Falls. I don’t know if I’ll go there or not.

Probably I’m hesitant about retracing my steps because I tried it once before, and it proved to be tricky.    In the 1970’s I brought my two daughters and their father (not Don) to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park and Grand Lake.   We did have a good time.  We made our own discoveries, and we all, me included, came away with happy memories.  But it was different and sometimes difficult for me, all along the way. Every time I excitedly told them about something I wanted them to see, it turned out to be so changed that I felt foolish.

The town of Estes Park, for example, had already grown incredibly, very different than it had been in those summer days of my romantic youth. Back then, I had known almost all the locals.  Walking up and down the street in front of the quaint, cedar-fronted  tourist shops, I would inevitably meet and greet someone or another of my buddies with whom I had been hanging out the night before, or with whom I had been hiking, or just sitting around in some spot  telling tall tales about snipe hunts or movies we liked or poems we’d read, or  some such carefree nonsense or other.

Once, on a dare, I’d hiked from downtown with a friend straight up to the top of a mountain that the aerial tramway ascended, responding to a bet from some locals that we two flat-landers couldn’t make it there in a certain specified time. To win the bet, we were to ride the tram back down and meet our friends, who would be clocking us. As it turned out, we did make it to the top on time, my friend having tugged me over some pretty serious steep places, my hiking boots sliding this way and that as I charged forward recklessly in my haste.  When we reached the top, we were delighted with ourselves, squealing and hopping around, waving our arms to be seen by our friends below.  But to our surprise, the tram had already closed for the day. My friend took off his shirt and ran it up the flag pole, sure that someone down below would see it and check our time.   We had to hike back down the mountain, this time going much slower.  When we finally trudged tiredly into the Dark Horse Saloon, our friends who were gathered there hadn’t seen any shirt on any flagpole, and never believed we’d done it at all.

On the weekends of that long ago college summer, I worked at the Dark Horse too on weekends. The place was kept in quite decent good order by a hefty bar tender who made sure none of us girls got any grief.  The only time that was ever at issue was during the week of the annual “Rooftop Rodeo” when the cowboys came to town.  They got drunk and rowdy after their performances, and I had to be on my toes to dance delicately out of their intended grasp.

It was surprising, then, that one of them, Billy Savage, turned out to be a quiet, gentle fellow who, a few days after I met him, took me out to the nearby ranch where he was working breaking horses, and we went for a long ride on gentle horses (for my sake) across lush green meadows, both of us silent the whole way.  Later, over a supper he cooked at the ranch, he told me about the time when at a rodeo event once, a bucking horse he was set to ride had backed over on him in the shoot, breaking a number of his ribs before anyone could get to him.   Rodeoing is a rough business, and it’s no wonder the cowboys get a little wild after psyching themselves up for such dangerous sport as riding mean bulls and roping angry longhorns.   It was Billy Savage, incidentally, who said of me later that it was as if he had been playing checkers all his life, and with me it was a game of chess.  He had deep blue eyes and a tender heart that had, sometime previously, been, like his ribs, badly broken.  I liked him a lot.

But he wasn’t the one who gave me the nicest tip of my summer cocktail waitress stint.   That was from a group of young guys who came in the Dark Horse and drank beer all one lazy Saturday afternoon.  As I brought them pitcher after pitcher of beer,  they paid me each time but gave me no tip.  Usually, each time people paid, they tipped me each time too.  So, with these guys, as I wrapped the folded dollar bills with which I made change back around my fingers and walked away, tipless, I just decided to be good-natured about it and give them as cheerful service as I did everyone else.   They were, anyway, a lot of fun.   They were having a great time with each other, telling stories and laughing, and they kept asking me questions and wanting to know all about me.   They knew they had to keep it all quite proper, of course, because Don happened to be sitting nearby, eyeing the whole thing darkly.    But to my delight, when they finally left, I found that they had spelled out my entire name and a long, sweet message on the table in a grand mixture of change, the best tip I had all summer.

Not everything that summer was so delightful.  My roommate totaled her car on a rainy night, driving while drinking, when we were headed down the mountain to meet Don in Denver for the weekend.  Neither or us or another friend in the car were hurt, but it added a darker tone to the time there.

The worst moment I had at the Dark Horse was different.  It was on an afternoon when some girls I had known from my college back in Texas came into the bar. They were just looking around, sightseeing, giggling and prissy. They were all tee-totalers, I knew already, and fundamentalist religious purists. Picture their surprise when they saw me, their very good little friend from college back in Texas, working in a saloon!  Part of me wanted to explain to them that it was really a very decent place; another part of me, the part that almost won, wanted to ignore their silliness or shove it in their judgmental faces.   But my embarrassment stayed with me for several days, and even now, I don’t tell everyone I meet that I was once a cocktail waitress in a smoky bar.

But I did learn, in those days, that possibly the best psychologists anywhere are the bartenders and waitresses in such places.  When people are on vacation, as they are when they come through Estes Park, they talk more freely and often more honestly than when they are back home, where they are bound by the kinds of associations and pre-conceived notions that I had felt from my college acquaintances.   During that time in Estes Park, when I was a college student, I listened to more heart-felt and touching stories from patrons at the Dark Horse  than at any other time in my life.

Yesterday, incidentally, I noticed that the Dark Horse was no longer in existence.  A fancy restaurant has taken its place.

I should have known, of course, that all of this couldn’t ever be the same experience for me as it had been back then or as it had been two years later, when I had returned to the area for another summer of fun.   I should have known because when I brought my family to Estes Park, some fifteen years after my college experiences,  when I was married and wanted my kids to love Colorado too, I was so eager for them to see the place and to enjoy it as I had done that I babbled about it for days before we got there, and when it turned out to be so different, I felt foolish and disappointed.

I wanted, for example, to take them to see Bear Lake, one of my favorite spots from my earlier years.  Once, in those days, I had hiked up to Bear Lake all by myself and, turning a bend in the trail, I had come literally face to face with an enormous buck deer.  We had stood there together, eye to eye, for what felt like an eternity before he turned and with stately grace, stepped off the trail and disappeared into the forest, and I was left, all alone, in that secluded spot on the way to Bear Lake.

But when I took my family to Bear Lake later in the 70’s, a shuttle bus carried a steady stream of tourists the way I had walked, right up to a new parking lot within a short walking distance of the beautiful lake.   I was glad that disabled people could now have access to the lake, but I knew there was no chance for my family to have anything like the kind of solitary encounter I had had and had treasured all these years.

We did have a wonderful time anyway during our visit to Rocky Mountain National Park. We stayed in a charming cedar cabin with a fireplace.  Bill went fishing. The girls and I went shopping in Estes Park. I have home movies of the kids swimming in a mountain stream while Bill panned for gold (with no luck, I might add).  It was a sunny, delightful day, full of joy and even now a special memory for all of us.   (One reason, perhaps, is that my oldest daughter, Selena, didn’t die when she got hyperthermia from staying too long in that river, and we had to pile all our of our coats over her and lie down all around and over her to warm her sufficiently to keep her alive. She hasn’t, I think, been warm since!)

Then too, when my family and I drove over Trail Ridge Road, the fog and clouds were so low over the mountains that we didn’t get to see anything at all!  The disappointment I felt that day is probably what makes me hesitate now to revisit any of my special places of memory, either from college days or from the time when I was here with my family.  I’m all alone on this trip, and somehow that makes it strangely lonely at these particular familiar spots.

The town of Grand Lake, however, unlike Estes Park or Rocky Mountain National Park, was especially pleasant for us when we came here, with no disappointments, and it’s been good to be here again this time too.    It hasn’t changed much in these forty or so years of my acquaintance with it.  If anything, it has been improved by the addition of a boardwalk along the lake, and by the work of a landscape person who has been able to produce everywhere in town flower beds bursting forth with hearty, colorfully blooming flowers.  Hanging baskets of lobelia three feet across, petunias that are masses of pink hanging as much as four feet down, tall, nodding daisies and asters and purple things I don’t recognize and other remarkably beautiful specimens give the little ten-block-long village a remarkably festive look.

Today I tried to do a watercolor of the river outside my doorway.    But I’m too much of a novice. It turned into a mess, and I threw it away.   It was fun, however.  I took a nap this afternoon.    I’ve eaten frugally for two days (peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and such) to offset the cost of this lodging, but it’s worth it.  It is hard, though, because the lodge’s restaurant is a fancy, gourmet place with all sorts of delicacies.  I may cave in yet and go to sit on their patio and be served in style beside the river.  A few minutes ago, I took a walk down to the lake to watch the sunset, all pink and glowing.

The lake, rightly named, is truly grand.  The town, too, though still comfortably rustic, is serene and sedate in its settled grace, and I’m glad.

Maybe by the time I leave here I’ll be a little more settled too.  Maybe my habitually restless self, the one Don used to laugh at when we went fishing, will become as calm as the waters of the lake, no matter what mysterious secrets lurk beneath the surface.  I sort of hope so. But I doubt it. I think my gypsy self is systemically restless and will always be eager to see what’s next around the bend, what new strata of experience will be laid down in my life.

It has been sweet, though, to sit here and reflect on the over-lapping layers of my experiences in this part of Colorado.  I hope Don is happy somewhere. I hope for the well-being and happiness of my girls and their father and my grandchildren, whatever they each are doing today.

And I hope I get to come here again someday with other people I love. That would be nice.   Maybe then I’ll tell them stories about this particular trip, when at age 65,  I wandered happy and alone, if somewhat nostalgic,  around this Grand Spirit Lake in Colorado, the last week of August, 2004.