Books read:
- Hillbilly Highway: The Transappalachian Migration and the Making of a White Working Class by Max Fraser
- Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
- Outline by Rachel Cusk
Trails walked:
- Dinosaur Tracks in Picket Wire Canyon near La Junta (Feb 11th)
- Beautiful Saturday drive and walk near Boulder and Ward (Feb 14th)
- Pole Hill Road near Estes Park (Feb 22nd)
Song(s) of the month: Eddie Vedder and Neil Finn - Throw Your Arms Around Me
February Summary:
Well, the Super Bowl was disappointing. For me, the sports season after the Super Bowl becomes a desert until college basketball's March Madness at the end of March. I'm not an NBA fan any longer (too boring). Baseball starts in April. So February is normally a time I get outside more and read more since there are no sports on TV. But every four years that changes. The Winter Olympics in Northern Italy held so many great moments. I mean, just the views of those Dolomites were stunning. And then all the pasta dishes! Italy is still my favorite food destination (OK I've only been there once, but the food was unforgettable...and cheap). The moments in the 2026 Winter Olympics that I enjoyed the most were:
Elana Meyers Taylor, at 41 years old, winning gold in the bobsled for the first time in her long career. Pair that with her raising two special needs kids and this was a moment to remember.
Alysa Liu coming out of retirement at the ripe ol' age of 20(!) to win gold was a great story on how to take control of your own life and live it the way you want. Her joy was contagious. She has an old soul for one so young. Here's one of her many philosophical quotes: “What I like to share about myself is my story, my art and my creative process, I guess messing up doesn’t take away from that. It’s still something, it’s still a story. A bad story is still a story, and I think that’s beautiful. There’s no way to lose.”
And speaking of bad stories...Lindsey Vonn bravely attempting the downhill with a torn ACL. It didn't go well. She crashed 13 seconds into her run and had to be helicoptered out. She said she was glad she gave it a go, but I have to wonder if she really means it. Have you seen the Xrays? Brutal injuries.
How about 22-year-old Eileen Gu? Majoring in International Relations at Stanford, plays piano, speaks fluent English and Mandarin, part-time fashion model, and oh yeah, wins gold medals in a skiing sport that involves hurtling herself 60 feet in the air while doing flips and spins. She takes lots of grief for competing for China instead of the US. The US Vice President sent her shade about this, and her response was a great lesson in handling criticism: "Thanks JD, that's sweet!" Here's what she says about the two countries she is tied to: “I’m American when I’m in the US and Chinese when I’m in China. Both continue to be supportive of me because they understand my mission is to use sport as a force for unity.” A force for unity. Imagine that.
Francesca Lollobrigida, great niece to the famous Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, won gold medals in the 3,000 and 5,000 meter speed skates. She celebrated with her two-year-old son. Awesome.
And of course the men's and women's US hockey teams each won overtime victories against their archrival Canada. Tremendous emotion in these games. The men honored the Gaudreau brothers Johnny and Mathew who were tragically killed while riding their bicycles in 2024. Both had wives and young children and were pro hockey players. Watching the brothers' parents tearing up while the team carried Johnny's NHL jersey, and then two of their young grandkids, now without their dads, created a bit of sobbing on my end.
I have an affliction these days. I've termed it "Grandpa Elbow." It's like Tennis Elbow, but without having to play tennis. It's caused by lifting young grandchildren up with your good arm, while cooking dinner or getting a bottle (beer, wine, formula, milk, whatever) ready with your off arm. It hurts, but it's worth it. I may have Grandpa Back too...My wife and I have been doing a bit more grandchild care than normal this month for various reasons. We love it, even though it may cut into reading and rambling time. In this shortened and busy month I've managed to read fascinating nonfiction books on the changing white working class in the Midwest and on Northern Ireland's Troubles during the 60s and 70s. My one fiction book was one of the more unique reads I've had where conversations help to reveal the outline of who a person is. My rambling took me to southeastern Colorado for the first time to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs, then on a drive/hike through the foothills and into the high mountains, and finally to some four-wheel-drive roads above Estes Park that are closed to vehicles in the winter. Enjoy!
Things My Grandkids Say: My granddaughter's mom recently had some news to share with her two-year-old daughter. So she asked her: "Do you want a baby brother?" "No"
"Do you want a baby sister?" "No"
"Do you want to be an only child?" "YES!"
Uh oh.....
Song(s) of the month: Eddie Vedder and Neil Finn - Throw Your Arms Around Me
I have this song on my Close Eyes and Sway playlist. It's a cover of the song by Australia's Hunters and Collectors who released it in 1984. It was one of Australia's most popular songs for years and still ranks in the top 20 "Most Australia" songs of all time. One of my favorite reviews of the song had this to say: "Nobody that has witnessed this song being sung drunkenly in a pub by a hundred people, arms linked, can deny its hold over the Australian psyche." The original version is fine, but somehow Vedder and Finn turn it into the love song it really should have sounded like in the first place. Their two voices have a unique blend that seems perfect for this song. One of these days I should highlight a list of songs that were most improved in their cover version. This would be on that list.
Sample lyrics:
We may never meet again
So shed your skin and lets get started
And you will throw your arms around me
Yeah, you will throw your arms around me
Here's a live version that's really good:
Here's the studio version with lyrics as a bonus:
Dinosaur Tracks in Picket Wire Canyon near La Junta – This is a terrific hike, but you really have to work for it. First of all, it’s a 4-hour drive from my home, including 22 miles of dirt road. Then you have at least a 12-mile walk ahead of you (round trip) in order to reach the dinosaur tracks which, on this day, included a very wet ford through a river, making a very squishy walk 6 miles back to the car. And then you have to drive back home another 4 hours. So, that’s a lot. But it was well worth it! My hiking buddy and I in Arizona used to have a general rule of thumb for hikes: The number of miles hiking had to exceed the number of hours driving time. The closest we ever came was Mount Baldy in Arizona which was a 5 hour drive each way (10 hours total), but we ended up hiking 11 miles, so…rule of thumb met.
Part of the decision about doing the hike on this day was that I had to get up early anyway to take my wife and her sister to the airport. And the airport is right on the way there, so I dropped them off and continued heading south and east to the Withers Canyon/Dinosaur Footprints trailhead which is around 30 miles south of La Junta. It was a fascinating drive, passing through Colorado towns that most folks who’ve lived here all their lives have never heard of: Strasburg, Deer Trail, Karval, Ordway, Rocky Ford, and Swink. These are the Eastern plains of Colorado, and they are filled with farms and oil fields, and nearly everyone drives a truck. The land isn’t as flat as I imagined it would be. There were lots of gentle hills and gulleys, almost like a warning to those headed west that the land was about to change. When I got to the trailhead there was only one other car, and it was still there when I left, so I assumed they were either camping somewhere or eaten by a mountain lion. I was the only one to sign the trail register this day.
The hike starts with a 300 foot semi steep descent into the canyon and I thought to myself, this is not gonna be a fun climb out after 12 miles. I ended up finding a short cut back to the trailhead that saved me a mile but was even steeper. The canyon is surprisingly beautiful. Lots of lush vegetation that would probably be ever prettier in the spring and summer (I would never attempt this hike in summer, as there is no shade). On this winter day in February, the temperature was in the 40s and 50s most of the day with pretty constant cloud cover. After the descent, the trail follows a two-track old road the rest of the way (a mountain bike would be a great way to explore this area). There were so many interesting rock formations, old buildings, and petroglyphs along the way to keep you occupied before finally reaching the old Dolores Mission at around mile 4.5 (it was probably more like mile 4, but I was doing lots of wandering around beforehand). The old mission was part of a community of Hispanic settlers here in the mid-1800s. There are a few gravestones, but the mission itself is pretty dilapidated. They picked a pretty spot with the Purgatoire River running nearby and canyon walls rising up around you. I found an interesting note on the forest service website about the name of this canyon (Picket Wire) in relation to the name of the river (Purgatoire): “Picket Wire Canyon has undergone several name changes over the years. Legend says the canyon was originally named El Rio de las Perdidas in Purgatorio after a group of Spanish treasure hunters died in the river. They believed that without a proper burial from the clergy, their souls would be banished to Purgatory. French explorers shortened the name to Purgatoire. English speakers, who couldn’t pronounce the French version, thought it sounded like 'Picket Wire.'” Gringos being gringos.
In another mile and half, I finally reached the dinosaur tracks. According to the signs, this is the largest set of dinosaur prints in the US. I wandered around on the trail side of the river checking out the prints, but the sign said the big brontosaurus tracks were on the other side of the river. There was no way to cross without getting wet (the unseasonably warm winter has created a constant flow of snowmelt) so I waded through the very cold knee-deep water to the other side. The tracks here really are impressive. Just try to imagine what it was like 150 million years ago with these huge reptiles trudging across the plain. This area was the western shoreline of a huge shallow lake at that time. The dino tracks in the mud eventually got compressed by the lake and turned to stone. Very cool.
After exploring for a bit, I headed back across the river for the squishy walk back to my car (I didn't bring a pair of wading sandals/shoes, nor did I bring an extra pair of dry socks...lesson learned). Just past the mission I checked my map and saw that there were some dirt roads on the mesa above me that would save about a mile of walking. But I had to get to the top of the mesa using some social and game trails that eventually faded away. I managed to make it to the top and then walked the dirt roads back to my car. I was glad to shorten my walk, but the canyon trail was prettier so I’m not sure I would do that again. I stopped in La Junta for dinner at Lucy’s Mexican Restaurant (If you know something about me, you know why I chose this restaurant). The steak street tacos were amazing (five of them for $13). On the drive through town I got the feeling that it’s going through some hard times. Lots of abandoned buildings and some folks looking down on their luck. They have a Tarantula Festival here in September that draws big crowds where you can view thousands of tarantulas during their mating season. Another interesting fact is that Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was born in La Junta! The drive back home was easy. I avoided I-25 through Colorado Springs and Denver and instead, took CO-71 to Limon where the I-70 took me to the I-25 and back home. A really fun (and long) day exploring a different part of Colorado.
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| Cool rock formations on the way down to the canyon |
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| Good signage the whole way |
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| An old well |
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| Typical walking along the valley floor, would be good for mountain biking |
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| Artsy shot of the pretty valley |
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| Desert squid? |
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| There were petroglyphs between these two rocks |
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| See? |
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| Some nice sweeping views from up here |
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| The Purgatoire River |
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| I'm thinking that anyone who would actually pick up an old headstone probably wouldn't pay attention to this sign anyway... |
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| Old Dolores Mission and headstone |
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| Headstone |
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| Obligatory shot through an open doorway |
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| Old wooden cross still there |
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| I saw these everywhere, like tennis balls. Some sort of casaba |
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| Dinosaur shoulder blade excavated from this area |
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| I wonder if this is still true. |
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| Allosaurus print |
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| Try to picture it walking here... |
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| I had to get wet and cross the river to...um...get to the other side |
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| ..where I saw these brontosaurus prints |
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| Dam! |
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| More brontosaurus prints |
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| I had to climb up these rocks on my off trail short cut |
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| Celebrated my day with dinner here in La Junta, yum. |
The Hillbilly Highway by Max Fraser – There were three major migrations of people within the US from the early 1900s until around 1970. Two of the three are probably familiar to most folks: The Great Migration of black people from the Jim Crow south to the factories in the north (I wrote about this in my review of The Warmth of Other Suns), and the migration of people to California from the Dust Bowl. Most folks, including me, had never heard about the migration of poor and working-class whites from the rural south to the Midwestern factories in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. And by shear numbers, this migration was even larger than the other two. In all three of these major migrations, desperate people were leaving desperate situations and ending up in places that turned out to be not much better for them. This book, The Hillbilly Highway, was about this third migration.Max Fraser is a history professor at the University of Miami, specializing in US Labor history. He got the idea for this book while writing an article about working class life in middle American in the aftermath of the Great Recession. He was in Muncie, Indiana and was surprised to find out how many folks in the poorer sections of town had their roots not in the Midwest, but in Appalachia, especially Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. He saw a story here and spent the next few years writing this book which was published in 2023. In addition to the normal references a history professor would use in researching a topic, Fraser also interviewed several family members about their migration stories. Much like The Warmth of Other Suns, this book is better because of the personal stories included in the narrative. However, unlike The Warmth of Other Suns, this book had a more academic tone than a story form. So, it wasn’t as fun to read. But I did learn a lot! Here’s a sample of the academic-speak: ”By the decades after World War II, a growing divide would emerge between a liberal political establishment composed increasingly of the rising middle classes, whose ideological worldview saw no necessary tension between the structural relations of a capitalist economy and the egalitarian ideals of a pluralist democracy; and those segments of the broader industrial working class for whom the promise of embourgeoisement was already turning out to be a false coin.” That's some tough reading.As the population of Appalachia increased in the early part of the 20th century, and as more industrial farms and mining operations started buying up all the farmland, the people were finding it more and more difficult to make a living. People who were used to living off the land for generations now had to either go to work in a mine or in a factory to support their family. The invention of the automobile (and all the parts needed for one) coincided with all of this. The factories needed workers, and there weren’t enough of them in the Midwest, so the migration began. Then two world wars created even more factory work and the migration soared. The completion of the Interstate Highway system made it fairly easy for the southerners to go back and forth from the factories to their Appalachian homes. This seemed to slow down the assimilation of southerners into the lifestyle of the Midwest as many of the workers only saw themselves working until they could make enough to support themselves back home. This created some tension in cities like Muncie, Akron, Detroit, and Chicago. The locals would complain about the hillbillies and their loud music, large families, constant clutter, and seeming lack of cleanliness. The author spent a lot of time talking about community efforts to improve relations between the locals and the new migrants. The migrants (like migrants worldwide) always seemed to end up living in the worst parts of town with the cheapest housing and fewest resources. So-called hillbilly ghettoes sprung up in every Midwest factory town.The book touched on the topics of unions, race relations, politics, and all the other factors that go into understanding the complicated situation. One of his talking points as he was on a book tour was that this book will help explain how the Rust Belt switched political allegiance from Liberal to Conservative. Here’s one line about that: “And as liberalism became increasingly tied, fairly or otherwise, to the fortunes of the Black ghetto, it would appear to have less and less to offer the southern Appalachian migrants who had once served as its critical bridge to the postwar city. Having first objectified them as the ideal test-subjects for reforming the behavioral maladjustments of the urban poor, after the 1960s the white poor and working classes of the Upper South and the Midwest would increasingly become personae non gratae in the eyes of postwar liberals.” But my favorite chapter was the one on the hillbilly music, which I love. He talked about Steve Earle’s song Hillbilly Highway, which was an influence on the title of the book. Here’s an excerpt from the song:My granddaddy was a miner, but he finally saw the lightHe didn't have much, just a beat-up truck and a dream about a better lifeGrand mama cried when she waved goodbye, never heard such a lonesome soundPretty soon the dirt road turned into blacktop, Detroit City boundAnd Hank Williams of course played a huge role in this story as his music told of the lives of these people and eventually took country music from the rural south to a nationwide phenomenon. Ironically, Williams died of heart failure (likely from opioid over usage) at the age of 29 on one of those Hillbilly Highways as he was being driven from Knoxville, Tennessee to Canton, Ohio, not for a factory job, but for a concert. Here are some lines from the book:Over the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, somewhere around eight million poor white southerners—perhaps even more—left economically marginal parts of the southern countryside and traveled north in search of work.from 1932 (the year before the Tennessee Valley Authority’s birth) to 1968 (at which point the TVA had become the largest single user of strip-mined coal in the country), jobs in southern Appalachian coal mines declined from 705,000 to just 132,000.“You and I know who these strike agitators are,” complained one Akron resident, in a letter to the Beacon Journal signed “Union Hater.” “They are these uneducated tobacco chewing geetar playing hillbilly illiterates from West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.”Akron, which was undergoing a period of phenomenal growth in the 1910s and 1920s. Home not only to Goodyear but also to fellow tiremakers B. F. Goodrich and Firestone Tire and Rubber, Akron boomed with the domestic automobile industry: in the decades between the wars, two-thirds of all rubber goods made in the United States would come out of Akron.By 1951, in fact, a citywide survey of Motor City residents found that more than one in five respondents named “poor southern whites” or “hillbillies” as the most “undesirable” group in the city—almost four times the number of Detroiters who answered “foreigners,” nearly twice the number who chose Black Americans, and second only to “gangsters” and “criminals” among survey responses....the so-called hillbilly ghetto. In the two decades between 1945 and 1965, in both large and small midwestern cities, zones of concentrated poverty where white southerners made up sizable portions of the population became suddenly ubiquitous features of the Transappalachian migration.In the eyes of longer-tenured residents, however, those same neighborhoods appeared as growing sinkholes of rural backwardness and urban dysfunction, incontrovertible signs of the economic, social, and cultural deterioration that heralded the onrushing decline of the American inner city.In the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, once a fashionable area along Lake Michigan north of the Loop before it became perhaps the most notorious hillbilly ghetto of the postwar period, white southerners eventually came to make up as much as 60 percent of the local population in certain census tracts.the hostility that greeted southern white migrants during these decades would never approach the level of the often-violent campaigns of organized resistance that greeted the simultaneous arrival of southern Blacks, in Chicago and other cities across the region.the relative whiteness of hillbilly ghettos provided important ideological cover, at a critical juncture in the development of liberal social policy—a way of talking about urban poverty as a problem of culture without talking explicitly about the politically explosive issue of race.it was no coincidence that the explosion in country music’s popularity after World War II overlapped with the most intensive period of out-migration from the rural South....the slide, then collapse, of auto jobs and the erosion of union contracts called into question the bigger contract that New Deal Democrats had signed with middle-class America.
Beautiful Saturday drive and walk – I woke up to a spectacularly beautiful mountain scene today. The sky was blue and the mountains had a recent dusting of snow. My wife was out of town, and I had no plans for the day, so I hopped in my car and just started driving west. I drove through Sunshine Canyon west of Boulder because I’ve not driven past the Mt. Sanitas trailhead before. It’s a pretty and winding drive with lots of nice homes nestled in nooks and crannies. I stopped at a parking area labeled Bald Mountain Scenic Area and took the one mile loop called Pines to Peak Loop. There weren’t many cars on this Saturday, but the loop was surprisingly pretty. Views of Boulder and the plains to the east, and once on top, spectacular views of the Indian Peaks to the west. There were a couple of families with small kids up here enjoying the beautiful day. After sitting on a park bench with views I headed back to my car and decided to drive up to Brainard Recreation Area to see if the overall lack of snow was impacting this normally very snowy area. One clue was that “America’s steepest county road”, Lickskillet Road was open (it’s normally closed in winter). I took this very steep and now muddy road from Gold Hill down to Left Hand Canyon Road which took me to the community of Ward. Ward was once the richest community in Colorado just after the gold rush, where ironically silver turned out to be the biggest producer here. Now it’s a small community of around 150 people, best known as the gateway to the spectacular Brainard Lake Recreation Area nearby.
I parked at the Gateway parking area in Brainard where there were lots of people going snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. I decided to walk up Left Hand Canyon Road which eventually leads to its namesake lake. It was too late in the day to walk all the way to the lake, so I went about a half mile up and turned around. There were lots of skiers enjoying this road, but there were places where they had to stop and take off their skis as several rocks were poking through. Even this very snowy area hasn’t had enough snow this year. I had a nice view of Mount Audubon on the way back to my car. Instead of driving back through Gold Hill, I decided to take the Peak-to-Peak highway north, through Lyons and back home. There are spectacular views of Sawtooth Mountain on this drive. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to hike this peak. It’s a 14 mile walk which I had planned to do last summer but never got around to it. Maybe this year!
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| Nice views of the peaks near Boulder |
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| These signs are more ominous after the series of mountain lion attacks north of here |
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| Little loop started here |
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| Great views of the Indian Peaks |
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| Framed shot |
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| I'll be driving up there soon after I take this photo |
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| Left Hand Road covered in snow |
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| Saw a few skiers |
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| Mount Audubon in the background |
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe – The subtitle of this book (A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland) had me a bit confused until about two thirds of the way through. It’s a terrific telling of a group of people involved in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during what’s known as “The Troubles” which is actually a continuation of the conflicts between the Irish and the English over this plot of six counties in the north of Ireland (known officially as Northern Ireland) for the past several centuries. There is a TV series on Disney based on this book that has gotten good ratings, maybe I’ll watch it. But if you want to see a great movie about “The Troubles” check out Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” which was nominated for seven Oscars and won for best screenplay (it should have won best picture over CODA in my opinion). I think it’s on Netflix now. The book’s author is an investigative writer for The New Yorker and wrote the highly successful book about the Sackler dynasty, Empire of Pain.Back to the book, it starts out with a bang. A mother of ten kids in a tenement building in Belfast in 1972 is kidnapped in front of her kids and taken away, never to be heard from again. The mother’s name was Jean McConville, and her ten kids had a pretty tough life before and especially after her kidnapping. They fended for themselves for a while until the government portioned them out to various orphanages, some with unspeakable living conditions and abuse. After the kidnapping, the story pivoted to the life of Dolours and Marian Price, two teens whose parents were involved in the IRA. Dolours and Marian became sort of legends in the IRA movement, planning operations, setting off bombs, going to prison and most famously, going on a hunger strike that captured the world’s attention and made Margaret Thatcher blink. The sisters were close with other famous IRA operatives including its theoretical leader, Gerry Adams, and his main operations man, Brendan Hughes. It was a fascinating look into how smart young kids can be caught up in an ideal which would eventually require them to injure and murder others in support of their cause. This was the late 60s, when the world was changing and civil rights riots were exploding. Young people around the world wanted to change their world and the young people in the IRA at this time were no exception.After the hunger strikes and after more violence and death, Gerry Adams started to feel that violence was no longer the answer. He became involved in Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA and eventually created a truce that did not end with the English leaving Northern Ireland but left open a path for their expulsion in the far future if the populace voted for that. That left the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes with the feeling that all their violent acts led to nothing.From here the story changes from all the action of kidnapping, bombings, hunger strikes etc., to more of a mystery and a failed attempt at an oral history of “The Troubles” conducted by officials at Boston College. Here’s where the “memory” part of the subtitle comes into play as the reader is introduced to The Belfast Project which meant to capture the memories of both IRA members and Loyalist members with a guarantee that the tapes would not be released to the public until after the death of those that chose to tell their story. Dolours Price told her story, as did Brendan Hughes, and several others. The title of the book, Say Nothing, is from a Seamus Heaney poem with the lines:Where to be saved you only must save faceAnd whatever you say, you say nothing.This sentiment was strong in Northern Ireland at the time. If you opened your mouth about anything related to IRA activities (or Loyalist activities), you could get a bullet in the back of your head. So, for people to record what they saw on tape, required a huge leap of faith. The project hired an ex-IRA man to do the interviews, which helped to recruit many people, mainly his friends who believed him when he said the tapes were for academic purposes in the future and would not be released until their deaths. Unfortunately, greed got in the way and one of the people responsible for the project wrote a book based on some of the stories told. Once the book was published, the secret of the project was out. That lead to subpoenas from the police in Northern Ireland, and of course a Pandora’s Box was opened. Many people had to go into hiding. But the author found a small clue in the tapes that possibly could lead to the mystery of who killed Jean McConville, the mother of ten that was kidnapped in the beginning of the story.This book is a great read, but it’s not a full story of The Troubles and shouldn’t be looked at as such. It’s a story of a few folks involved in the IRA and their views about what happened. I hope to eventually read other, more complete histories of this emotional time period. But I sure did enjoy this small snippet of a look into this time.
Pole Hill Road near Estes Park – Traveling west on US 36, just before the highway heads downhill into Estes Park, there is a dirt road, called Pole Hill Road. There are several homes along this road which eventually ends at a closed gate where I parked. During the summer, the gate is open and these roads become an all-wheel drive paradise, probably making it not very enjoyable for hiking. But on this February Sunday, the gate was closed (the sign says it closes on December 7th each year). I was the only hiker on these roads for most of the day (I saw a family of 5 near the trailhead). The views of the mountains are great all along the way, which probably makes this place pretty popular when the roads are open. My goal was Panorama Point and The Notch which are reachable by forest roads off of Pole Hill Road. When I reached the last quarter mile road to Panorama Point there was another closed gate that mentioned a permit was required. It was a bit more difficult, but I managed to walk around the gate and started up the very steep hill, sliding backwards in the 4 inch snow with every step (spikes weren’t helpful as the snow was too soft). Eventually, I reached a point where there were several downed trees across road that were not easy to cross, as I had to take off my pack and slither under the trees. Exhausted, I finally gave up. I’ll have to visit Panorama Point some other time. So, I headed back down the steep slope and took another forest road towards The Notch. After a couple of detours due to impossible terrain, I finally reached The Notch. The views from here are spectacular. The snow-capped mountains stretch out from Longs Peak in the south to Mummy Mountain in the north. It’s really pretty. It looks like a popular place for Jeep and Razor drivers to hang out. Lake Estes gleams below you as Rocky Mountain National Park rises above it. I walked about 7.5 miles with lots of up and down, hiking in snow about half the time. It was a pretty good workout with great views. Kind of a hidden winter gem.
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| Great views from the start |
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| About half the hike was in this |
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| Last stretch to Panorama Point was not encouraging |
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| Ran into this pretty meadow with views |
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| Meadow |
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| The All Trails app tried to take me through this; I disagreed and found a road instead |
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| So pretty up here |
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| Views from The Notch |
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| Framed view |
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| Lake Estes and its namesake town below |
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| My poles on Pole Hill Road |
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| I couldn't stop taking photos |
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| See? |
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| This is walking back down to my car |
Outline by Rachel Cusk – I can’t remember how this book ended up on my “to read” list, but I’m glad it did. It was very different from anything I’ve read. It won several awards, which is probably how I had heard about it. There is not really a plot per se, but in general it’s a about a woman writer from the UK who travels to Athens to help teach a writing class during the hot Greek summer. The “story” is told through the dialogues of the different people she meets on this trip, starting with an older, thrice divorced, Greek man who happens to be seated next to her on the plane from London to Athens. Other characters include some of the students in her class, fellow teachers, and friends of friends she meets while in Athens. Nothing much really happens; other than a couple of boating/swimming excursions she ends up on with the person she sat next to on the plane. She teaches her class, has dinner with friends, and then in the last chapter has a conversation with another writer who is taking her Athens apartment on the day she leaves back to London. But through all of these different conversations, we end up with a sort of “outline” of the woman in the story, the writer, whose name we don’t even know until someone calls her by it halfway through the book.
It seemed to me as though the author was, in a sense, teaching the reader how to write by providing these observant dialogues throughout the book. Her first assignment in her class was to ask each student to describe something interesting that they observed on the way to class that day. So, she is teaching you the power of observation, which most great writers have in abundance. And she ends up providing really excellent character descriptions just by having those characters tell a story about their life. So interesting. Anyway, before I make more of a mess of my own inability to describe this book, here are some lines:
He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents.
He began to ask me questions, as though he had learned to remind himself to do so, and I wondered what or who had taught him that lesson, which many people never learn.
Before they left, his father-in-law made a rare excursion into speech.
What Ryan had learned from this is that your failures keep returning to you, while your successes are something you always have to convince yourself of.
There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise.
And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines.
how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?
for my husband it is completely normal that our son should grow up alone, because he was an only child himself. And for me, of course, it would be disastrous to have more children: I would be completely submerged, as so many women are.
‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.’
The woman who said this was of a glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally.
He has always been lazy about details, since he is a person of extremes, and prefers not to be detained by facts.
There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things that I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!
Song(s) of the month: Eddie Vedder and Neil Finn - Throw Your Arms Around Me
Dinosaur Tracks in Picket Wire Canyon near La Junta – This is a terrific hike, but you really have to work for it. First of all, it’s a 4-hour drive from my home, including 22 miles of dirt road. Then you have at least a 12-mile walk ahead of you (round trip) in order to reach the dinosaur tracks which, on this day, included a very wet ford through a river, making a very squishy walk 6 miles back to the car. And then you have to drive back home another 4 hours. So, that’s a lot. But it was well worth it! My hiking buddy and I in Arizona used to have a general rule of thumb for hikes: The number of miles hiking had to exceed the number of hours driving time. The closest we ever came was Mount Baldy in Arizona which was a 5 hour drive each way (10 hours total), but we ended up hiking 11 miles, so…rule of thumb met. 
The Hillbilly Highway by Max Fraser – There were three major migrations of people within the US from the early 1900s until around 1970. Two of the three are probably familiar to most folks: The Great Migration of black people from the Jim Crow south to the factories in the north (I wrote about this in my review of The Warmth of Other Suns), and the migration of people to California from the Dust Bowl. Most folks, including me, had never heard about the migration of poor and working-class whites from the rural south to the Midwestern factories in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. And by shear numbers, this migration was even larger than the other two. In all three of these major migrations, desperate people were leaving desperate situations and ending up in places that turned out to be not much better for them. This book, The Hillbilly Highway, was about this third migration.
Beautiful Saturday drive and walk – I woke up to a spectacularly beautiful mountain scene today. The sky was blue and the mountains had a recent dusting of snow. My wife was out of town, and I had no plans for the day, so I hopped in my car and just started driving west. I drove through Sunshine Canyon west of Boulder because I’ve not driven past the Mt. Sanitas trailhead before. It’s a pretty and winding drive with lots of nice homes nestled in nooks and crannies. I stopped at a parking area labeled Bald Mountain Scenic Area and took the one mile loop called Pines to Peak Loop. There weren’t many cars on this Saturday, but the loop was surprisingly pretty. Views of Boulder and the plains to the east, and once on top, spectacular views of the Indian Peaks to the west. There were a couple of families with small kids up here enjoying the beautiful day. After sitting on a park bench with views I headed back to my car and decided to drive up to Brainard Recreation Area to see if the overall lack of snow was impacting this normally very snowy area. One clue was that “America’s steepest county road”, Lickskillet Road was open (it’s normally closed in winter). I took this very steep and now muddy road from Gold Hill down to Left Hand Canyon Road which took me to the community of Ward. Ward was once the richest community in Colorado just after the gold rush, where ironically silver turned out to be the biggest producer here. Now it’s a small community of around 150 people, best known as the gateway to the spectacular Brainard Lake Recreation Area nearby. 
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe – The subtitle of this book (A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland) had me a bit confused until about two thirds of the way through. It’s a terrific telling of a group of people involved in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during what’s known as “The Troubles” which is actually a continuation of the conflicts between the Irish and the English over this plot of six counties in the north of Ireland (known officially as Northern Ireland) for the past several centuries. There is a TV series on Disney based on this book that has gotten good ratings, maybe I’ll watch it. But if you want to see a great movie about “The Troubles” check out Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” which was nominated for seven Oscars and won for best screenplay (it should have won best picture over CODA in my opinion). I think it’s on Netflix now. The book’s author is an investigative writer for The New Yorker and wrote the highly successful book about the Sackler dynasty, Empire of Pain.
Pole Hill Road near Estes Park – Traveling west on US 36, just before the highway heads downhill into Estes Park, there is a dirt road, called Pole Hill Road. There are several homes along this road which eventually ends at a closed gate where I parked. During the summer, the gate is open and these roads become an all-wheel drive paradise, probably making it not very enjoyable for hiking. But on this February Sunday, the gate was closed (the sign says it closes on December 7th each year). I was the only hiker on these roads for most of the day (I saw a family of 5 near the trailhead). The views of the mountains are great all along the way, which probably makes this place pretty popular when the roads are open. My goal was Panorama Point and The Notch which are reachable by forest roads off of Pole Hill Road. When I reached the last quarter mile road to Panorama Point there was another closed gate that mentioned a permit was required. It was a bit more difficult, but I managed to walk around the gate and started up the very steep hill, sliding backwards in the 4 inch snow with every step (spikes weren’t helpful as the snow was too soft). Eventually, I reached a point where there were several downed trees across road that were not easy to cross, as I had to take off my pack and slither under the trees. Exhausted, I finally gave up. I’ll have to visit Panorama Point some other time. So, I headed back down the steep slope and took another forest road towards The Notch. After a couple of detours due to impossible terrain, I finally reached The Notch. The views from here are spectacular. The snow-capped mountains stretch out from Longs Peak in the south to Mummy Mountain in the north. It’s really pretty. It looks like a popular place for Jeep and Razor drivers to hang out. Lake Estes gleams below you as Rocky Mountain National Park rises above it. I walked about 7.5 miles with lots of up and down, hiking in snow about half the time. It was a pretty good workout with great views. Kind of a hidden winter gem.
Outline by Rachel Cusk – I can’t remember how this book ended up on my “to read” list, but I’m glad it did. It was very different from anything I’ve read. It won several awards, which is probably how I had heard about it. There is not really a plot per se, but in general it’s a about a woman writer from the UK who travels to Athens to help teach a writing class during the hot Greek summer. The “story” is told through the dialogues of the different people she meets on this trip, starting with an older, thrice divorced, Greek man who happens to be seated next to her on the plane from London to Athens. Other characters include some of the students in her class, fellow teachers, and friends of friends she meets while in Athens. Nothing much really happens; other than a couple of boating/swimming excursions she ends up on with the person she sat next to on the plane. She teaches her class, has dinner with friends, and then in the last chapter has a conversation with another writer who is taking her Athens apartment on the day she leaves back to London. But through all of these different conversations, we end up with a sort of “outline” of the woman in the story, the writer, whose name we don’t even know until someone calls her by it halfway through the book.
