The Last Ice Weekend of the Year
Overland Mystery Express
"Man, people drive crazy on this road."
"Yeah, I see what Cameron Burns was talking about. Primary danger of climbing ice at Clear Creek is the drivers coming from Black Hawk and Central City."
"Hang on to your shorts, Dan. I gotta drive way too fast 'r else we're gonna get run over."
"Well, step on it then."
Colorado drivers are as constant as the Speed of Light, be it winter or summer. And the roads are one harrowing experience after another. We must go south to Colorado to climb ice because it's alot closer than Cody, the Bighorns, Utah, Montana or even Canada. Especially Canada. (O Canada... going to Canada... what a dream...)
Momentarily, the nightmarish highways of Colorado, population center of the Central U.S., were the reality. The undetectable glazing of ice doesn't seem to deter many people around here from driving too fast, except for the two slugs in this Wyoming pick-up. A month ago, driving on an interstate at a fiendish fifty miles per hour, we nearly bought the farm just south of the Wyoming border on a patch of black ice, in my little truck. We became older, and wiser now. Yessir! We were driving like little old farmers.
Except on this road...
This time, in March, it was fairly dry, luckily. Winter was dying into Spring quicker than usual. We needed to get all the ice we could until next winter. Today we had revisited the upper and lower tiers of Big Thompson Canyon's best-known falls. All the ice was fatter, albeit more beat up, than it was in January. Only problem was it tended to fracture in massive sections, unlike in mid-winter. Dinner plate fractures were becoming dining hall fractures. Not good.
We left the falls and drove in to Golden to find a motel. Unfortunately, they saw us coming. The one good-looking flea-bag type lodging was full. The cost of a room at the Golden Hotel was over $80 a night. We drove on. We blundered on to the Black Hawk Highway, thinking that lodging in a gambling shanty would be cheap.
Well, we didn't find a hotel. But what a sight. Man, or rather, some sorry excuse for all of mankind had chopped away beautiful rock and inserted great, big casinos up there on the mountainsides. It was more like the government installation atop Devil's Tower in the movie E.T. than anything I'd ever seen. We got lost on the backstreets of Central City, and happened upon a gravel road that seemed to be heading south, over the mountains.
"Look, man: sign says Idaho Springs, 9 miles. What do ya think?"
"I don't know. It's dark, I'm tired, and I'm hungry. And we're lost. So why not?"
"I don't have a shovel if we get stuck."
"Well. Don't get stuck."
"Well. Well, well, well."
A drift would come in to view, and we would bust through it. Luckily they were small and shallow, more like speed bumps. Now and then, we'd see a dilapidated wooden building off the side of the road.
"Look at that."
"Do you suppose people live up here at this time of the year?"
"They must. Isn't that a school bus stop?"
No matter how many structures we saw, the emptiness and the darkness combined to make this place frightening, the sort of place where, if you were stranded, you'd probably have to think about eating one of the other passengers in the car.
We didn't talk about that, though. I figured that, in order to qualify as a cannibal, you had to be both stranded in the Andes Mountains, and a soccer player.
All thoughts of food left me as the road began its hairpin descent into the darkness below. Alternately, to one side was a gaping void, to the other a snow-dusted mountainside. The road remained gravel, with the added attraction of a washboard surface during some of the more exciting stretches. Most of the time, the steep grade was sufficient to carry us down, to the tune of the little engine whining in the alto pitch of second gear. It took us nearly an hour to get from Central City's suburb to the fringe of a sleeping Idaho Springs.
This had been one of those little side adventures in to the Unknown which, had anything gone wrong, could have been most significant. But nothing went wrong. We went to a small place called the Blair Motel, where the rooms were warm , inexpensive, and done up in 1970's motif. After a spartan dinner of chips, salsa and beer, we turned in, our gear spread out and drying all around us.
The next day, along with nearly a dozen other souls desperately seeking the last of the winter's ice, we breathlessly slogged up to the base of Lincoln Falls, and spent a wonderful day abusing our gear and ourselves.
Blue, fat and proud over Montgomery Reservoir... and the ice wasn't half-bad either.
