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 water. 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 tumble down the mountainside and make a doormat of me. Rock slides were evidently common. The valley floor was a graveyard of boulders. I prayed that I would not meet another vehicle coming down the hill and have to reverse all the way to the valley floor. But I needn't have worried because of course not a single other person in the whole of North America was 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 sliding over the void. I wasn't used to dealing with landscapes that can kill you. Cautiously I pressed on.
High up in the mountains I crossed a wooden bridge of laughable ricketyness over a deep chasm. It was the sort of bridge on which, in the movies, a slat always breaks, causing the heroine to plunge through up to her armpits with her pert legs wiggling helplessly above the chasm, until the hero dashes back to save her, spears falling all around them. When I was twelve years old, I could never understand why the hero, operating from this position of superiority, didn't say to the lady, 'OK, I'll save your life, but later you have to let me see you naked. Agreed?'
Beyond the bridge wet snow began to fly about. It mixed with the hundreds of insects that had been flinging themselves into the windshield since Nebraska (what a senseless waste of life!) and turned it into a brown sludge. I attacked it with window washer solution, but this just converted it from a brown sludge to a creamy sludge and I still couldn't see. I stopped and jumped out to wipe at the window with my sleeve, certain that at any moment a bobcat, seeing the chance of a lifetime, would drop onto my shoulders and rip off my scalp with a sound like two strips of Velcro being parted. I imagined myself, scalpless, stumbling whimpering down the mountainside with the bobcat nipping at my heels. This formed such a vivid image in my mind that I jumped back into the car, even though I had only created a small rectangle of visibility about the size of an envelope. It was like looking out of a tank turret.
The car wouldn't start. Of course. Drily I said, 'Oh, thank you, God.' Up here in the thin air, the Chevette just gasped and wheezed and quickly became flooded. While I waited for the flooding to subside, I looked at the map and was dismayed to discover that I still had twenty miles to go. I had done only eight miles so far and I had been at it for well over an hour. The possibility that the Chevette might not make it to Victor and Cripple Creek took root in my skull. For the first time it occurred to me that perhaps no one ever came along this road. If I died out here, I reflected bleakly, it could be years before anyone found me or the Chevette, which would obviously be a tragedy.
Apart from anything else the battery was still under warranty.
But of course I didn't die out there. In fact, to tell you the truth, I don't intend ever to die. The car started up and I crept up over the last of the high passes and thence into Victor with out further incident. Victor was a wonderful sight, a town of Western-style buildings perched incongruously in a high green valley of the most incredible beauty. Once it and Cripple Creek, six miles down the road, were boom towns to beat all boom towns. At their peak, in 1g08, they had 500 gold mines between thern and a population of 100,000. Miners were paid in gold. In z5 years or so the mines produced $8o0 million worth of gold and made a lot of people rich. Jack Dempsey lived in Victor and started his career there.
Today only a couple of working mines are left and the population is barely a thousand. Victor had the air of a ghost town, though at least the streets were paved. Chipmunks darted among the buildings and grass was growing through cracks in the sidewalk. The town was full of antique stores and craft shops, but almost all of them were closed, evidently waiting for the summer season. Quite a few were empty and one, the Amber Inn, had been seized for nonpayment of taxes. A big sign in the window said so. But the post office was open and one cafe, which was full of old men in bib overalls and younger men with beards and ponytails. All the men wore baseball caps, though here they advertised brands of beer-Coors, Bud Lite, Olympia-rather than brands of fertilizers.
I decided to drive on to Cripple Creek for lunch, and then wished I hadn't. Cripple Creek stands in the shadows of Mount Pisgah and Pikes Peak and was far more touristy than Victor. Most of the stores were open, though they weren't doing much business. I parked on the main street in front of the Sarsaparilla Saloon and had a look around. Architecturally, Cripple Creek was much the same as Victor, but here the businesses were almost all geared to tourists: gift shops, snack bars, ice cream parlors, a place where children could pan for gold in an artificial creek, a miniature golf course. It was pretty awful, and made worse by the bleakening weather. Flurries of snow were still swirling about. It was cold and the air was thin. Cripple Creek is nearly two miles up. At that altitude, if you're not used to it, you feel uncomfortably breathless a lot of the time and vaguely unwell all of the time. Certainly the last thing I wanted was an ice cream or a game of miniature golf, so I returned to the car and pressed on.
At the junction of US 24, I turned left and headed west. Here the weather was superb. The sun shone, the sky was blue. Out of the west, a flotilla of clouds sailed in, fluffy and benign, skimming the peaks. The highway was of pink asphalt; it was like driving along a strip of bubblegum. The road led up and over the Wilkerson Pass and then down into a long valley of rolling meadows with glittering streams and log cabins set against a backdrop of muscular mountains. It looked like a scene out of a deodorant commercial. It was glorious, and I had it almost all to myself. Near Buena Vista the land dramatically dropped away to reveal a plain and beyond it the majestic Collegiate Peaks, the highest range in the United States, with 16 peaks over 14,000 feet along a stretch of 30
miles. I fell with the highway down the mountainside and crossed the plain towards the Collegiate range, tall and blue and snow-peaked. It was like driving into the opening credits of a Paramount movie.
I had intended to make for Aspen, but at the turning at Twin Lakes I found a white barrier barring the way and a sign saying that the highway to Aspen over Independence Pass was closed because of snow. Aspen was just 20 miles away down the closed road, but to reach it by the alternative northern route would have required a detour of 150 miles. Disappointed, I looked for someplace else to go for the night and drove on to Leadville, a place about which I knew nothing and indeed had never even heard of.
Leadville was outstanding. The outskirts of the town were ragged and shabby-there's a surprising amount of poverty in Colorado-but the main street was broad and lined with sturdy Victorian buildings, many of them with turrets and towers. Leadville was another gold-and-silver-mining town; it was here that the Unsinkable Molly Brown got her start, as did Meyer Guggenheim. Like Cripple Creek and Victor, it now catered to touristsevery place in the Rockies caters to tourists-but it had a much more genuine feel to it. Its population was 4,000, enough to give it an independent life apart from what the tourists brought it.
