ROAD TRIPPING

I really can’t imagine my life without long Road Trips in the American West. In the late 1970s I moved from Missouri to Colorado and fell in love with the West and its sweeping vistas, towering mountains and sparkling creeks and rivers. My then husband and I took a mountaineering class, started buying all the gear and began backpacking, snowshoeing and skiing around that beautiful state.

 

We moved to Tucson Arizona in the early 1980s and learned about the Sonoran Desert and its ‘Sky Island’ mountains. From there, we moved to New Zealand for a short time where my ex fell in love with all things Kiwi. In each place, we packed our vehicle and took long Road Trips, learning to appreciate the scenery and the people of the place. But I yearned to be back in the States closer to my family. Eventually I would bring our 5-year-old son back with me to the desert by myself. I continued the Road Trips, schlepping my son all over the Western US. Since then the only Western state my son Dan and I have not visited is North Dakota and it’s on the List.

 

Dan and I developed a deep understanding and appreciation for each other on those long Road Trips. The rules were simple: 1) rotate ‘primitive’ camping in National Forest or BLM lands, camping in campgrounds with ‘facilities’ and staying in inexpensive motels with hot showers and clean sheets; 2) never take the same road twice if you could help it; and 3) take no electronic entertainment devices except one tape or CD player.

 

My son and I learned to be a team on our Road Trips. We would share camping chores. We would take turns with the music selection and we would often mutually agree on a book on tape which we would listen to over miles and miles of open road. We would bicker about the merits of the book and its characters; we would argue about which band played the best cover of any Dylan original. On one Road Trip, we spent our time learning more about the Bible by listening to all of Ken Davis’s Don’t Know Much About the Bible, discussing which parts had meaning to us and why. My son told me if he were a juvenile judge he would insist that every family with wayward teens take a Road Trip without electronics because they would be forced to talk and cooperate as a family or be miserable. Fair enough.

 

Besides helping to build a relationship with my son that will last the rest of my life, Road Trips also gave both of us an appreciation for the quality and variety of landscape in the American West. We would spread our maps and Atlases out on the roadside tables searching for a new way to get from A to Z, giving any road that was NOT an Interstate a higher priority. We both still love driving through the tiny bergs and villages that make up the rural population centers of the West. You can park your truck in the local park and walk around looking for grub and never worry about a stranger messing with your things.

 

And then there are the views – the endless variety of colors and shapes. The first time I drove through Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument I was a danger to myself (since I had the road just about all to myself) because I could NOT keep my eyes on the road. Around every corner I spied the most beautiful scenery I ever saw – until the next corner. The thing about these views - even though I’ve been through Grand Staircase many times now, the awe the scenery invokes is new every time.  Mother Nature keeps changing the canvas so that each time has the probability of being a totally new experience.

 

I have been reminded of my love for Road Trips as I have made my way back to Tucson from my summer season in Yellowstone National Park. My friends have named it my ‘re-entry’, worried that I will find it difficult to be back in the city after spending five months living in expansive vistas and with entertaining wildlife. I have employed Road Trips before as a way to cushion big changes in my life. When I dropped Dan off for his first year of college at University of Montana, I took a 10-day circuitous route back to get over my sadness at being an ‘empty-nester’, wanting some time and distance before coming back to open the door of my now-empty house.

 

I really started my journey about a week ago as I drove out of Missoula following the sparking Clark Fork River along I-90 headed for Salt Lake. Montana is incredibly beautiful. Whether it is soaring snow-capped mountains or rolling grassy hills, the trip down I-90 then I-15 forces you to count your blessings. Maybe it is possible to stay grumpy in scenery like that but not for me.

 

After a few hours, I realized I really didn’t need to be in Salt Lake that night which opened the door to getting off the Interstate and onto a byway – much more desirable for a Road Tripper like me. So after sailing by the handsome gently undulating and productive farmland of Idaho, I turned off on US 91, hugging the Bear River Range all the way into Utah which is quite possibly the crème de la crème of Western river canyon country.

 

It is also the site of one of this country’s largest massacres of Native Americans in our history.  Standing atop a lofty and windy bluff overlooking the beautiful Bear River just north of the Idaho-Utah border at an educational memorial to the many Shoshone families killed in the valley below, I could understand why the Shoshone were angry at the loss of the land and the water of this verdant valley. Land and water – two of the West’s most common reasons for battle and integral to the history of the West. I was pleased that as a nation we are recognizing that not everything we have done in the past was honorable and that sometimes the victims are the ones that deserve the Memorial.

 

I grew weary near Ogden where I chose to spend the night. Ogden, the home of Utah’s Weber State University, hosted ski events in the 2002 Olympics and has become a western skiing hub with three downhill ski resorts in the nearby Wasatch Mountains. And if you are a railroad buff, you’ll be able to visit the train museum in Ogden’s historic Italian Renaissance Union Station and see the exact place where the western and eastern railroad expansions finally met up to provide transcontinental service to the US at Promontory Point.

 

I stayed at the historic Ben Lomond Hotel, an upscale ‘suite’ motel with soft beds, great amenities and friendly staff. I don’t normally allow myself the luxury of an upscale hotel on my Road Trips but I’m glad I did. The grand style of the Ben Lomond with its beautiful and soaring lobby, sumptuous ballrooms and many photos of early Ogden felt a little like staying in an unexpectedly comfortable museum.  I loved my stay at the Ben Lomond and I loved Ogden with its quaint historic blocks (25^th Avenue), public sculptures and beautiful mountain backdrop.

 

Not a bad day for a Road Trip. Road Trips start each day with the knowledge that the day is bound to be special – special because you are taking your time to get to know the area through which you are traveling, perhaps meeting some interesting people, learning about why this country is so great. You find out that people all over value the same things.  So while the scenery around you changes like an Imax production, the central core of what makes us great stays the same – productivity, generosity to strangers, a sense of place and history, a longing and reverence for ‘home’. A great reminder why I take Road Trips when making big changes in my life. It’s a comfort to know that there are some things that are timeless.