Rocky Mountain High

Our first stop in Colorado was Steamboat Springs staying and catching up with Mel & Jenny who Mary worked with on the Kern river in her rafting days back in the late 80's. After getting some locals advice we drove down to the Colorado river at Glenwood Springs where we enjoyed a couple of days kayaking on the Shoshone gorge and surfing on the local play wave. The drive down took us thru the very spectacular Glenwood canyon where the freeway winds its way in a feat of US can-do engineering down the vertical walled valley. Its probably the only place in the states where people can experiance being in a big red canyon without having to hike or raft in.

We did a couple of sessions at the Glenwood wave, part of a man made feature in the Colorado river, which has a very big flow during the spring run-off.

We saw pictures of the big wave working at the early summer flow but we had to be content with surfing the little summer remnant. We camped down by the river & were treated to a beaver swimming by one morning and a bat landed on a tree beside us in broad daylight.. We were joined for one day's kayaking by Mary's friend Jim also from her old rafting days. The whole family kayaked below the Shoshone gorge with Lotte joining us for a couple of runs down to our campsite while Jim did our shuttle.

We headed back to Steamboat for the long Labour weekend which signals the end of the summer school holidays, to spend with Mel & Jenny & their daughters Zoe & Emma. It was a

welcome break from camping to be based indoors, sharing meals & enjoying the c

ompany of another family. Mel is a ninja biker & took Mary, Max & I on an epic 50 km ride along the continental divide starting at 10,000 feet at Rabbit Ears pass to Buffalo pass & then home via a locals single track called Grouse Mountain on steep switchbacks thru aspen groves & fir forest and then down a fast public walking & biking trail called Spring Bar into town. It was a long 6 hour ride & Max was sustained by satchets of Goo, sort of astronauts energy food which Mel had. I broke my chain on the last section & coasted downhill & chainless all the way home.

The next day Mel took me out on a ride out from town up, up, up into the hills. We went way back on a trail called upper Bear, where we saw only one other group of riders. We were out for 5 hours & I was knackered about halfway thru. Mel downloaded his GPS data after the ride to show me I had endured 27 miles with a total climb of 4000 feet. I was given Goo by some hikers we met who worked for the goo company. I understood how Max felt the day before. Meanwhile Mary & the kids went luging & goat lassooing in town. Steamboat is a compact little town with mountain bike trails & 2 skifields on the edge of town, commuter bike trails in town, playwaves on the Yampa river in town and hot springs. Sounds good eh! On our last day we took all the kids including Zoe & Emma down Spring Bar trail. Otie & I biked out to the airport

to look at a small airshow and saw a Cessna ground loop (spun 180 degrees horizontally) in strong winds while landing. The planes weren't flying & there weren't many. We are so spoilt with the Wanaka airshow.

Then it was back on the road & we headed to the Rocky Mountain National Park for 3 days. Our highlights there included seeing, in the distance, a moose with massive antlers, seeing 2 coyotes sauntering across the road right by the van, driving over the high altitude road at 12000 feet and hiking there. The next day we trekked up to the top of Flattop mountain at 12100 feet. The kids are doing so well at walking up such big hills & the secret is to carry lots of water & yummy snacks & to have frequent stops. The kids all have their favourite snacks, Max's are sweet & salty bars, Lotte has cashew nuts & Otie loves beef jerky. Max felt sick at that altitude, so while he headed down with Lotte & Mary, Otie & I headed up and climbed to the top of nearby Halletts Peak which at 12700 feet was higher than the top of Mount Cook. We saw lots of pikas whose habitat was in a band of about 3000 feet and saw a flock of ptarmagins which were starting to turn white, their winter coat of feathers. This park was a little disappointing because the mountains were not craggy and many of the trees were dead from pine beetle infestation on the western side. The park felt out of balance with too many deer which eat the young trees and have destroyed the beaver habitat making them locally extinct. I reckon they need a couple of wolf packs to sort everything out. But I think we have been spoilt with the grandeur and wildlife of the other parks we had visited.

We headed out east to the cute little town of Lyon where we stayed for a couple of days with Scott Shipley, who is designing & overseeing the construction of the whitewater enhancement features on the Hawea river due to be constructed next February. Scott, his wife Hela & son Jack made us very welcome & treated us to a barbeque starring the biggest steaks we had ever seen, followed by a luxuriant soak in their hot tub. The next day Scott took time out of his busy schedule & drove me around the area looking at whitewater parks, with Max tagging along. So many towns in Colorado have revitalised their rivers flowing in & nearby, creating parks with kayak surfing waves, swimming holes, green & wooded areas. We had a close look at the Golden park which has a number of features built over the last 8 years. Scott told me many Colorado towns have zoned no development areas on their outskirts, land which has been bought by the community & local government and retained in its natural state for wildlife habitat & recreation & to limit urban sprawl. Back in Lyon, Scott has a playhole in the small river by his house & Max & I had an afternoon session on it even though the river was low.

Beside the hole was a slalom course and that evening the local slalom community of kids & adults were out practising. It reminded me of home. That evening Scott told me about the US slalom scene which sounds about twice the size of the sport in NZ and with very similar issues. One difference here is that there is no funding from the US government for sport. Scott is the US's most sucessful slalom athlete & is on the national kayaking board which oversees all canoe & kayak sport in the US. The fastest growing branch of the sport here is standup paddleboarding & we saw quite a few boardists out on the rivers.

Soon we were back on the road & drove south by Denver and onto the freeway back up into the Rockies and up into the Winter Park ski area for a mountain biking day up on the field. We bought lift passes and had a great time with Max leading the way down all the trails with Otie in hot pursuit. Mary had a mellower time with Lotte & got in runs with the boys at the end of the day when their wrists were aching and just wanted to rest. Another beautiful ski area & resort which must be stunning in winter. Luckily we had no mishaps, just great riding. We drove to Frisco & stayed with Jim from the old Kern days.

The next day we went to Breckenridge & caught up with Melissa, another old rafting buddy of Mary's. Breckenridge used to be a mining area with much damage caused by tailings & toxic runoff. The town has been very proactive to retain its historical atmosphere, covenanting adjoining land from development & carrying out a huge reclaimation project to re-instate the river flowing thru town with beaver, bird & fish habitat and whitewater. The river was previously buried under the mining tailings. Included in the reconstruction is a pool with a replica gold dredge, now a floating restaurant, near the middle of town. Melissa did a vehicle shuttle up a rail trail for us and Mary & I mountainbiked down a valley thru the forest back to her house where we stayed the night. Max was still feeling sick because of the altitude & Melissa & her husband Jerry found him a bottle of oxygen to suck on while we had dinner.

The next day we drove thru Summit County past many 14000 foot peaks, past Vail & Copper Mountain over into the Arkansas river valley where Max & I kayaked the Numbers section which was low, bony & tight. We camped by the takeout in the company of a very sociable old hobo sleeping in his rusty car who shared our fire. We met a couple of mature local kayakers doing an after work run down the river. I suggested there should be an over 40's website enabling older kayakers to make contact with each other. They were great guys & we had a beer together.

The next day we spent viewing the latest whitewater enhancements in Buena Vista & Salida. These were state of the art & what we will have on the Hawea. Unfortunately the river was low flowing at about 8 cumecs whereas the minmum flow on the Hawea will be 14. The waves at BV are beside a new village housing development being constructed by kayakers, which was very cool. Its only in the first stage but is designed so all the communal activities are in walking or biking distance, lots of green areas with climbing rocks dotted on the lawns. There is a brewery restaurant right beside the play waves.

We moved onto Salida & was shown around by Mike Harvey who works with Scott & is responsible for the waves in this area. Max , Otie and I went for a surf on the play waves but they were not working well at the low river flow. Salida is an older town which has not been discovered & spruced up, with downtown backing right onto the river & mountain biking trails across the river which Mary & I checked out at dusk following well designed & marked trails up into the hills. It was very much like being over the Shaky bridge in Alex. It was very enjoyable & we got back after dark. Salida is a great little town.

We had stopped in at the local Absolute bike shop for some maintainence earlier in the day & one of the staff told us all about the famed Monarch Crest trail which is nearby which she had taken her 8 year old nephew on so we organised for a family outing on it for the following day.
We linked up with the vehicle shuttle at the end of the trail and were drove up to Monarch pass & dropped off with a number of other bikers. We had a 900 foot climb over the first few miles up above the tree line so carefully managed Lotte up to the high point above 12000 feet and we had bought some goo along for her and the boys. We followed the continental divide trail & trans Colorado trail for about 12 miles.

The terrain wasn't hard although it was windy. The ride was not technical & Lotte handled it with ease. The colours were pretty with the alpine tundra leaves all turning autumn colours. We met guys with horses hunting elk with bows & black powder guns.

Their hunting season opens a couple of weeks before the normal hunting season. We opted to take an old rail trail back down from the tops which wound thru golden aspen groves, rather than the single track which we were told was undulating & technical. Then the last part was a long downhill on a sealed road to the van.

It was a long enjoyable day with about 50kms of riding. The kids did awesome.

We loaded up our bikes & drove for about 3 hours to the Black Canyon of the Gunniston National Park where we camped the night. We often aim to camp in the parks or national monuments (sort of mini-parks) which are administered by the national parks service. There are about 350 of these in the states. The US President can declare an area a national monument but to become a national park an act of Congress is needed, I think. Many of the parks started out as national monuments. These areas are run as environmental dictatorships where the flora, fauna, rivers and landscapes are completely protected and I love being in them. We feel safe in the campgrounds and there is no commercialism. Now that the schools are back, its only us and retired folk in these campgrounds and surprisingly few overseas tourists.

We did some walks in the park & went to a ranger talk on the geology of the canyon which is carved out of a single piece of gniess an old hard basement rock about 1.4 billion years old. We are starting to understand the the sedimentary formation and uplifting of the Colorado Plateau and its erosion over the last 10 million years. The ranger was a retired primary school teacher & a great guy who came back to park HQ & awarded Lotte & Otie their junior ranger badges after they completed a junior education program at the park. The ranger deputised me to award a night sky award once the kids completed a night sky program which I took away with me.

The kids have been doing junior ranger programs at most of the parks and monuments which have been usefull educational tools. The Gunny is a kayaking river but not frequently run & it looked steep 2000 feet below us. We saw some climbers on a big wall who just looked like specks.

Back on the road & south into the San Juan mountains stopping for the night in the very picturesque mountain town of Ouray with a fantastic chocolate & coffee shop. I went for an early morning bikeride on the perimeter trail around town as the sun came up. Oray is in a mountainous mining area with jeeps driving over the old mining trails and with the trees showing their autumn colours there were 4 wheel drive vehicles out in force.

We drove up a very pretty highway out of town over Red Mountain pass in its full glory of golden aspens thru to Silverton where we stopped to savour this old mining town with its dirt roads. We toyed with the idea of hiring a jeep for the day to drive up into the remote back country because it was so gorgeous but there were too many limitations of where you could drive so we flagged the idea & headed south to Durango. Down at the river I caught up with Cathy Hearn , the US junior slalom coach, who I had known in a long ago past life, who was coaching some local Colorado kids. We went out for dinner to a brewery restaurant for a fantastic dinner in a great atmosphere in an old warehouse. About 20 brews to choose from. Patrons are given bowls of peanuts in their shells and the shucked casings are thrown on the floor to be swept up later. We need one of these places in Alex!

And so we drove away from Durango & out of the Colorado Rockies after almost 3 weeks. We all loved the state & the boys are very much looking forward to return one day to ski. The locals are a physically active bunch here & there is very little obesity to be seen. There are many progressive towns with ski fields, urban whitewater play parks, organised & promoted mountain biking trails, bike commuter lanes, green protected areas on the urban fringe, farmers markets & micro breweries.

Crystals, Wisdom & Polygamy Porter - tales from the road

With the onset of cool mornings & as we are only equiped with light summer sleeping bags we

headed south for warmer weather. We travelled to Missoula to check out Brennans wave, an artificial wave on the Clark Fork river flowing thru the middle of town. This was the first of a number of whitewater enhancements I plan to view in the States as part of the build up to the construction of our waves on the Hawea next year. Unlike NZ with our constant rainfall & lakes to ensure a constant flow of water in our rivers, the western US relies on snow melt to fill the rivers & once that snow is gone by mid to late summer the rivers are at a low flow.

So local kayaking & rafting is seasonal & is in full swing in spring to mid summer & is generally all over by the end of July.

So the Missoula wave was small but good fun on a hot afternoon with a few of the locals.

After a good sluicing we headed to our 2 favourite stores, the first to stock up on books & the other to buy Montana steak, cheapest animal flesh in these parts, to barbeque for dinner.

As part of our routine , we camped, for the night, at a state forest park.

That night we shared the camping area with some economic refugees from Vermont looking for a simpler life in the west. This family were tent camping with a son, dog & a huge macaw parrot. Mmmmm, what is their reality?

We moved south thru the scenic Bitteroot Valley now on the Lewis & Clark historic trail with great interpretative panels on the way, giving our kids (and Mary & I) a great history lesson.

These guys were the first Europeans to cross the Rockies to the Pacific doing so in 1803 - 1804 with the aid of a very able Indian woman Sacachawea.

Among the zoological specimans they sent back to the civilized world was a grizzly bear skin , the grizzly being previously unknown to western science. We crossed over the Lost Trail & Chief Joseph passes into the Beaverhead national forest, stopping at the Big Hole National Monument, a poignantly preserved battlefield site where the US calvary attacked a large band of Nez Pearce indians who had refused to sign a treaty and who fought a number of battles before their war ended. Their leader Cheif Joseph became very well known & I've read posters in the past with his wise prophetic words on the environment.

In these remote Montana mountains we found Wisdom a small farming town in a state of semi-decline surrounded by big ranches. We wandered around town, talked to a cowboy and sent some postcards from the post office manned by a thalidomide clerk. We drove away leaving Wisdom behind. The countryside was not unlike Central Otago and the ranchers were very busy bailing hay. We headed to the Pioneer mountains to Crystal Park to camp and fossick for semi-precious stones, a place our old hobo mate Larry had told us about.

While Mary & the kids scratched around & I talked to an old professor who had just returned from Christchurch working with landcare and a Japanese butterfly project.

With some stones in our possession we headed south into Idaho & onto Utah eventually arriving in Salt Lake City. We randomly picked a freeway offramp, found a laundromat for a long over due cleanup and then a garage to service the van. We phoned our friend Kathy, who was on the Salmon with us & discovered that her place was 2 blocks from the laundry. We had a great time with Kathy for a couple of days, the highlight being attending her debut as bass guitairist in a rock band, Light Vizon, totally enjoying the concert & yaahooing in the front row. No crowd surfing though. Are all band girls called Kathy?

We went to the Saturday morning farmers market, pigging out on the free samples of salsa, jerky, goats cheese, breads, oils, noodles, peaches etc, etc. We listened to a pianist with his bicycle trailered piano and watched incedible hula hoop dancing.

Then we went to the temple and did some Mormonism, including watching another gig, a live radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle choir, who did a couple of fantastic numbers. The film on Joseph Smith was however sugary propaganda and completly non-juicy. We managed to evade the missionaries who were everywhere & ready to pounce on the vulnerable. Meanwhile on the subject of beer, there are many microbreweries in the states we have visited, and one, in Utah makes a brew called Polagamy Porter & their slogan is "Why have only one?" I haven't sampled this one yet, but plan to.

In the afternoon we headed east towards Colorado driving thru dusk into the night & moving closer to a lightening storm which just got bigger & bigger untill we were right on the edge of it with powerfull bolts of lightening from the sky to the ground and going horizontally right across the windscreen, and right above us turning the clouds blue all around us. We turned around and fled back for cover under a petrol station canopy in the last town we had passed thru. The kids were asleep & missed it all. We eventually got going again driving to the Dinosaur National Monument where we drove into another lightening storm as big as the previous one, just before our campsite.

The lightening lit up the whole area and we were relieved to finally park under some trees while the storm raged around us.

This park was fascinating and has a large wall in the visitors center currently being renovated of hundreds of dinosaur bones which had accumulated in a river eddy 65 million years ago. We were not allowed onto the building site & had to be contented with some sauropod bones in the cliff walls, which were very impressive. We chatted to the ranger, a kayaker, who told us about the kayaking in the park.

We were very interested & tried very hard to follow the rules & get a permit, but the office was 30 kms away & no one would answer the phone. So we were forced to do a rebel run.

On the way to the put in we visited some wonderfull indian pictographs. Max, Otie & I did the 14 km run on the Green river, the whitewater was easy and the canyon scenery was spectacular. We snuck out of the park & headed into the night towards Colorado.

Home of the Grizzly

Our northern wanderings took us to Bozeman Montana where we enjoyed Friday evening in the historical downtown area where the retailers and local artists collaberated with artworks displayed in the stores and, best of all, complimentary beverage & nibbles.

Saw some awesome objects de art, bought nothing, lingered long, ate & drank local fare.We travelled the next day thru vast Montana vistas, took a couple of back roads and saw the crosssection of this state, beef ranching, forested mountain ranges & closed mines.

Montana has an ongoing issue with toxic waste from closed mines and part of the tax on fuel is allocated for the ongoing costs of cleaning up this pollution which has become the responsibility of the state.

We checked out an art studio of an amazing 92 year old man who started painting at 80. We met him & he told us he aimed to offend everyone with his extreme anti-materialism & environmental philosophy. Then thru a ghost town called Garnett up a rough isolated road.

We arrived at Glacier National Park the next day & based ourselves at the Apgar campground for the next 3 days while we tried to get a scarce backcountry 4 day hiking permit.

The park is bisected by a very spectacular drive with the grand name of "The going to the sun road". The park runs free shuttles buses over the road dropping visitors at the various hiking trails. We did a long 12 mile hike from the highest point of the road, Logan pass, which took us along the continental divide on a great trail, which in parts were hewn out of the cliff faces. We saw big horned sheep, the white mountain goats which are the parks symbol, Columbian ground sqirrels and a ptarmigan.

Mary & I did a side hike up up to the ridge for a view of Grinnell glacier

the largest glacier in the park. Well, those of us who have visited the Tasman, Fox & Franz Joseph glaciers were impressed with the mountain views but were under-awed by Grinnell, a large snowbank destined to be water vapour by 2020.

The continental divide is where the water flows east or west.

There is Triple Divide peak in the park, where streams from 3 sides either flow into Hudson Bay, the Pacific via the Columbia river or the Atlantic via the Missouri, Mississippi & the Gulf of Mexico.

There was constant reminders to be wary of bears in the campground & out hiking. We had borrowed a book on grizzly attacks which Mary has been reading to the kids at bedtime. We now own a can of bear spray which is never far from our side. The idea is that when a 250 kilo, 3 meter tall grizzly is charging & about to kill you, you squirt this flyspray sized aerosol in its face. Yeah right!

We enjoyed talks in the evening at the campground, one about local Indian legends and the other about wolves. The Indians revered the wolf but to the settlers they were vermin and 100,000 were shot untill they were locally extinct in the 1930's. It is now understood that the ecosystem then went out of balance with an exploding deer population which stripped vegetation causing a collapse in the beaver & racoon populations.

The removal of wolves allowed coyote numbers to increase which predated pronghorn antelope young almost wiping out that species. It all just goes to show how delicate the environment is. The good news is that wolves have moved back into Glacier from Canada.

The ranchers & rednecks of these northern states are very anti-wolf & their slogan, which we saw on big pickup trucks was a wolf picture with a red cross thru it with the words "Smoke a pack a day".

Getting a hiking permit is a complicated process & after going to the permit office twice at 6-30 in the morning to get first in line, we got a 4 day permit to go up Belly river over Stony Indian pass and down the Waterton valley into Canada. The positive effect of the permit system in that there are not many hikers in the back country.

Interestingly Glacier has 2 million visitors a year, mostly in the short summer season during July & August. Only 2% go hiking, with only 1% staying 2 or more days in the park. The average visitor drives across the park staying 4 hours. A a result the road & visitors centers are very crowded whereas the back country is empty.

We headed to the east side of the park with Mary & the kids biking down from the road summit thru gorgeous scenery.

The next morning we headed up the Belly river trail. We talked to a group of hikers and a mule train coming out who were led by a ranger who checked our permit. One of the group had tramped in NZ. I told them I was reallly impressed by how well the park was managed & one commented that I should put that in a letter to the park superintendent, at which comment the group all laughed.

The guy confessed he was the superintendent, so we had a chat about ranger exchanges with DOC in NZ and also administrative & scientific aid to national parks in Africa.

The super warned of bears ahead as they had been watching a group that morning.

We had a long 10 mile day ahead of us and as the scenery got better so did the proliferation of bear crap on the trail. We stuck together and made plenty of noise with our bear spray at the ready. The danger is surprising a bear or getting between a bear sow & her cubs. Luckily none were seen & we got to our campside tired & hungry at 7.

Enjoyed a pleasant evening in the campsite with a band of 4 brothers from Wisconsin. The campsites have stipulated food preparation & storages areas well away from tentsites, so it is very social hanging out with other hikers. The campsites only have 3 or 4 tent sites with a usual maximum of 4 hikers per site. They let us have 5 in our party.

Next day was a short hike to very picturesque Mokowanis lake where we arrived early and swam. The next day our wildlife highlight was seeing a pine marten. It was our big day climbing 2200 feet up Stony Indian pass over the continental divide up thru flowery meadows and passed numerous waterfalls. We started off in light rain but when we got up high it cleared up into a bueatifull day.

We had a big feast of huckleberries which turned out not to be so, but we didn't get ill. Then down the other side to camp by another small pretty lake. Our cooker had broken & we were able to borrow one to boil water for our dried food.

An early night with our nightly scum card tournament with lots of laughing & crying from the kids as they won & lost during the evening. I cant imagine what the other campers thought of the noise we made.

We had deer all round our tent the next morning. We packed up & made our way down hill in light rain which continued on & off during the day as we made our way 7.5 miles to Goat Haunt and Waterton lake. On this trail we surprised a moose which ran off down the trail leaving hoof prints for us to follow for quite a distance.

Otie also found a yellow & black salamander, an amphibian in serious decline in the northern part of the park.

We caught the Canadian ferry (a vintage boat from 1927) at the south end of the lake and took a 1 hour voyage into Canada. At Waterton town the captain phoned Canadian immigration to advise on the hikers coming in from the States. He handed me the phone & I was advised that only US & Canadians were allowed over the border at Goat Haunt and I needed immediately to get to the road crossing about 25 kms away so I could be processed as coming into Cananda to allow me to leave back to the States. I explained I was already in the system having been in Canada in July and that we had no vehicle & was advised I could check in the next morning as we were going to get a shuttle out the next day.

Our van was parked at that border crossing where the hiking trail had started. 2 other hikers off the boat were listening and offered to take Mary back into the US where they were headed, to get the van, return & pick us up.

Mary did the trip returning with the van & we camped the night in Canada. That evening we drove up to Cameron Lake and were treated to seeing 2 black bears crossing the road. The first ran across just as I sarcasticly said we will only see a bear if one crossed the road. It was fantastic.

The next day we looked at the grand Prince of Wales lodge with a magnificent setting at the head of Waterton Lake. The old grang lodges around Glacier were built in the 1920's by the Great Northern Railway who diversified into tourism to grow their rail business.

We drove back to the border & again were treated to a grizzly cub running across the road. It was so good to view bears from the van.

No worries at the border. A last stop at the park St Mary's visitors center for Lotte to hand in her completed park booklet & get sworn in as a junior ranger.

The center had lots of very good stuff on the 3 local Indian peoples who lived in the area foe 10,000 years. The Blackfeet have an oral story telling tradition which went back to the last ice age. The Indians told their legends and stories including the signing of a treaty in 1855 ceeding territory to the government & their struggle ever since because the area taken was not what was explained to them prior to signing. Sound familiar!

Another tribe, the Salish, had a history of assisting the Lewis & Clark expetition and living in peacefull cooperation with early European settlers. They signed no treaty but were swept up into a reservation with the other local tribes. In this part of Montana the place names were in English and their Salish names with its very complicated linguistics.

The nights were getting colder so we are back on the road heading south for warmer climes.