I love road trips. I really love what a person can do when there is freedom to stop and look around, to sleep in the wild, to stand physically very still and notice a million little things. So a road trip is really just a kind of spiritual training for the rest of the year when the craziness of life often makes me forget. When you can take time to see something up close, to touch it, to smell it, to feel it, to roll around it, or to notice it enough to leave it alone, to look and notice what you might step on if your feet are not careful, that is when you have taken enough time. Before that, you have usually (not always) wasted any time you have experiencing something. Or you miss the experience altogether.
This morning we woke to fresh air, the sounds of joyfully clicking beetles in the grasses beside the brook at our campsite, and the bright sun just appearing over the tops of the canyon walls. Popi and the 3 big kids woke earlier than the little Dragon, and I could hear their voices echoing through the air as they scaled the cliffs, and I knew they would go all the way to the top of the rock face towering above our campsite.
Castles towered above our campsite.
The Castle Rock area is an alpine desert where junipers, cactus, pine, river reeds, bears, and snakes all live quite happily together. After I packed up camp, I strapped the little Dragon to my back and we set off on a hike together. When you come from a particular place, and have grown up there, lived close to the earth, away from houses, feasted on native plants, know the way the ground feels to your feet, you have a deep knowledge by acquaintance with the smallest details in your surroundings. When you go to a new place, you do not know anything around you. It is all new, you know it for the first time, but you do not know it well. When you are in an airplane, or when you lodge in hotels away from nature, the texture of the land is lost. The traveler passes by without knowing where he is. After all, from an airplane, one cannot possibly know the wonder of the environment one is traversing. And when one travels from hotel to hotel, the main texture one experiences is painted walls and carpet. There is not much variation in smells, sights, sounds, any sensations. But when a traveler momentarily submits to the goodness of nature, and it has been declared good by the Creator, there is a brand new understanding of the complex variations in the earth, even from one mountain to the next. The Creator implied, *Here, have this good place, take care of it, name it, know it, tend to it. It is Mine, care for it as a good person would.* A road trip, and specifically a camping road trip, is one of the best ways a person can grow to love this good gift of the earth. Not the only way, just one of the best ways. I believe walking the earth would be the best, but then one might neglect all the other good things we have been given to do, like enjoying relationships with others, feeding the hungry, visiting the sick. A road trip is a fine compromise.
There are so many pathways in the wilderness, some made by people, some made by God, all lead somewhere important.
So today I photographed the tiny textures of this place we slept in. We soaked in the smells, the sounds, the tactile sensations, even the taste of the mountain water from the wells at the campground. But I can share what it was like to get on my hands and knees with Mr. Dragon on my back and see the visual complexities of this place.
Peterson*s is famous everywhere!!! Someone put a sticker on the campground dumpster!
Rearing to GO!
There are so many colors here.
Yellow, spiky, soft, reaching, relaxing flowers.
Pink, holding dew drops not yet touched by morning sun.
Orange and red, tall and round, rugged and fancy.
Soft green, but some soft and fragile, some rough and waxy, some tall, layered, reaching, others, slowly building upward, some painful and awakening, others calm and healing, all patterned and perfectly spaced.
Greens giving birth to new life and reaching their arms to the sky.
Some things rebel against and actively resist the pathway, springing up despite violence meant to destroy them. We lay next to these little shoots for quite some time and listened to them quietly grow.
Some creature plants rest gratefully on others, or suck up death and decay to make things beautiful again. Especially notice these amazing lacy, yellow stars. They look large in this picture, but they are about 1/8 of an inch across. I thought maybe eyelashes were the only way to appropriately touch them, and left them alone in the end.
Plants gracefully making way for and nourishing the new, posing as art all the while.
These hairy berries were so inviting. We didn*t touch them, as I was unsure whether our hands would destroy their growth, but looking close showed a coexistence of fragile tendrils against a smooth, protective skin.
Chaos of the scattered pine cones on the forest floor, and the order of a fibonacci pattern when you lay on the ground to see it up close.
Tiny creatures whose perspective is always different than ours.
One cactus in 4 different phases of life simultaneously. The lacy interior of the flower guarded by a green sentinel surrounded by the spikes of war was quite inspiring. I still wanted to eat them, but I left them alone!
So many interesting people have passed this way. Some are more interesting than others!
We finally converged from our various wilderness adventures and I was told that Bunny Boo had hit her head but kept climbing, the Little Magpie scraped her tummy while army crawling up a rock chimney, and the Lion and made it to the top first and yelled down the loudest. Mr. Dragon yelled at them all and chattered with a sparkle in his eye, and I know he was telling them about our adventures.
My Bunny Boo loves living things as much as I do.
We are those people who pull into a campsite at 10:00 pm, without cash, and casually decide to mail a check for the cost of the overnight stay when our vacation is over. I guess we have camped enough to know that it is not a very big deal. The camp host needs enough money to keep his campground spotless, and he could not care less whether he gets his cash now or later, as long as he gets it. So Brandon schmoozed the camp host and was told that we could pay with credit card at the little museum up the road. We cannot resist a cute little museum or Indian relics, so, of course, we went.
These pictures show a map of the hunting grounds in the surrounding mountains (lower left), the Fremont Indian creation story in which God carried people across the ocean to this land (bottom right), and stories of hunting. The older carvings are redder from oxidation, the lighter carvings a few hundred years old at the most.
And this museum was adorable. It commemorated the Fremont Indians who lived there long ago, and these Indians liked to carve pictures in the surrounding rock faces.
Uh, stay on the trail. Hello? Stay on the trail? Whose kids are those, anyway???
There was a tiny little walk through the canyon inlet, gratifying in the many carvings apparent from the walkway, a neat laminated guide page telling us what we were looking at, and a grand finale of a tepee to play in. This museum was all about kids.
Fun things to play with both inside and outside. I think my kids missed their calling as Native American kids.
We were on our way to Fort Collins, Colorado, and needed to leave sooner than the kids liked. We lured them to the car with the promise of many tunnels through the mountains, and the road did not disappoint. We stopped for lunch at an enormous sand stone formation with caves and cliffs and everything our little creatures love to explore.
Look closely. Notice the little native animals scaling the cliff!
Across the road from our lunch spot.
Interstate 70 might be my favorite road through the Rockies because it is right on top of the Colorado and Eagle Rivers. Train tracks perch on the cliff across the river, so you are following rivers, rails, and roads from buttes and torn, red gullies to these perky, green snowy mountains, in Colorado and across the Great Divide. In a matter of hours, the entire world is different. 
We finally made it to Fort Collins and to the hospitality of our friends. The kids promptly fell asleep, and we sat up, enjoying a bit of sleepy discussion with people we would prefer to see far more often, people who do not bat an eye when we ask to stay over and add 6 more people to their 5, and who do not mind us keeping them up for excited kindred chatter.
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