Cold Blue Mesa

Oscar in my rain-jacket.

Elk Creek Campground at Blue Mesa. It felt about as cold as it looks

Hawk (or Falcon? I'm a little hazy on my birds of prey) outside of Gunnison.

April 29, 2011

I wake up and look over at Joshua. His sleeping bag is cinched so tightly, I can't see skin. I nudge him and ask him if he was cold during the night. He mumbles in the affirmative.

Seeing that we're awake, Oscar hops up onto our cots and snuggles in between us, shivering. We press our cold noses against one another.

We break camp, and less than an hour later, we're back on the road. Before us, the road follows the Arkansas River, and above us, the sky is encoded with various predictions. Rain, snow, clouds that touch the earth and obscure the horizon. Even blue sky.

In Poncha Springs, we take 50 headed West. The road climbs steadily over Monarch Pass, and at the top, the peaks are covered in a powdery blanket of snow. Chairlifts that have retired for the season sway lonesome in the wind.

On the other side of the pass, the western slope unfolds. Colorado may be famous for its Rocky Spine, but it has a grand set of ribs: the West Elk Mountains, Sawatch Range, and San Juan Mountains are visible from this place, high on the Continental Divide. From here, all rivers flow West.

In Gunnison, we turn North on 135 and then West on Ohio Creek Road. At Mill Creek, we take to the dirt road, and at the trail head, we picnic in the car, dipping hard boiled eggs in mustard and red hot chili powder.

Strapping on our snowshoes, we climb into the West Elk Wilderness on the Mill-Castle Trail. High in the mountains, we see spires of rock reaching upward. Snowflakes drift down lazily. The sky is grey.

We snowshoe for hours. The snow is deep, and the trees afford us shelter from the wind. There is no one here. High in the mountains, abandoned log cabins sit stranded in deep snow. There are no traversable roads to get here. We wonder who owns them and when they stay there. Are these summer homes? Imagine owning a four-story log cabin summer home!

Up the trail, we stumble upon a piece of Rubbermaid Tupperware stuffed in the stump of a tree. We pull it out and discover a Geo-cache. People have left small, inconsequential things: a bandanna, an empty bottle of sunscreen, coins, a whistle. We flip through the journal, write down a few words, and leave Joshua's Ellsworth library card. We take a skeleton doubloon.

It starts to snow harder, and we turn around. It's all down hill on the way back, and Oscar races on ahead, jumping and pirouetting in the snow.

Back at the car, we again peel off our sopping socks. As we're driving back down the road, we spy an enormous hawk, perched on a fence post. We drive up close, and it stays still and allows us to take a photo.

We drive back through Gunnison, and snow turns to rain. We continue West of 50, headed toward the Blue Mesa Reservoir, Colorado's largest body of water. As we leave the snowy peaks behind us, the land from side to side is clothed in Sage. Up on the hills, Pinyon and Juniper twist their gnarled, stubborn limbs against the wind. We've read that juniper can cut off supply to a limb, should it need to. The limb will fall off and die, giving the tree the extra reserves it needs to live on.

At Elk Creek Campground, we turn toward the water. It starts to rain harder.

Sitting above the water, completely exposed to wind and rain, we decide to sit in the car for a while and let the weather change its mind. I pull out my book, and by the last page, it's stopped raining. We set up camp, and Joshua stakes everything in with the back of his hatchet. He assures me that we're not going to blow away. I look at the ominous sky and our lack of windbreak and nod my head, noncommittally.

Once our tent is staked to the ground, we walk through the sage to the rocky beach. We're wearing our down jackets, and our hands are shoved in the pockets, our collars up near our ears. Blue Mesa is a fitting name. With all the flat-topped hills around, the reservoir looks like another inverted, blue table.

For dinner, we heat up a can of re-fried beans and eat them with the corn bread Joshua made before we left. There's no running water nearby and the thought of touching the reservoir's freezing water makes us shudder. Oscar obligingly cleans our dishes.

As the sun begins to set, we pack into the tent. I dress Oscar in my rain jacket so he won't be cold, and we laugh at his fumbling tries to walk. In the end though, he curls up and falls asleep. We stick our hands down the collar of the jacket, and inside, his fur is warm.

We play a couple more games of boggle, and afterward, I start my next book, Plainsong. But just as the last 100 pages of a good book hold me captive, the first hundred are less enticing. I fall asleep with the book tented upon my chest.