A High-Country Wandering Detour

In the weeks leading up to this grand adventure, no rain had been in the forecast.  In fact, the area had been enduring drought conditions for quite some time.  The very week before all indications were that the drought for this area would continue throughout our stay.  That all changed a few days before our departure, with chances of rain increasing exponentially with every passing day.  It arrived today, with a vengeance.  It was not pouring but it was persistent, and plans for hiking the trail up to Brown's Creek Falls were foiled.  Driving over to the trailhead, we thought we could stare it down but the longer we stayed, the more insistent the rain.

A hike into higher elevations under a persistent, though not particularly heavy rain, is probably not a great idea, as prepared as we were.  We had emergency rain gear but not anything that would ensure that being soaked for four or five hours was a pleasant experience.  We abandoned the effort in favor of a hot cup of coffee in Buena Vista and rallied alternative plans.

Coffee seemed to make everything right again and after reviewing weather maps and finding that the edge of the rain lay only an hour or so north, we decided to go wandering about seeking distraction in our usual way in that direction.  We diverged from the highway in order to pass through the Midland Tunnels first, and decided to just continue on that dirt road back to the highway.  That led us to some beautiful scenery and the historic Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad span across the Arkansas River.  It offered some protection from the constantly dripping environment.

We wandered north along US-24, pausing for this and that curiosity along the way.  The rain slacked off significantly and mostly paused about the time we saw the sign for Independence Pass, so we decided to pursue that obstacle.  It was not until we began to head west into the Twin Lakes area that the rain finally began to completely subside.  Our new favorite radio station out of Salida assured us that any break from rain and/or snow was only temporary for the afternoon.  Snow would be a fact later in the day for those sustaining 3 km or more in altitude.

The mission to discover the sun proved successful in the town of Twin Lakes, while wandering about the braided stream delta area near the visitor center.  It evaporated as quickly as it appeared too, leaving us wondering if the rain had caught up to us again.

It did not, though we could tell that it continued to torment all points south of our existence.  Pushing on, we soon found ourselves standing on the Top of the Rockies, 3,686 meters above sea level at Independence Pass.  This elevation remains an unparalleled experience for me.  Everything seems crisper and clearer at these heights, or maybe it is just the natural high brought on by the general lack of oxygen.

My comrade took the wheelhouse for the ride back down to the Twin Lakes area.  I thought somehow it would be less of a white-knuckle journey than the trip up the hill.  However, I neglected to take into account that I would find myself on the same side of the road staring down into that same abyss.  Pausing at Willis Gulch to collect ourselves, or rather myself, the area offered up a beautiful assortment of colors not just in the trees but through the water too.

Eventually, we made our way back to Buena Vista to play a little game of "Cat and Mouse" with our meal plans for the evening.  We had it all worked out to go one place, then saw another place that looked interesting, but we went with the original plan, which turned up closed.  Heading back to the distraction known as Sorelle Delicatessen, we were greeted enthusiastically by staff five minutes from closing.  They graced us with more than we ordered and quickly sent us on our way back to our little cabin.  Along the way, I racked up yet another historic schoolhouse for the map.

The meatball sandwich did not have a chance, once it was unwrapped.  The Chicken Bacon Ranch was received much the same attention.  Satisfied with that accomplishment, with a bit of sunlight left in the day, a stroll down the road to check on our white-tailed friends in the meadow seemed in order.  A few bucks were lingering and immediately noted my presence, though never budged from their space.

They went back to grazing after deciding there was no imminent threat, and I moved on down the road to just walk a bit.  Passing Mount Princeton Campground, I could hear rushing water and decided to investigate what I was hearing.  The pines can be tricky that way sometimes and sure enough, there was Chalk Creek rushing along at high speed.

There was not a lot of daylight left, so I rushed back to the cabin as fast as one could without running to capture my comrade and take her up to behold this force of nature.  She hesitated at first, being perfectly content with the reading that she had opted for, instead of the walk but finally gave in.  This time we drove up for a quick look around before the sun finally fell out of the sky, and the rain began again.

At the cabin, the rain returned, as if on cue, leaving very little to do.  Any chance of night outside by the fire pit was gone.  We should have covered the wood up yesterday.  That left the collection of "bored" games waiting patiently on the shelf.  Stratego would have been a fun new experience for my comrade, if all the pieces had been present.  Monopoly seemed a bit excessive for two people, so we settled with multiple rounds of Battleship before finally giving up for the evening, dreaming of encountering much less precipitation the next day.  The forecast held some hope for that.

Bad Shoes, Hippies and Bears

A few years ago, I ran into an old friend in Florence while standing in the queue at a local service station.  It had been quite a pleasant surprise and we made plans to connect for breakfast on this particular journey.  There was not much time for anything else on this round, so we enjoyed the little we had with some good food at Fat Joe's Cafe and generally catching up on the enterprise of one another and his forging new acquaintance with our host.

We spent the rest of the morning stumbling about various efforts. An attempt to locate an old stagecoach hotel met with failure, lacking proper clearance on the vehicle we commanded. Hoping to defray that cost, we set out on foot to traverse the last mile. Unfortunately, the slacker shoes that had been well-suited to breakfast were not built for that sort of adventuring, so we abandoned the task for a future visit. Wandering back into town, we paused for a moment to capture Historic Florence High School, which was surprisingly not yet included in my ever-growing map of schoolhouses in Google Earth.

Back at the ranch again, the last effort of the morning, now afternoon, turned towards mapping. Our host had created a map for some young explorers and wanted a little feedback towards suitability.  We pondered the situation over a little axe throwing, ultimately deciding that it a very good fit for evaluating the young apprentices.  The real test will come when they apply themselves to considering the map.  

The day was fading quickly though, and as much as we hated to leave again, we needed to reach basecamp before the sun fell too far down.  It was notched up in a canyon between two massive peaks and evening would come much sooner than anywhere else.  Saying our goodbyes, looking forward to connecting again later in the week, we followed the sage advice of our host and filled our reserves prior to departure.  The cost had already exceeded the original payment price at home by $0.60 per gallon.  Our host promised it would double that in the northern end of the Arkansas River valley.

While it was not a long drive, we still had 160 km to cover that would take a couple of hours or more, depending upon the number of distractions.  Breaking into the river valley flatlands at Salida, we discovered a new favorite station through  KWUZ-FM, Hippie Radio, which would keep us entertained with blast-after-blast from the past for the next handful of days.

It took very little for Mt Princeton to appear looming in the windshield under skies that had only begun to clutter with afternoon clouds.  It was an ominous sign that things would very likely be rather unpleasant the following day, as forecasts had predicted.  We clung to optimism though, hoping the weather-guessing guys would be as inaccurate as they usually were.

Our new host greeted our landing at the cabin and introduced us to our home for the next few days.  It seems we had missed the real fun though.  The proprietor shared with us a photo from the property camera showing a black bear that had come knocking the night before, looking to offer his own personal greeting.  It was all the coercion needed for us to ensure anything that even resembled a crumb of food was properly evacuated from our vehicle.  We even went so far as to store all food items inside the refrigerator, regardless of whether they needed to be or not.

The sun was fading quickly, and satisfied with the level of precautions taken with provisions, I ambled a short piece down the road to look in on Love Meadow.  I was pleasantly surprised to find a small herd of deer indulging themselves in a late evening snack.  A few glanced up, though generally they paid no attention to my arrival or departure.  The scene instilled a certain calm, and with deep twilight setting in, I returned to spend the remainder of the evening with my comrade in the quiet solitude of slumber that only a mountainside cabin can offer.

Colorado Road Trip Part 3 of 9

Dirt Road Derailment West of Great Bend

A good breakfast and a bit of coffee set things in the right perspective for a day on the road taking in the decaying and dismantled. Our primary goal was to reach our retreat in the high desert at the base of the Wet Mountains by early afternoon.  The drive west out of Kansas and into Colorado under mostly clear skies enabled solid progress.  Familiar places rolled by without much to mention until pausing for a moment in Dighton to observe a seemingly abandoned bus in an equally abandoned service station. 

One of the quests for the day was to visit an old Missouri Pacific Railroad Depot in Horace.  The structure was reported abandoned and collapsing and we wanted to make a few observations before all that transpired. The depot and many other similar sites were deserted in the 1990s and left to rot, as railroad through-traffic shifted.  Our observations found it exactly as described, and the associated town attempting to follow the same general path.

A little further down the line, we stumbled on a derailment resting quietly in the sun near Chivington, alone and forgotten in this relative wasteland that borders Kansas. More than a year ago, these 124 cars loaded full of thousands of bushels of wheat rolled happily along the Colorado Pacific Railroad Line, then suddenly and unexpectedly gave up and rolled over.

This is not entirely a wasteland though, when one takes a little closer look, which is how we ended up at the intersection of County Road U & County Road 30 in Kiowa County.  It can be a place of intense beauty that only the local biota could appreciate, or those seeking to remove themselves entirely from civilization.  Blue skies tower over dirt roads and crops as far as the eye can see and not a sound from the human element, generally speaking.

Returning to two-lane asphalt, a harsh reality of rural travel began to set in. Rest stops are often few and far between out here, and we were beginning to feel the need for such a diversion. Haswell seemed like the first opportunity for such matters, though we quickly discovered Google Maps was lying about the existence of such an opportunity through a Service Station. However, the "Nation's Smallest Jail" captured our attention momentarily, resulting in the discovery of a suitable portable relief station as well. While it would have qualified as one of the smallest, I have suspicions someone is making themselves out to be bigger than they are. The Prospect Heights Jail is definitely a contender, and the little cage jail at Parkville Nature Sanctuary is much smaller. If Haswell loses that title, they can still claim fame with an Intel chip and a Radio Telescope. There are lots of things to see in this big little town!

More familiar places passed by without much of interest to draw us in, enabling a soft landing when and where we expected.  After a long day on the road, we were glad to once again looking north across the plains at Pikes Peak and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.  

In honor of our triumphant return, our host hoisted the blue line stars and stripes.  We followed that surprising welcome refamiliarizing ourselves with the compound grounds, then settled in for good food and even better conversation.  With the sun well in retreat by then, we topped off the evening with a few more hours of quiet discussion, while staring off into that beautiful night sky that blankets the prairie.  Some folks are truly blessed beyond our imagination.

Colorado Road Trip Part 2 of 9

Surviving a Smoky Hill River Squall

Escaping on our latest adventure out to Colorado found us traveling along the least preferred yet most expedient path possible, westbound on I-70.  Heavy cloud cover lacking rain made for easy progress on this dreaded route.  However, things would turn from this level of tolerably mundane to downright unnerving on the final leg.

The situation deteriorated dramatically after departing I-70 and settling into a southwesterly heading on KS-156, crossing the Smoky Hill River.  Darkening skies were not just sign of sundown.  A few brief sprinkles were the only warning just seconds before a deluge haunted us nearly all the way to the Great Bend in the Arkansas River.  

Traversing that diagonal out of Ellsworth should have taken less than an hour. A harrowing experience of more than 90 minutes passed in typhoon-like conditions that reduced visibility to under 10 meters in a blinding wall of water.  The torrent of rain, mist, and wash from oncoming traffic left us guessing at lane position with faded, sometimes non-existent markings.

We eventually arrived safely at our layover for evening, later than anticipated, though none the worse for wear with our formerly bug-splattered transport completely and utterly insect free.

Colorado Road Trip Part 1 of 9

A Fifty Million Dollar College Scandal

Academics remain sidelined as an elite athletic payroll dominates the field.

I heard a story on the radio that made my jaw drop this morning.  Some universities are now allocating upwards of $50 million to pay student-athletes. It is a striking snapshot of completely misaligned priorities in higher education and I am shocked at the absence of objection.

Meanwhile, in the lecture halls and laboratories, students are paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the privilege of pursuing a degree. In many cases, these same people are funneled into decades of often predatory and crushing debt long before their professional lives begin.

How did we arrive at a place where this feels normal?

When did higher education completely abandon its purpose in favor of becoming an entertainment business that operates as a school on the side?

Having watched this rise to power over the last several decades, the shift is staggering. What was once a localized or even regional weekend tradition has ballooned into a multi-billion-dollar corporate juggernaut that completely dominates institutional priorities.

Imagine if that $50 million was directed where it actually belongs: lowering tuition costs, funding grants for the economically or situationally disadvantaged, supporting essential research, retaining and recruiting academic faculty, as well as modernizing labs and classrooms. 

At a time when national test scores and academic proficiency are in a well-documented slide, our institutions should be doubling down on real education. Instead, tens of millions of dollars are funneled into an athletic arms race while the core academic engine rusts on the sidelines.

When a university’s multi-million-dollar investments favor stadium lights over academic access, the fundamental mission of higher education is lost. 

Much like professional sports franchises that demand public bond initiatives and taxpayer-funded stadiums while pricing out local fans, universities are running the exact same playbook. Even when athletic departments claim to be self-sustaining, they leverage non-profit status, tax advantages, and campus infrastructure while general student fees often quietly subsidize non-revenue sports.

We are quite literally witnessing a system designed around sports entertainment while ordinary students often carry a heavy financial anchor long after graduation.

If a university can assemble $50 million for athletic talent, it surely has the resources to ensure an affordable education for remainder of the student body, without leaving them indebted for life. It is well past time that we start demanding academic institutions re-center their true mission: making education accessible, affordable, and valued above all else.

What can be done?

• Vote with Enrollment:  Parents and prospective students should choose institutions that align with these values. Prioritize universities that invest heavily in academic programs, faculty support, and student affordability over those that divert massive resources into hyper-commercialized athletic budgets.
• Pressure Campus Leadership: Write directly to university boards of trustees, university presidents, and alumni associations. Withhold institutional donations and explicitly cite the hyper-commercialization of athletics and skyrocketing academic tuition as the reason.
• Demand Legislative Accountability: Contact your federal and state representatives. Demand that any legislative frameworks governing college athletics include strict caps on athletic spending, mandate tuition freezes, and require transparency for how student fee money is allocated toward athletic programs.
• Hit them in the Ledger: Boycott the machine. Stop buying game tickets, turn off the television broadcasts, unfollow the team accounts, and refuse to purchase official university merchandise. Until we stop bankrolling their multi-million-dollar athletic arms race, nothing will change.
  

Until the public, alumni, and lawmakers begin to hold these non-profit institutions accountable, they will continue prioritizing stadium lights over classroom access.  The consumer public should demand that higher education return to its actual mandate: delivering accessible, affordable, quality education above all else.