Holly and I flew to Denver May 20th to embark on a week of exploring the state of Colorado. We’ve spent quite a bit of time in Utah skiing, hiking, family reunion-ing and such, but never had the chance or reason to see what the nation’s skinniest state has to offer. We grabbed (a ridiculously expensive) rental car (being under 25, they stuck it to us), and headed for a meeting in Lakewood with my previous co-op manager Bob Schmitz. ATA is opening a Rocky Mountain office in Lakewood just west of Denver in June, and as they expressed interest in a full time offer, I wanted to see what the area looked like in case it becomes important in the future. Bob showed us around the nearly fully constructed office (complete with ping pong table, I mean conference, room) and we had a great conversation over dinner about finding jobs and grad school and the like. Holly and I then went on our way to look for a place to camp for the night, where we found the Colorado School of Mines to be quite inviting. We found a pretty secluded spot near the practice football field where we set up our tent just at dusk. Just before slipping in the tent to get some sleep, a police officer paid us a visit while looking for some kids who’d started a fire nearby. He was likely the most friendly cop I’ve ever spoken to, as he asked what we were doing setting up camp in such a weird place and then proceeded to ask about the specs of our tent and how he’d been looking for a similar one to take hunting. We were fortunate to get some sleep there and use the visiting basketball team’s locker room for showering facilities in the morning. I admit, it was a bit vagabondish, if you will, but it got the job done. We checked out the geology museum there before leaving to go take the famous Coors Brewery tour, which did not happen because they don’t give tours on Wednesdays. We then drove to Boulder to find a city full of life, freedom of thought, and happy people. Pearl St. is a big, pedestrian only outdoor mall with more outdoorsy stores than I’ve ever seen. We moved on to explore more of the city and see the beautiful mountains lurking just west of the city. On the plane the day before I sat next to a woman who told me all about her daughter, her travels to Europe and Australia, and said that she’d likely be able to give me some advice for my trip and to get in touch with her. So I left a message with her daughter hoping to at least be able to talk, when in fact, she called back when we were passing a park and said that she and a friend were about to hike in. So Holly and I joined them for a hike where she proceeded to offer her floor for our sleeping bags, as well as tag along for dinner with boyfriend and friend. The friend, it turns out, was a school mate who’d just returned from two years in China working as a study abroad coordinator. Her dad worked in China as well, and after making the wrong people mad, was chased out of the country by the Chinese mafia. She received an urgent call from her dad saying that she had a plane ticket waiting for her and she needed to leave the country immediately. Wow. Can you say stimulating dinner conversation or what. Our host, Kristen, was an experienced ‘couch surfer’ so she didn’t have any problem putting us up. For those of you who don’t know, there’s a website called couchsurfing.com where people are registered as hosts and others are surfers, and it’s a large network of people staying at other people’s houses for free.
Holly and I left Boulder for a quick drive to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park. We saw the hotel that inspired “The Shining” to be written, and wandered in and out of yet more outdoors stores. We set up camp in Moraine Park, where the wind whipped through the trees at very audible speeds. For Georgians in May, high 30’s is a bit chilly sleeping weather in tent with sleeping bags rated for 40 degrees. I was using my padded surfboard bag as my sleeping pad as I didn’t have room for much else, so Holly was envied for her luxury extra padding. We hiked Glacier Gorge where we walked lightly on a snow covered trail up to a pair of frozen lakes. The snow was deep enough where we constantly risked sinking knee deep upon a misstep. Holly’s tennis shoes didn’t fare so well with the wet conditions, but otherwise we were totally prepared for the constantly changing weather. Holly was feeling poorly from the elevation so she napped while I hiked passed Nymph, Dream, and Emerald Lakes through even deeper snow. It was a lot of fun to run down the trail, slipping, sliding, and skiing on my feet. We saw lots of wildlife, elk and foxes aplenty.
The next day we waited for the Trail Ridge Road to open (the highest road in the US at just over 12,000 ft) but as a snow storm blew in while we waited forcing us to drive down through Golden and skip the western side of the park. We stopped briefly in Vail for dinner and were denied the chance to see Aspen and the photographic Maroon Bells because of road closure as well. We continued to Buena Vista where we dropped in on Younglife camp that Holly went to a couple summers ago. We were lucky enough to run into a couple of her friends from UGA and got to worship with the group of college kids that will be leading the camp for the summer. We pretended to be part of the group and participated in the name learning activities that they were doing. We met a girl who plays soccer on Rebecca Bohler’s soccer team at Samford University (Morgan Montague). After leaving Younglife camp, we stopped in a KOA campground to sleep for a little bit.
In the morning we got up nice and early and continued south to Great Sand Dunes National Park. We drove through a bunch of little towns, including Leadville, CO (elevation 10,500 ft.), and a demolished WWII training camp. The little towns, especially Leadville, seemed like we entered another country. Full of trailer homes, dirty streets, and old cars, it felt like rural Alaska or somewhere in Mexico. Holly and I talked about how the weather in an area affects the mental state of the people living there, and contrasted and compared how different people across the country deal with their weather. After being spoiled in the south with such sunny weather, I don’t know how I’d react to places with drastically different weather than that. I do know, however, that I can deal with San Diego weather quite successfully, haha.
Great Sand Dunes National Park (GSDNP) is an incredible sight. People who’ve never heard about it (like myself before 3 weeks ago) would have trouble believing it’s there. There’s a massive system of sand that has been migrating across the valley for thousands of years and now is caught in a cycle that keeps it in the same place. Prevailing winds from the west are constantly moving the dunes eastward, creating unusually tall mounds of sand. At the same time, snowmelt in the mountains to the east of the dunes continually carries sand westward as it circles around the dunes. Because the Medano stream is flowing over a bed of sand, an extremely rare phenomenon occurs in the stream that happens in only a few other places in the world, pulsing waves. Upon first viewing the stream, the subtle phenomenon is visible from the shore. There seem to be rushes of water a differing periods of time coming from up stream. The weird thing is that the stream is rarely deeper than a couple feet (at the height of the snowmelt), so the bystander wonders where these rushes are coming from. What happens is the water moves sand to form ridges along the bottom surface, in groups of about 7 or 8, as I noticed. It’s hard to describe visually what occurs, but the ridges create standing waves as the water passes over them. The water deposits yet more sand onto each ridge as it passes over it, creating larger ridges. To the person watching this process, it appears that flat sand soon creates waves, the waves move up stream for a few seconds, and then the ridges get plowed over by the faster flowing water. It takes about 30 seconds for each cycle to occur, and once the ridges are plowed over, the rush of water flows downstream. Crazy. Apparently the waves can grow to a couple feet tall when there’s lots of water coming downstream. Holly and I hiked to the top of the dunes, which took substantial effort considering the pelting sand, steep sand, and little forward progress. It was neat to see how quickly your footsteps were covered up after we started coming down the 300 foot tall sand dunes. When we got to the top, I could definitely tell how you could get lost in a hurry in that kind of setting. People would disappear below a ridge in a second and my distance perception was quickly fooled. It was neat to stand atop the dunes and see snow covered mountains close on one side and a huge grass covered plain on the other. Afterwards, Holly and I got a quick nap and I went on another hike along Mosca Pass, one of the few other hiking trails in the park. I realized on this hike how vulnerable hikers are to mountain lions, and began thinking of ways you could design a neck protection device to keep the lion’s first bite from being deadly. Then I realized how rare attacks are and how much of a pain it would be to wear. I guess mountain lion attacks are kind of like shark attacks, if it’s your time then it’s just your time.
We made our way to Colorado Springs, or “the springs” as everybody seems to call them in Colorado, and went downtown. I was surprised at how small the downtown was and how much of a suburban area the springs were. After receiving some good advice from the guys at an outdoors store, we headed toward Manitou Springs to see what “the incine” was all about. It was a hiking trail that we decided not to spend time on as we needed to find a place to sleep and do some laundry, since I’d need clean clothes to start my New Zealand trip. As this was my first time in a Laundromat, I thought about the scene in Fight Club where the devilish girl walks through and just pulls clothes out of the dryer for herself, and wanted to make sure none of my clothes took off. While here I got in touch with Bob Chipman, a good friend of my grandpa Hess’s, where he gave me some instruction as to how we could turn in our rental car and still have place to stay for our flight out the next day. Very insightful and generously, he arranged for us to stay with his daughter Susan Barker, who not only lived close to the rental car place, but also was kind enough to take us in for the evening and drop us off at the airport the next day. It was amazing to have a home cooked meal and a mattress to sleep on.
But that was after we left Manitou Springs. Something very fortunate happened before we left and I was very happy and much better off from it. Prior to the fortune, we drove through the Garden of the Gods, a neat park up in the mountains with these vertical rock formations that shot out of the ground. Then we made a stop at the Rock Shox office, a company under SRAM’s umbrella that is arguably the world’s leader in bike suspension technology. I would say the majority of nice mountain bikes have Rock Shox on them, but the only company really better is Fox Racing shocks, and they are much more broad. So anyways, I wanted to just pop my head in the office to see if I could have a little informational interview with an engineer there to find out how he got his job, what he’d suggest, etc. I was lucky enough to get set up with the Engineering Manager, and he took me back in the office and chatted with me for about 45 minutes before giving me a tour of the office, test lab, and prototyping area. It was an incredible experience. He was really encouraging in the sense that further education isn’t stressed in that atmosphere as much as hands on experience is. He also said something that I think could apply to me directly when he said we’re looking for guys who are a jack of all trades moreso than an expert in any given area. I do need a lot of work, as far as they are concerned, with the knowledge of certain programs they use as well as more hands on experience (which isn’t much through Georgia Tech anyways). I gave him my resume and he told me I needed to put more sports interests on there, since I don’t have any currently listed. I just made a general resume that I could hand out if necessary, and companies like GE and the other big guys that hire at GT don’t seem to care what bike races you’ve won or whatnot. Oh well, I’ve got time to refine it before I’m ready for employment. Incredibly successful stop, nonetheless. Holly could tell by the smile gleaming from my face as I got in the car. The job search has begun.
After leaving Colorado Springs, we headed for downtown Denver and walked around a bit. It was enjoyable, quite the mix of people there. Lots of Caucasians, and not a lot else, which was interesting to see. We drove back down to Centennial where Sue picked us up and things continued to work out wonderfully. Mr. Chipman came over and was incredibly kind, talking about things ranging from my Dad’s mom Wilma (who died in a car crash when he was 10), all the way to the difference between working in industry as an engineer versus his professor experience at UCLA. The next morning I said farewell to Holly, as she was headed back to Atlanta and I was headed to LA. She was an incredible traveler, up for anything I was. I’m glad that she had the opportunity to come because we hadn’t got to be together like that for a couple week’s time since the summer after my freshman year. She’s an incredible girl and I thought it was funny when she didn’t notice all of the guys staring at her as we walked down the street but I did. I look forward to seeing what directions she heads in the near future.
When I arrived in LA, my fortune continued, as my bag was the first off the rounder and as I walked outside, my friend Mallory pulled up. We went back to her apartment near UCLA for the afternoon, and I got to catch up with some of her roommates I met last summer. On the way back to the airport, we experienced some incredible luck and skipped 40 minutes worth of traffic on the highway. It appeared that a 4 car crash has just been successfully moved to the side of the interstate as we passed, so the road was completely open a 5:30 pm in the middle of LA. It was clear all the way until the LAX exit, were we got off and laughed at the peculiar experience of traveling freely during rush hour in the worst traffic in the country. Off to New Zealand I go!
