Today, in perhaps the most evocative of our road trips, we drove out of southern Colorado into Utah and from there into Arizona. The landscape changed gradually from the green-topped mesa where the ancient Pueblo peoples once eked out a living through increasingly arid landscapes, though always punctuated by the vivid green of the vegetation close to the San Juan River. The region we traversed is known as the Four Corners Region. State boundaries in these parts were drawn with a ruler and the Four Corners Monument marks the only spot in the whole of the United States where four states – Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah – meet. This is also Navajo Indian land, with a Hopi Indian reservation in the middle (and an Ute bit in the north-eastern corner). The long, largely straight, roads are punctuated by an occasional concession (trading station), always Indian run. The further west we travelled the more extraordinary the geology we encountered. Stone ‘monuments’ we visited in Utah included the twin rocks at Bluff, the Valley of the Gods, and Mexican Hat. But nothing prepared us for Goosenecks. Its entrenched meanders (that’s the correct geological term) coiled around 1,000 feet (300 metres) below us, nibbling at the 300 million year-old rocks of the Paradox Formation, and it is easy to forget that at this point the river itself is some 1,200 metres above sea level. Moreover, the canyon is hidden until you are virtually upon it so that the ‘wow factor’ is intense.

A busy legislature…

I learned from my Arizona Daily Sun (‘Serving Flagstaff and northern Arizona since 1883’) today that ‘hundreds of new (Arizona) state laws will take effect this coming Thursday. If you have a child between the ages of five and eight who measures less than 4 feet 9 inches then you must use a specially designed booster seat in your car – or pay a $50 fine. As of this Thursday Arizonians will be able to have their eyebrows plucked by unlicensed eyebrow threaders, show proof of car insurance on their mobile phones, study the Bible in school for literary purposes, hunt with weapons without regard to the number of bullets they hold and with a silencer on the muzzle. Among the 363 bills that Governor Jan Brewer signed into law are measures to exempt dogs used in ranching from the normal cruelty laws and (music to my ears) the creation of an official state ‘poet laureate’. So now you know…

After our lunchtime wander we took the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad down to the other end of the line, at Durango. If you want to know what steam travel in the Wild West was truly like then this is definitely one of the places to come. Steam engines have worked continuously on the line since the 1880s and all of the rolling stock is original. The 72 kilometre trip takes ages (and that’s going downhill!) and the stretch nearer to Durango, where the landscape flattens out a little, is relatively uninteresting (apart from the deer) but after quitting Silverton the railway faithfully follows the River Animus (its wonderful full Spanish name is ‘Animus Perditas’ – or the River of Lost Souls), including creeping along the sides of a series of very steep-sided gorges where it is probably better not to look directly down because there is nothing between you and the river to stop you becoming a lost soul. There is a photogenic stretch where the train turns back on itself and that’s where my illustration comes from but for much of this stretch the train seems to be literally teetering on the edge. On the way down I was excited to see plenty of evidence of beaver activity, in the form of gnawed trunks and dams constructions, though none of the animals themselves. A railroad town built to service the San Juan mining region, Durango has a lively buzz to it and a selection of good restaurants. This evening we ate fusion/Japanese.

What’s left of Yankee Girl…

From Ouray, we took the vertiginous million dollar highway (there are plenty of stories about how it got the name, but the building of the road certainly opened up the mountains to proper prospection) up to Silverton, stopping off on the way to look at the remains of the Idarado Mine (there are plenty of remains of mines around, but this site is one of the most visible and extensive). It’s a desolate spot now, well above the treeline. An information panel explained that the mine’s Yankee Girl Shaft, which burrowed down some 1,200 feet, produced over $12 million in ore during its 16 years of operation, estimated to be worth over $100 million in today’s market. The mine also sported a five-and-a-half mile long tunnel connecting it up to another mine in a neighbouring valley. The Red Mountain (guess why it’s called that) mining district was and probably still is full of gold, silver, copper, zinc and lead. The tailings from these works are splayed out spectacularly over the mountainsides. Cadmium and lead has leached into local water supplies and a lot of work has had to be done to neutralise some of the worst effects of this polution. From there we drove on to Silverton which, as its name suggests, is a former silver mining camp. On the way there we spotted a Harley Davidson (this is biker land) with a pet dog sitting on the pillion, complete with goggles, crash helmet and scarf! Like Ouray, Silverton was also once a rough place where prospectors came down from the surrounding mountains to drown their sorrows or drink their earnings (Silverton itself is, at 2,836 metres, one of the highest towns in America). It also had a ‘wrong side of the tracks’, for Silverton is the upper terminus for the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad which, like the million dollar highway, opened up the mountains to prospectors and the mining industry. Before catching the train we had a wander around. Silverton has a population of 531, dividing into 255 households or 149 families. And yet, when we stopped counting, it has at least five churches in good repair. Local religion may flourish but, despite the local population being over 97% white, it is fragmented.

Butch

We set off to the south early today, at first towards Ouray, following the Gunnison River. Off to our left were the mesas – table top mountains – but these soon gave way to more traditional (or familiar) alpine-type areas. This area is known as ‘the  Switzerland of America’, because it sports a number of ski resorts, including the best known, Telluride (which also has a jazz festival). We are in the Wild West now. Butch Cassidy robbed his first bank here (the San Miguel Valley Bank in Telluride)  and Ouray, our first port of call, still has some of the architecture (above all, the 1876 Beaumont Hotel) dating from its time as a town full of prospectors, spending their gold money on women and whiskey. (Women, though, soon started to clean the place up.) It’s a pretty place but, looking at its main street with the boutiques for stop-off coach parties, I wondered what it must be like when the tourists are not around. I have made a point during this trip of buying at least one local newspaper every day and so today I got the Ouray County Plaindealer (a weekly). The paper publishes the Marshal’s and the Sheriff’s logs and they give an idea: a ‘two-vehicle accident on private property; moderate damage, no injuries’; ‘officer stopped motorist and notified him he had a flat tire’; a ‘female with shortness of breath transported to hospital’; an ‘intoxicated individual’; a report of cows on the highway; a ‘car deer accident minor damage’; a male contacted for ‘urinating in Hartwell Park’… Andy Warhol’s observation about small towns came back to me. Clearly, Ouray’s wild past is well and truly behind it.

Grand Junction, as N° 1 sprog put it, is the sort of town where the main street is called Main Street. To be fair, it is the largest city in Western Colorado and is an outdoors sort of place – a base camp for those who wish to hike or bike in its beautiful surroundings (my picture shows the town from the top of a nearby mesa). We’re getting into Spanish territory now – particularly the old Spanish trails. We ate an (excellent) Mexican meal. Later, on Main Street, I found another very good independent book shop, Grand Valley Books, where I found just the book I had been looking for; a field guide to the birds of Colorado (there are so many species here that I simply don’t recognise – I’ll have to come back to the birds later). Later, back at the hotel, we watched the quirky London Olympics Opening ceremony and so now we are well equipped to deal with American bemusement about the odd bits (such as the homage to the NHS).

For pretty much the rest of the day we followed the upper Colorado River as it slowly grew in size and steadily cut deeper and deeper into the surrounding rock. The scenery (like all of the Amtrak trains, there was an observation car) was just beautiful. For large stretches of the journey we were gazing on wilderness of one sort or another. And where there are wildernesses, there are wild animals. We saw plenty of deer and, the thrill of our lives, saw no less than five bald eagles (together with sundry other birds of prey, including a golden eagle or two). We also saw wildlife of another sort. The river is renowned for its whitewater rafting. Some say that the Gore Canyon stretch provides the wildest waters in the country. We glimpsed some rafts on these upper stretches. Lower down, the white water is more gentle. Clearly, it is the tradition among frat boy holidaymakers to moon the passing trains and so moon us they did. At one stage I saw the gaunt ruins of an old chimney stack high on a bluff, as if to underline the fact that such landscapes can never be truly tamed and man’s presence is only tolerated. At Dotsero we passed Colorado’s most recently active volcano (a mere 4,140 years ago) and then enjoyed the beautiful Glenwood Canyon, its spectacular high cliffs dotted with Aspen and evergreen trees. More sinisterly, we passed through New Castle, notable for an underground fire in an old coal mine that has burned away for many years, before pulling into Grand Junction two hours late (so named because it is at the junction between the Gunnison and the Grand Rivers – before 1921 the upper reaches of the Colorado were known as the Grand River).

When we arrived in Denver two days ago they were announcing on the Amtrak Califrornia Zephyr that there had been a track washout and that trains were being re-routed through Wyoming. We had assumed that, as would be the case in other countries, the washout would take a while to repair. (To give you an idea of the sort of forces the raildroads have to deal with, our train went around ‘Big 10 Curve’ where the winds can be so strong that hopper cars filled with sand and welded to the rails have been parked on an adjacent railway line to act as a windbreak.) But not in America. We had underestimated the importance of King Coal. Not only was the track through the Rockies repaired, but our train this morning was pretty much on time. We were given another reminder of the importance of King Coal as we approach the impressive Moffat Tunnel. Nearby Wyoming has a number of vast open cast coal mines. The coal is loaded onto carriages that are formed up into vast trains and sent east to Denver and beyond. As we toiled our way up to the western entrance to the tunnel we were informed that a coal train was unfortunately coming the other way and that, as a result, we would have to wait in a siding until the train had passed. This took quite a while, but the passing of the train in question took even longer. These vast trains are made up of well over a hundred fully-laden coal wagons. Frequently, they are pulled and pushed by two diesel locomotives, with another two situated in the middle of the train for good measure. Once the train had finally passed, we had to wait another fifteen minutes for the tunnel to ‘vent’ and then, when we finally set off, we were warned to stay in our carriages and not to cross between them. The filth on our windows when we finally emerged on the other side of the Continental Divide inidcated why such strictures are necessary. It’s not just a question of venting the tunnel of the diesel fumes from six toiling locomotives. The coal trucks are open and each time a train passes is engulfed in a cloud of coal dust. The 10 kilometre tunnel, which opened in 1928 and at last provided Denver with a more direct route to the west, is an impressive achievement. It stands at 2,800 metres above sea-level and took prodigious quantities of financing and of engineering.

This evening, back in Denver, we had dinner with Martin Rhodes who, to give him his full title, is Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Martin and I were contemporaries at the European University Institute in Florence back in the early 1980s. It is, I realise, a fact of life that the more you study the more diasporas you belong to and hence the more likely it is that you will know an academic at the university of whatever city it is you happen to be in. We had not seen each other for over ten years and it was great to catch up on things. Originally from New Zealand, having studied and taught in the UK, and having previously been based in Italy for some time, Martin has perhaps more reason that most to bring a comparative perspective to his analyses, and I learned a lot about underlying trends in American politics and society.

We returned to Denver late this afternoon by a more southerly route through the mountains. This, our guide explained, was the old prospectors’ trail. Dotted about on either side of the road were a large number of old mine workings. Some were still quite sophisticated structures, with trestles and mine heads. Others seemed to be little better than rabbit holes, with workings scattered over the mountainsides beneath the tunnels. Some had been closed off. Others were probably considered too inaccessible to be worth while blocking. This poignant patchwork of diggings from just a century-and-a-half ago represents the last traces of the frenetic madness that overcame Americans seeking their fortunes in 1859 (Colorado’s gold rush came ten years after California’s). Incongruously, high above them on a bluff, as the road starts to dip towards Denver, stands the house in the picture. Woody Allen enthusiasts will surely immediately recognise it as the house in Sleeper (1973), which was filmed in and around Denver, in part because of its modernistic architecture.