…Or so we thought, but just a few kilometres further on we joined a small and very excited crowd by the side of the road. They were looking down at a patch of marshy ground. An animal of some sort had been spotted and was now out of sight behind some bushes. Gradually it came back into view; it was a young moose cow. Shortly after I took this picture it took fright and loped away, but we had seen it, and pretty close up. Our guide told us a little about this wonderful animal, which we had been so lucky to see (they are solitary and shy), including the improbable fact that they are excellent swimmers and divers. Now our cups were truly running over. We didn’t get to see the horned sheep nor a black bear (but since, as a park ranger told me, they are using electric shocks and tear gas to try and keep them away from human beings, perhaps this wasn’t such a surprise), but we had seen fine examples of some of the largest land mammals (elk, and then moose) in North America. Quite a day!

Our guide was comically, if understandably, cautious about predicting what wildlife we might see whilst in the National Park. On the way there, she played a DVD of the sort of animals that roam the park as a sort of precaution. Before we entered the Park she pointed out the ubiquitous prairie dogs on the plains and we were happy to spot a coyote. Once in the Park we saw chipmunks and squirrels, of course, and she urged us to see the humming birds feeding at the back of the Fall River Visitors’ Center. Later, we saw a marmot sunning itself on a rock, and our guide relaxed; if we saw anything else, she declared, it would be a bonus. At the Alpine Visitor Center, high up in the tundra, we decided to skip the gift shops and take a walk along a trail we had spotted. We were soon rewarded with a close sighting of a solitary female elk. An elderly German tourist pointed to where the rest of the ‘harem’ could be seen, quite close to the road. Sure enough; when we set off along the Trail Ridge Road again we soon came to a group of about twenty elk grazing nonchalantly some 100 metres from the road. Our guide was now positively beaming; such sightings were not so common. So nothing prepared us for what happened next. Rounding a bend in the road, we saw two elk stags not more than ten metres away (in retrospect, maybe dangerously close but they seemed completely uninterested in us). Now our cups were really running over….!

One of our earlier halts was at an alluvial fan in Horshoe Park. The fan was created only in 1982 (15 July), when a dam high above, Lawn Lake Dam, suddenly failed. It is calculated that the lake was emptied of its 830,000 cubic metres of water within a minute. The resulting flash flood scoured out a gully, created the alluvial fan, rushed down the valley, killed three people (campers), smashed through a second dam, and created $31 million in damage to Estes Park. All this may have happened thirty years ago but the impressive scars on the landscape still seem very fresh. I find such breaking dam episodes slightly disconcerting. I was brought up on the tale of The Dambusters, of course, and as a child was deeply impressed by Guy Gibson’s account of looking down and seeing a car’s headlights extinguished as the desperately speeding car was overtaken by a wall of water. This fear of failing dams was compounded in 1980 when, on our way to Cortina d’Ampezzo, my architect host pointed to the Vajont Dam high above, responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 people in 1962. And I confess that I never felt entirely comfortable when camping just beneath the Bious-Artigues dam at the Pic du Midi d’Ossau…

This morning we set off early from Denver to Boulder and then headed north west, up into the mountains, into the Rocky Mountain National Park. Throughout the day we followed Trail Ridge Road, from Estes Park in the east to Grand Lake in the south west, and then back through the mountains to Denver, stopping frequently to admire the scenery or gaze at animal life (see next posts). The trail offers countless stupendous views, as the road first winds through montane forests and grassland (the so-called ‘parks’) before climbing up into sub-Alpine forest and, beyond the tree line, the tundra (a third of the Park is above the tree line!). The Park boasts over 60 mountains over 3,700 metres high, including the highest peak, visible for miles around, Longs Peak (4,345 metres). The road itself, still paved, reaches a height of 3,713 metres, qualifying as America’s highest road (in contrast, Spain has a paved, restricted dead end that comes in at 3,400 metres, but Europe’s other highest roads are all a thousand metres lower). At this height we could see a number of glaciers and permanent snow fields (and definitely experienced some breathlessness!). Further on, we crossed the Continental Divide at Milner Pass and saw the Colorado River’s modest headwaters. Pardon the pun, but it was a breathtaking day in more senses than one!

Beer has made something of a resurgence in the US, but not the chemical stuff that’s sold in huge kegs. Microbreweries are on the rise everywhere, producing small-batch beers with distinctive tastes. This evening we ate at the Wynkoop, which describes itself as Denver’s first ever brewpub. The idea is simple: serve good, wholesome food and good beer to go with it (have a look at what’s currently on tap). And it works. The Wynkoop is clearly a very popular place with a high turnover. In fact, if I am being honest, and leaving the issue of quantities to one side (and forgetting about Amtrak restaurant cars), we have not yet eaten badly once in the US; on the contrary, we have eaten rather well. As to why the food should have been good at the Wynkoop, it’s easy to understand once you read their philosophy. I’ll stop giving them free publicity now, but if ever you’re in Denver you could do worse than give them a try. They’re at the end of 16th Street, opposite the Union Station and – a nice coincidence – the Tattered Cover.

This afternoon I took an obligatory stroll down Denver’s 16th Street (a pedestrian-only shopping mall) but at the Union station end of it, on Wynkoop and 16th, there is what is reputed to be one of the best independent bookshops in the United States. I can’t verify that claim, but I can confirm that Tattered Cover is a wonderful place. It is located over several floors of a former warehouse, and the wooden beams and floorboards, together with the acres of wooden bookshelves, already give the place a distinctive atmosphere. But what makes it extra special is that there are comfortable armchairs everywhere, together with plenty of tables to work, plus free wifi, plus food and drink at a friendly bar, plus no sense of urgency or hurry and nobody gets chased out for doing their own thing or holding an impromptu meeting or sprawling their legs over the arms of the chairs and settling back for a good read. I suppose the logic of the place is that if you make people really welcome they’ll keep returning and they’ll end up buying books sooner or later. Filligranes in Brussels is similar in style but just can’t match Tattered Cover for space and that relaxed, and relaxing, atmosphere.

Here is the picture, Young Plains Indian, on display in the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art that, on balance, I liked the most because it is so evocative of much of what I have been blogging about during this part of our journey. The life of the artist, James Bama, from Manhattan, New York to Cody, Wyoming is 100 per cent American and so are his chosen themes, the rodeo, trappers, mountain men, native Indians, loosely bracketed as ‘Western art’. His particular form of photo realism may not be the greatest of art but I defy anybody not to be moved by the pride and optimism of the handsome young  man, dressed in all his tribal finery, in the picture. To get that luminous effect (it probably doesn’t come across in my copy), Bama used an old photograph and repainted it, thus further emphasising (to my mind, at least) the sense of lost promise for, as we all know, that young man’s proud optimism was misplaced.

We spent some of this afternoon in Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The new Liebeskind architecture (see the picture) makes you wonder how galleries can be arranged and sufficient light let into the building but, in fact, it all works very well. (By coincidence, N° 1 sprog had heard Liebeskind expounding on his architectural vision in the Bozar in Brussels in July.) The Liebeskind part is just the wing housing contemporary art, with the museum itself (Denver Art Museum)  spanning a street and housing a number of significant collections of American Indian, American and European Art. We were particularly interested in the American art, and more particularly American representations of America, such as Theodore Waddell’s repetitive theme of black splotches on various different backgrounds, recalling the massacred bison herds I blogged about earlier this morning. I was also interested by ‘lost’ artists Vance Kirkland’s space paintings – they seem somehow so familiar, as if they have been used on the covers of countless science fiction novels! But I’ll have to do a separate post to show the picture on display that I liked the most.

We grabbed a quick lunch in an ‘eatery’ near our hotel. ‘Where are you from?’ came the inevitable question from the waitress, curiosity no doubt picqued by my accent and that of my wife. ‘Belgium and Great Britain,’ we replied. ‘Oh, really?’ said our waitress. ‘My father comes from Belgium, from Mol, and my mother comes from Glasgow, though she’s got Irish roots, but I am an American.’ And she was, indeed, thoroughly American in accent and mannerisms. PS: The lady in the picture was not our waitress but her roots are definitely showing…

Our train pulled into Denver in the early morning. It is known as the ‘mile high’ city for the simple reason that it lies exactly one mile (1,610 metres) above sea level. Our guide insisted we make sure we are properly hydrated and take our time to acclimatise to the altitude, especially since we will be going even higher during our stay here. We set off imediately on a guided tour. The city – Colorado state’s capital – sports an eclectic mixture of architecture, from a scaled-down version of the Capitol (the State Capitol) to the numerous modern and post-modern skycrapers of the downtown district to the distinctive angularity of Daniel Liebskind’s extension of the modern art museum. Frequently, when you gaze down a road you can see the Rockies at the end of it. We’re getting into gold- and silver-digging territory now. Denver initially came to prominence as a staging post for prospectors headed west. Colfax Avenue, described to us as being the longest commercial thoroughfare in the US, was once the Blue Sky Indians’ way down to the plains to hunt bison, before becoming a trail blazed by prospectors to the gold fields. The coming of the railroad (1870) turned Denver into a boom town. Now, Denver owes its prosperity primarily to its status as a transport hub and a gateway to the winter and summer tourism in the area, but it is also an important university town, has developed potential as a convention host and has attracted some federal agencies, including the Mint. The city was, and remains, important to Barack Obama and the Democrats. This is where on 28 August 2008, at the Democratic National Convention at Invesco Field, then U.S. Senator Barack Obama accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. A frequent visitor on happier occasions, he was back a few days ago to visit the nearby tragic town of Aurora, but he’ll be back again for more political reasons on 3 October, when the first televised debate between the presidential candidates will take place at the University of Denver (tomorrow will mark the count-down of the last 100 days of the presidential campaign).