First of all some brief details on traveling Trail Ridge Road:
What: A 48-mile long route along the tops of the Rocky Mountains, crossing the Continental Divide, and allowing serene and amazing views of the tundra ecosystem, the mountain sky, and snowy cirques. (Cirques are those bowls near the mountain peaks that catch snow and keep it until August, or sometimes year round). You will also get the general experience of being unbelievably high up (12,000 feet) without having to hike or climb anything.
Where: About 85 miles from Denver, in Rocky Mountain National Park (RMNP).
When: From May to September, although closures are weather-related, not seasonal. The park will announce when the road opens in spring, and when it is scheduled to close in fall.
Why: Because it combines the thrill of being on a roller coaster (admittedly for longer and less intensely) with the introspection of entering a remote, natural world that most people have never seen before and many know almost nothing about (the tundra ecosystem).
How: Reserve a date and time to enter the park at Reservation.gov. This will mean going online a week or more in advance, more for weekends and times between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. On the day of your reservation, drive to the Fall River entrance of Rocky Mountain National Park, pay $25 per car, and follow the map that they give you to the intersection of Fall River Road to Trail Ridge Road. Turn right and go up the mountain.
Our Own Personal Trail Ridge Road Odyssey
Tiara wanted to go to over Trail Ridge Road a couple weekends ago, which is surprising when you reflect that she is afraid of heights. But then, I suppose, people do enjoy being scared out of their wits, especially if the actual risk to life and limb is sufficiently modest.
Trail Ridge Road follows, at least in part, a trail once used by indigenous people. The road winds up along steep, wooded hills with stonework curbs, in some places, to prevent you from going over, and in some other places, no such stonework. Whenever I see such apparatus at the side of the road, I wonder how they decided which curves would have stonework, and on which the drivers would be allowed to take their chances. Then I look at the railings, whether stone or metal, and I wonder just how hard a car would have to hit one to go through, or, if you like, how slow you’d have to be going that the rail would actually stop you.
That’s the kind of thinking that gets going in your head on Trail Ridge Road.
There’s a viewing deck halfway up (Rainbow Curve Overlook) where Leo’s friend Peter, one day two summers ago, before COVID, got out and stood looking out. The viewing deck did offer an impressive panorama, although I personally was afraid to get out of the car and sat the entire time holding the emergency break on just in case. As I watched, Peter’s floppy fedora, his fisherman’s hat, flew off. He watched it drift down like a parachute, down the clifflike hill, over the tops of trees, and into the forest below.
“Well that’s that,” he reflected. “Have to go back to REI and get another one.” He seemed singularly unbothered, and this moment seemed to sum up the experience of Trail Ridge Road: Looking over yawning chasms and being glad only your hat went over the edge.
This last week, Tiara and I (along with Emma, the three year old) drove on, into the tundra zone, where if you stop at Forest Canyon Overlook you might see woodchuck-like marmots, creatures who sleep almost all their lives and look like misshapen teddy bears. We then drove up across the tundra and through the Rock Gates before Tundra Communities Trailhead.
I drove and the road and rose up into the sky. The weathered and bare round tops of the hills seemed to depend on invisible strings, hanging under a blue heaven which seemed mysteriously close. It is here, while the road is closed in winter, that snow drifts pile as high as 35 feet.
Tiara and I didn’t stop at the Tundra Communities Overlook but drove along, without true fear at the height, because westward travel is the inside of the road, and we trundled on along the ridges of bald mountains and then past the Alpine Visitor Center, which was closed due to it not yet being 10 a.m. (It was still early. We had got into the park without a reservation by knowing a loophole: You can enter RMNP before 9 a.m. without a reservation as long as you don’t plan to visit Bear Lake). We drove on down the road over the Continental Divide and through woods, first healthy ones and then, after the Continental Divide (Milner Pass, about 10,000 feet) burnt ones from the Cameron Peak Fire of 2020. As we drove through the blackened tree trunks, Tiara told me about a 13 year old who came into the pediatrics office thinking she might be pregnant.
“I tried really hard to stay calm and professional,” Tiara said. “I told her all right, we’d do a pregnancy test. I do those all the time, of course, but never on a girl this young.”
“I was panicking, lest it be true.” This story is a little more shocking than Tiara’s usual reports of seizures and autism and children with unreliable parents. I can’t get distracted. I’m driving. I keep my eyes on the road. A twenty mph curve winds to the left.
“The test was negative,” Tiara continued. “I ended up referring her to Terry anyway, so she could get Norplant. That’s what we usually do … it’s super reliable and they don’t have to remember anything.”
She finishes, “I feel like a bad Catholic. What do you think?”
I look out the window at the trees, but only for a second. Often there’s a moral dimension with these stories that Tiara tells when we go out for the day, but not often as stark a one as this. I feel suddenly tired. Tiara is only 32. She still frets about moral conundrums that I have long ago decided are hopeless. Ideological purity gets you in trouble.
“I think it would be unfair to deny her the remedies that are expected to be available for someone in this culture.” I feel no guilt when I say this, just a distant anger that one really doesn’t have a choice about their opinion on this, if they are an everyday professional and they want to survive. And our job as humans is to survive. It’s a rough world out there, for teenagers and doctors both.
Tiara is thoughtful. She knows that on one level, I’m absolutely right, but as a physician, she is troubled, because having sex with you’re 13 and possibly getting pregnant is a dangerous way to live even with the most progressive, supportive medical care around. And being a doctor doesn’t mean you get to weigh in on things like this. You come in after there’s trouble of one type or another, generally, and are told, like an auto mechanic, to fix whatever it is.
We drive around another switchback, a really tight one to the right, 15 mph. “It’s not always easy, working in the service of everyday people,” I say. Because, of course, I work with everyday people too. The similarities with Tiara’s awareness and my own worries at work are considerable. Everyday people, they have situations that sometimes we university types don’t quite understand. The everyday world is harsh. Somehow, that’s part of what we’re studying on this road. Perhaps, looking at the harshness of this geography, we are reflecting that our ordered and controlled lives are the anomaly, not the rule. In people as well as nature.
At the Grand Lake Entrance, at the far side of the road, there was a sign: No re-entrance without pass. We didn’t have a pass; we got in without one using the early entrance loophole. A ranger was standing outside the kiosk on the Grand Lake incoming side, which had no customers. Cars were coming down from Trail Ridge Road and were turning around, including a bright red, late model Firebird driven by a young man, a girl riding with him on the passenger side, which parked behind us as we pulled over. Like us, no doubt, they were trying to figure out what to do. I got out.
“How far to the Visitor Center?” I ask the ranger, who wears a forage cap and a gray Lincoln beard.
“Quarter mile.”
“Well can we walk?”
“You can’t come back in once you leave without a pass.”
“Even without a car?”
“Nope.”
“How far is it around to Denver?”
“Three and a half hours.”
“Aw Jeez. And you can’t even let us walk to the Visitor Center? Well that’s pretty harsh.”
“There’s too many people, Lady. Just too many people.”
“Well thanks for the info.” I turn to go back, open the car door.
“No go,” I say to Tiara. “We’ll just have to drive back and go to the Alpine Visitor Center instead.” We pull out going back up towards the pass and the Firebird follows us, no doubt assuming that, whatever the ranger said, it applies to them too, and he’s right. We drive through the burned-out woods again. Trees are black and stripped of their branches, and some are bowed into arches; the heat has warped them into blackened arcs the shape of rainbows. The ground is black with ash, and here and there you can see the granite bedrock worn through, flat and lumpy, the only part of the landscape impervious to the searing heat.
“Too many people, he said,” I report to Tiara. “Well I don’t know about that. I mean I had six kids but they’re all the right kind of people. We should have told someone else not to have kids. (In fact, I didn’t feel I should have to, I had three close friends and one family member who voluntarily, dedicatedly had none, which is what I say when anyone tries to bully me about having too many children.)
We drive back up, past the winding part in the forest, over Milner Pass and up higher and higher. The air thins out. We stop at Alpine Visitor Center, shop in the gift shop, get a map of the points of interest on the Road ($2, it’s a bargain) and then decide to hike up the Machu PIcchu look-alike stairway to the top of this particular mountain.
I go up without too much difficulty and Emma skips up the stairs laughing. But climbing to the top of a promontory, Tiara, who’s pregnant with her third, and besides that she has asthma, is out of breath. Below us, cirques and ravines began the work of collecting the water that will run down to both the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. “Just go ahead with Emma, I’ll catch up,” Tiara says.
Emma and I quickly reach the top. We begin to climb the rock at the pinnacle. Two South Asian guys are on the rock with us, and they comment on Emma’s cuteness, they ask how old she is. A conversation ensues. “Where are you all from?”
“California,” one guy says. His face is round, as are his dark glasses, he looks convivial, outgoing. “We came up for the weekend.”
They have accents, though. They are foreign born.
“I am from California,” I say. “And Emma’s mother too, We were both born there. Have you been there long?” A polite way of saying “where are you really from?”
“Well, no, we were in Texas. And New Jersey.”
“Texas! We were in Texas.”
“Where?”
“Fort Worth. Denton. Houston. Small world. You know Colorado is better than Texas. The people here, they’re politically active. They keep things fair. You get paid better.”
The young guys from California nod, but I’m not sure they understand what I’m saying. After we climb down, I reflect that of course, America is so different than South Asia that the distinctions I’m making between states and laws and tax rates in the U.S. may not be very obvious to them. And actually, they’re not obvious to people who’ve been here since birth, either. Try to explain to a layman what a regressive tax is.
But I like the young men. I think of the ranger, “Too many people, Lady.” Does he mean that I shouldn’t have had all those kids? Or that the South Asian guys should not have been let in this country? I don’t like either possibility. Anyway, as predicted for decades, birth rates are now falling, not just in the developed world, but worldwide. So if we can just live long enough to see it, the problem may be solved.
There’s a kind of irony in that last sentence, but I won’t get into it.
We bundle Emma into the back of the Subaru Outback (which is the unofficial Colorado State vehicle) and start the drive back down. We are on the outside of the curves, now, and sweeping vistas of tundra drop just a foot or two from the edge of the road. No barriers here, just yellow late summer tundra and blue sky right above it. Tiara starts telling me something else, but I have to stop her. “I need to concentrate,.” I say.
She draws a breath. I think she was talking because she was nervous and talking was calming her, but it was making me more tense. And I’m driving, I can’t be tense.
Facing us, a line of cars comes steadily up the hill, passing close beside on the two lane road. There’s not a tree for miles. The undulating road, the round, weathered tops of the mountains, the thin air, Emma playing in the back with a stuffed elk I bought her at the gift shop … it’s all so incredibly beautiful. But certain parts of that panorama are also scary. Like life, you know. You can’t explain the emotions that go through you as you drive across the summits of these mountains. It’s a deep and spiritual peace. Combined with a desire to finish the journey so you’ll be 100% sure of not dying by driving off a cliff.
But I remind myself, as I drive, two hands on the wheel, at 15 miles per hour, a speed which is not troubling to the cars behind me because they, like me, see that an error on this stretch of road would be catastrophic and so they, too, wish to travel only fifteen miles per hour, I remind myself not to hurry through the experiences of this life. We only go through each one once. And they’re worth having. Even the scary ones. Even the bad ones.
And that mystical moment on the road is worth a lot.
I hope we are able to keep RMNP and Trail Ridge Road open to lots of people, the ranger at Grand Lake’s comment notwithstanding. Not just to Tiara, my other kids, the guys from South Asia and the thirteen year old girl from the pediatrics office, but like, everyone. I mean, there’s probably a lot of people that need the experience of feeling like they’re inches from death. Even though, the truth is, we’re all just exactly that, just most of the time we don’t think about it. And like the Trail Ridge Road itself, you’ll never know what death or anything else is like, unless you go.
