Ooh...Aah...

Hiking the Jud Wiebe Trail above Telluride.

Telluride Gondola service

Three cousin reunion - Kris, Susi and Rob

Paul, Susi, Art, Kris & Rob - Catching up!

Rob - our guide extraordinaire

Looking down at Ooh Aah Point - Grand Canyon

Ooh Aah Point

The Grand Canyon at last

Ooh…Aah….

            The phone rang one day late last summer and it was my cousin Susi from Houston.  “How would you and Art like to come to Telluride next summer to visit us for a week?” she said.  We did not need time to think it over as we’d heard about Telluride from Susi and Paul for years – a place they have been vacationing in for years.  A month later, we met again at a family wedding in Ann Arbor.  Rob and Kim, who were hosting the wedding, heard us making plans for Telluride the following summer and chimed in with, “you must come visit us in Flagstaff the next week and we’ll show you all the sights.  When we got home from the wedding we added “trip to Colorado and Arizona” to the 2014 calendar.

Eleven months later, with my nose pressed to the window of a small propeller airplane, I gazed over the tops of the jagged brown Rockies - the dark green of the canyons like pieces of velvet spread out for miles, and the clouds just beneath us looking like large pieces of floating cotton.  We bumped along at 24,000 ft. for the 39 min. flight to Montrose with occasional apologies from the cockpit for the rough ride.  I felt a familiar sense of adventure remembering the many airplanes I had been on as a child traveling back and forth to Buenos Aires in the 1950’s.  This was how travel used to be…smaller airplanes, slower speeds at lower altitudes but so much closer to the ground.  I also remembered a flight from San Jose, Costa Rica to Manuel Antonio in the early 1980’s and the spectacular snow capped Himalayas from my window on the propeller flight from Pokhara to Kathmandu in the late 2000’s.  As recently as last spring I was on a thirty-minute propeller flight from Charlotte to Asheville flying over the Blue Ridge Mountains. I do like knowing there are still a few of those old prop planes around.

The Franz Klammer Lodge owned by the Fairmount Hotel in Mountain Village is where we stayed at Susi and Paul’s condominium. At 9500 ft., it is the highest altitude I have been to with the exception of Cuzco, Machu Picchu and La Paz. Bolivia…but that was a lifetime ago! My slight headache went away in a day or so and I was eager to start exploring.  A free service of gondolas operate daily from Mountain Village up and over the mountains, down to the town Telluride – like riding a shuttle bus from place to place with breathtaking views, - that is, if you aren’t squeamish about heights.  There are special gondola cars for dog riders and Tadgh, Susi and Paul’s Wheaten terrier, is a veteran traveler.

Telluride was an old mining town in the late 1800’s and is in a canyon along the San Juan Mountain Range at 8,745 ft. above sea level.  Today it is a National Historic District, an ski resort and a summer vacation destination for hikers, campers, and mountain bikers. Telluride hosts many festivals such as the Telluride Film Festival that was happening when we were there. Laid out in a grid, the cross streets that are named after trees - Aspen, Oak, Fir, Pine, Spruce, and Willow – are lined with charming narrow two-story houses that once were lived in by miner’s families. Today they are million dollar properties with perfectly landscaped gardens.  A five or six block long Main Street has upscale boutiques, art galleries, outdoor clothing stores and ethnic restaurants and cafes. We even shopped at a Farmer’s Market for organic fruits and vegetables grown on the Colorado plateau.  It seems the perfect picturesque town and not as crowded as the popular resorts near Denver simply because it’s harder to get to. I couldn’t help but notice an air of friendliness everywhere that reminded me of small town Vermont. Locals gather outside the post office, the library, and the popular cafés to catch up on town happenings.  You can tell the locals from the vacationers just because they all know each other well.

We hiked the Jud Wiebe Trail one day that goes straight up to 10,000 ft. above the town of Telluride. The switchback trail comes to an open meadow and into a forest of graceful aspen trees, their silver dollar leaves fluttering in the clear mountain air. I was panting so hard when I reached the top I decided high altitude hiking is not for me.  I bowed out on the next up and down hike to Bear Creek but Susi, Paul, and Art were not fazed.

 

Susi and I started our mornings with Yoga classes in a studio on the top floor of the lodge with windows facing the mountains. We ended our days with many laughs over friendly bridge games – the girls challenging the guys and then one couple against the other. Our walks and daily excursions were punctuated late in the day with relaxation in one of the many hot tubs. My early birthday gift was a ninety-minute full body massage at the spa at the Franz Klammer.  Heavenly!

 On a rainy day Susi and Paul drove us to Ouray, Colorado another old mining town and vacation spot.  We stopped along the way in Ridgway for a lunch at the True Grit Café that was part of the original movie set for John Wayne’s “True Grit”.  Art kept saying as we woke up each day in the high Rockies and watched the sun set from the top of our lodge across the valley, “this all looks like a movie set…could it be real?”

Six days later at 6 am on a Sunday, we left with Susie and Paul and the Tadgh in their car headed south to New Mexico.  We stopped in Dolores at the Ponderosa Restaurant for an 8 a.m. breakfast.  Driving south out of the canyons and away from the mountains the landscape becomes flat, the land is gray and dusty with occasional shrubs and bizarre land formations in the distance - remnants of early volcanic formations.  Shacks, trailers, and small square houses with tin roofs dot the landscape, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  Driving through Cortez, past the Ute Mountain Casino, and onto the Navajo reservation lands that go for miles through southern Colorado and into New Mexico, I felt bereft at leaving behind the lush Telluride landscape.

            In four hours we found ourselves in a different world from where we started as we arrived in Gallup, New Mexico to Earl’s Restaurant where Rob had driven to meet us from Flagstaff.  The Navajo jewelry vendor’s tables were set up outside of Earl’s in the hot sunshine and Navajo families filled the tables indoors for Sunday lunch.  After lunch, Susi and Paul headed East towards Albuquerque and on to Houston and we headed West with Rob for Arizona.  As we drove down the flat straight highway I stared at the wide-open cloudless skies and empty landscape.  We were headed to Flagstaff and the foot of the San Francisco Peaks.

            My cousin Rob stepped into his role of “guide extraordinaire” for the next six days.  Kim had had to leave unexpectedly the week before to fly to Maine and care for youngest son Tyler recovering from an ankle operation.  I can imagine that the prospect of taking us everywhere on his own without Kim might have been daunting and yet, after all these months of planning he and we simply forged ahead as planned.  Rob had mapped the route to Flagstaff stopping at two historic “must see” sites – The Hubbell Trading Post and the La Posada Hotel.  The Hubbell Trading Post, between Gallup and Flagstaff, is a National Historic Site on the Navajo Reservation. The superb park ranger guide was a live walking history book spouting facts, figures, and stories with great enthusiasm and drawing us in to the history of this place!  Names like General James Carleton, Kit Carson, General William Sherman and John Lorenzo Hubbell were all part of this historic trading post on Navajo lands that was opened to support Navajo arts and crafts.  It is still a trading post today with many original hand woven rug, gorgeous turquoise and silver jewelry, pottery, and baskets for sale.

            Our next stop was Winslow, Arizona on Route #66 an unimpressive small town but home to the historic La Posada Hotel.  Designed by Mary Colter and owned by Fred Harvey a railroad magnate in the 1930’s it was built next to the railroad tracks and was a major stop on the Santa Fe Railroad.  Walking through the hotel that has been renovated like a museum and but still hosts tourists, I was transported back to my visits in Mexico. The hotel is a gem of Spanish art and architecture. La Posada seems an unlikely sight today in an ordinary town on the plains of northern Arizona but the freight trains still pass by as well as the daily Amtrak en route from Chicago to Los Angeles. If only La Posada closer we’d spend a few days there…the rates were amazingly reasonable and there was something unique about watching the trains go by.

            Flagstaff, at 7000 ft., was another surprise – a small city in northern Arizona surrounded by lush green pine forests at the foot of tall mountains.  Originally a camp where pioneers stopped on the way to California, today it is a college town - home to Northern Arizona University, - and a recreation area for hikers, campers, and tourists.  I felt wonderful waking up to clean clear air, cool mornings, and warm sunny days.  Rob took us to some of the local sites including The Riordan Mansion  (no comparison to Biltmore House)  and we learned the history of the Riordan brothers who came from the Midwest, started a successful logging industry as well as many other businesses and community improvements in Flagstaff.  We loved the Northern Arizona Museum where Kim is a docent and missed what might have been a highlight, of her guiding us through her museum. A superb special exhibit of large oil paintings by Shonto Begay introduced us to this Navajo painter we had not heard of.

            The red rock formations in and around Sedona, just an hour from Flagstaff are another “must see”.  We started on a hike to Cathedral Rock but the sun beat down relentlessly at 5000 ft.  and we did not make it very far. Instead we opted for a gourmet lunch outdoors at a French restaurant in Tlaquepaque.  Copied after Mexican architecture this arts and crafts village has tall shady trees, arches, fountains, plazas, iron railing verandas and decorative tiles. Sedona is full of serious art galleries full of luscious Native American sculptures and paintings. We saw several we could have easily brought home…but didn’t, of course.

            Seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time was a thrill.  Jaded world travelers that we are, Art kept saying “I had no idea we had such a natural wonder in our country.”  My cousin Rob is probably the best guide one could have to the Canyon.  An avid outdoorsman, he has hiked every trail with a 40-pound backpack and camped all over the canyon floor, for the past seven years he has lived out West.  As I write this, he is off on a 10-day camping trip on a creek off of the Colorado River working as a volunteer helping biologists and fish experts who are working to eradicate trout from the canyon streams in order to bring back certain endangered species of fish.

            The South rim of the Grand Canyon is a 75-mile drive from Flagstaff. Rob introduced us to the canyon with a hike to Ooh Aah Point, a rock formation that has a 360-degree view down into the canyon. It is less than a mile straight down from the head of the South Kaibab trail but I was nervous about managing the steep and narrow path. We took our time and I noticed other tourists doing the same thing most of whom were foreigners. Throughout the day I kept eavesdropping on bits of other languages from all over the world – a reminder that the Grand Canyon is a world renown destination.

 We reached Ooh Aah Point at 6440 ft. and found ourselves sharing photo taking time with Chinese tourists. From here we could look down several miles to the floor of the canyon and in the distance see the geologic layers that trace a history of the earth. Looking up to the rim of the canyon was the steep ridge we had just came along down a narrow switchback trail. It was only 1.8 miles down to “Ooh Aah Point” and back up to the rim and but took us nearly 2 hours.

 

We realized the enormity of the canyon and using the easy shuttle buses we stopped at number of lookout points never tiring of what we were seeing.  We spotted one or two rare condors, an endangered species that have been introduced back into the Grand Canyon environment.  It was only through binoculars that we could appreciate the rapids on the Colorado River, that runs through the Canyon, and finally understood what it might be like to take a rafting trip down the Colorado. We stopped at the historic El Tovar Hotel and sat out on one of the verandas to eat our picnic lunch.  El Tovar, sits on the rim of the canyon and was owned by the Fred Harvey Company, and is still a very popular resort hotel.  The sunset over the South rim was like a curtain coming down on our day and on our trip. It was time to head home.

Now that I’m home I carry the memory of all that spectacular scenery in my head.. I miss being surrounded by  tallmountains, with unusual rock formations that look like someone with an artistic eye carved them.  I miss the feel of the wide-open spaces, the very deep blue skies, the reddish orange color of the earth, and the pure mountain air at altitudes high above the Blue Ridge. I miss the warmth and love of my Iowa cousins who showed it all to us. Mostly, I miss what I now find myself calling the “ooh and aah “ of being in a new place.   But that is what keeps me travelling and, so… I’ll get on with planning our next adventure.