Western Road Trip

The Road West: Can there be any other direction out of Missouri?  

The East has the history, the farms, the hardwood forests, the figurative and literal green.   But the American West captures the nation’s imagination and momentum, its majesty and myth.  More than a geographic place, the American West means the Great Wide Open.  And two-lane highways on which to hightail it.

St. Louis to Kansas City

St. Louis lays claim to the Gateway to the West, but that territory and state of mind lie far beyond America’s last eastern city.  Interstate 70 heads left on the map, an awful four-lane road, marred by seismic semis, lined with sight blocking, soul mocking billboards, congested with local ingress/egress traffic where cars and trucks jockey for position. This half-mile wide swath of road remains a high-speed means to an end, and nothing more.

Interstate 70’s vehicular rhythm assault nears its end in Kansas City, the self-proclaimed first western city. The tale of two cities differ more than a common state name suggests with differences underscored by dissimilar western ties.  Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery provisioned in St. Louis, and headed west by streaming the Missouri River.  Decades later, Kansas City claimed the nation’s western gate when intrepid pioneers embarked by wagon from Westport along the Santa Fe Trail.

Today, the cities’ denizens eye the other warily, with older brother slighting upstart sibling, while the younger lays claim to a new urban paradigm.   St. Louis possesses the history, red brick and old-style neighborhoods, soulful city parks and, befitting its age, more classic architecture—at least in areas that avoided rust belt corrosion.  St. Louis banks old eastern money traditions, though parochialism weighs it down.

Conversely, Kansas City grew up with the automobile, its boulevards and neighborhoods fit together in a way that gives it a more progressive feel whose future seems brighter, though history duller than its eastern kin.  As evinced by its Plaza built in a Spanish architectural style with an array of restaurants and shops, KC seems a more pleasant place to stroll with a cleaner and safer environ.

The cities maintain music traditions, with KC known for jazz. The Lou tunes blue; it even named their hockey club the Blues.  Kansas City never warmed to ice hockey, but abounds in basketball.  St. Louis’ pins its identity with their Cardinals, a love that dates nigh 150 years back when its younger sibling still penned cattle. But the late-blooming western kin secured big league status—and the city’s first and eternal love—when the upstart Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 1970, and again in 2020.

Regardless of the merits of either side of the state, the real West lurks beyond the KC Metro area, which now spills into Johnson County, Kansas.  That one-time farmland now parks three-car garages, a microcosm of suburban sprawl spreading throughout the nation.

Kansas

The southwestern bend of Interstate 35 finally outruns congestion to reach the great wide open.  Some maintain that the West begins with mountains majesty, but au contraire.  The West exists as a state of mind that begins in the Great Plains; a place of American lore, with cowboys and cattle drives, where great Native American tribes and buffalo roamed.  Running from Alberta Canada to North Texas, the Great Plains 500,000 square miles remain sparsely populated where open two-lane roads avail reliable rates of speed.

A burgeoning population whittles away at two-lane highways with so many old US Routes re-figured to four lane interstate facsimiles.  Not all roadways warrant such expansion.  Some less traveled two-lane routes incorporate a third ‘passing’ lanes at a fraction of the cost of four-lane highways.  But the concrete cartel derives revenue by the cement mixer load, and prefers the chute wide-open to pour expansive concrete swaths that cost more than mere money.

Two lane highways more closely follow the contours of the land, their curves less sweeping, their rises and falls more in tune with the landscape as opposed to interstates, which scour and flatten the land. Two-lane roads comport to the earth rather than comporting the earth to the road.  Exploratory travelers seek them out.

At Emporia, two-lane US 50 takes the traveler through the near-treeless Flint Hills where buffalo once roamed, and the deer and the antelope range.  As its name suggests, the Flint Hills impedes the plow so much of the land remains in pre-settlement blues-stem pastoral splendor.

Located just north of Cottonwood Falls, the Circle Z Bar Ranch–with its Victorian home and two-story barn both built of native Kansas limestone–and the surrounding Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve merit a look-see and a stroll.  When cirrus clouds present, the setting sun streaks wispy clouds an amalgam of orange and reddish hues.   

The West reveals its subtle splendor at dawn’s early light where US 54 leaves Wichita behind.  The open spaces fills one’s head as the rising sun spreads its yellow light across empty flat lands, the road crossing and re-crossing the meandering Necesumah River.  Sunlight reflects off distant silos that mark the towns, gleaming parallel rail lines that connect them.   Billboards conspicuous by their absence. 

Route 54 runs right on through the villages rather than by-passing them, slowdowns drop speeds to 30 per as the mind speeds up to absorb irregular towns devoid of chain stores, where instead churches, schools and small businesses hug the road.  Movement’s magnetic pull proves too strong to stop where time stands still.  

Forking off and re-joining US 50, the road gallops west, getting in and out of Dodge, circling round Garden City, passing through lonely Holcumb, the stark setting for Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.  Clock watchers drew the western time zone line across the Sunflower State’s far end in Hamilton County whose denizens cede later sunsets in exchange for earlier sunrises.   But the land remains unconvinced as the road rolls on as the high plains rise imperceptibly in elevation to meet the mountains some 200 hundred miles hence.

Colorado

Hispanic touches adorn Lamar’s tree-lined streets, a thirsty land hydrated by water diverted from the AR-ken-saw River, rather than the Ar-KAN-sas as Jayhawkers call it.  Subtle differences tell Dorothy and Toto that they are not in Kansas anymore, but the Great Plains continue on and on anyway. 

The road meets La Junta, the junction, so named for the rail yard that begat the town.  Or did the egg ranchero come first?  Until now, the road paralleled the Sante Fe Trail, which followed the river’s capricious course.  The trail’s namesake railroad followed suit when it spiked adjacent track.  Map-dotting towns grew astride the rails.  Dirt roads followed that presaged pavement’s placement on which we roll.

Colorado Route 10 veers on a 45-degree southwesterly route out of La Junta, a straight crow-fly road traversing the arid, beige earth of sagebrush and barbwire that pen the High Plains, a barren expanse as far as the eye cares to see.  The road finds Walsenburg where it links US 160, a scenic two-laner that climbs over three divide passes, as it traverses along southern Colorado’s alpine forests until it reaches the Colorado Plateau beyond Durango. 

Great Sand Dunes

The Great Sand Dunes loom 30 miles beyond the La Veta Pass.   The word ‘great’ long lost its gravitas, being greatly overused.  But the G-word retains grit here.   Locals refer to this National Park simply as The Dunes, great and sand being two words too many.  

Wind swept sand builds steep drifts and deep basins, each crest and drop follows another, reaching 740 feet above the flats extending 50 square miles.  Wedged at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Dunes play sand volleyball, where prevailing winds push billions of sand granules up and away to the mountain passes, and north storm winds and water runoff carried by Medano Creek volley them back. The unrelenting movement yields a sandy equilibrium.  The Dunes basic shapes never change.

The early morning sun begins its climb behind the Sangre de Cristo Mountains casting The Dunes in soft sunlight and peaceful shadows.  A morning climb up the steep, feet-shifting sands means two steps forward, one step back.  Star Dune’s high point offers views of a sea of undulating sand extending for miles.  Looking east, the pinion flats lie at the base of the Sangre de Cristo with 14 pointers Crestone Peak and Mt. Blanca rising up behind and dominating the panorama.  Returning down the steep-sloped Dunes to the pinion flats means letting gravity do the work with two steps down, the third step free. 

Outside the Park, a steep windy gravel road leads to the Zapata Lake Trail, a challenging nine mile round trip day hike that begins at 9000 feet, with a 3000-foot elevation gain.  Big horn sheep graze above the tree line.  At 12,000 feet, Zapata’s alpine lake sits in stunning repose reflecting the blue sky and towering peaks that hem its shore.     

Wolf Creek Pass and Beyond.

Wolf Creek Pass marks the Continental Divide, the road’s apex measuring 10,586 feet above sea level.  Moisture falling east of the divide runs to the Gulf; west of the line runs to the Pacific.  Happenstance provides our own divides.   Pivot points—education and career forks, chance meetings with a future spouse—direct life’s course like rain clouds moved by whimsical winds to drop moisture on either side of the continental divide.

Side roads off the highway beyond the pass lead to the Weminuche Wilderness trailheads in the San Juan Mountains.  Author Phillip Caputo wrote that ‘a tourist is out to see sights, which have been enumerated for him in a guidebook’. 

Backpackers leave the guidebook and the crowd behind, exchanged for a topographical map and solitude costing 45 pounds strapped to the back.  A hike through dense forests, along ledges above cascading streams, a romp through flowering mountain meadows, and still more strenuous climbs to reach the summit along the continental divide trail.   Glorious views of purple mountain majesty, immersed in the rarified air that separates heaven and earth make for hard-earned exhilaration.  

Day hikers find a mid-mountain trail in a box canyon that follows the Piedra River more to their liking.  The hidden trail provides solace for both a hardcore mountaineer and soft shoe tender foot.

Mountain ascents wreck legs; descents blister feet.  Both deserve a hot and cold break at Pagosa Springs. The Springs Resort boasts that “Potassium, Magnesium, Zinc, Lithium, Iron, Manganese…. our geothermal waters contain 13 minerals in all, are scientifically proven to promote healthy skin, lower blood pressure, strengthen bones and muscles, increase energy and much more.”  Believe it, or not.  In any event, a hot soak feels good.

The old Spa Hotel that pre-dates mass tourism offers quaint lodging for the price of a figurative soaking.  Fortunately, the springs remain available to non-lodging commoners for a hot spa immersion. A short walk from the Springs leads to concessionaire who rents tubes and provides a bus ride upstream for a cold-water float down the San Juan River back to the spa for a return hot dip.  Repeat as necessary.

Durango & Mesa Verde

Durango, a tourist town worth seeing anyway.  A café waitress plops down a mountain breakfast that only a burly trucker could consume.   A walk-by bookstore displays William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways. Its opening lines motor off with the carburetor wide open: 

“A good road book, like Kerouac’s On the Road and Zen, and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fills the dead time like Lazarus.”

Jack Kerouac’s referenced book focuses on escape and escapades, finding oneself via the unencumbered joy of the journey itself.  Robert Pirsig chronicles his motorcycle journey of discovery of inner self and life’s meaning.  Least Heat Moon found himself through others he met along the back roads, which he calls blue highways.  All three authors illuminate the road of life in their own unique fashion.

The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gage Railroad negotiates mountain passes, toe-holds narrow ledges above the agitated Animas River with its white water hurtling over and around its boulder strewn course. Tickets for the northern trek along the rails to Silverton requires more gold than silver, but worth the price.

Along the graded landscape
balanced on ballast
spiked astride
perpendicular ties
lies aligned
parallel lines
of forged steel rails.

Mesa Verde beckons west of Durango.  The national park’s winding road from valley floor to mesa top takes 45 minutes.  Families attest that ghosts on this meandering route haunt siblings into unrelenting brouhahas.   

Ancestral Puebloans built cliff dwellings into the sides of the cliffs or atop the mesas, some of them 1500 years old. Great names all: The Square Tower House; Oak Tree House; Fire Temple; Sun Temple; and the Cliff Palace.

 A motel layover in Cortez feels like jack-braking on the road’s nomadic pull after double-timed campsites setups and shutdowns, with Spartan meals that serve only to fuel the next adventure. Motels’ comforting beds and showers and neighboring restaurants recharge batteries, but lodgers oft lose the race with the sun.

New Mexico

Old Route 66 gallops into Gallup, a town with comforting grit that only time with history on its side provides.   Route 66 tickles the imagination where extant two-lane glory remains, a whole ‘nother journey where people ride the mother road in search of youth on an age-old road.   A local Mexican diner oddly named Jerry’s filled with locals means good food with hefty entrees that fill even a minor’s hollow leg. 

Arizona

A blue bird day of blue skies instills the driver with confidence to merge onto a blue highway off Arizona Route 3’s beaten path.  These unmarked roads run deep into the Hopi/Navaho reservations’ outsized interior, north by northwest—unsigned gravel roads leading here, there, somewhere in a spacious land, where pale faces with Missouri tags stick out like summer snow.   Like Lewis & Clark, finding the way requires native assistance.  Following a friendly to the main road, his bumper sticker read:  ‘Indians had bad immigration laws.’  Perhaps Twain had it right when he wrote in Pudd’nhead Wilson:  “Wasn’t it great to discover America.  Wouldn’t it be better if we hadn’t.”

A blank spot on the road 60 years ago, Page AZ grew out of the desert for the dam that flooded Glen Canyon. The marina docks speedboats and cruisers that ply waters where eons-old geological wonders lie newly hidden beneath the artificial lake.  Page looks its age, an empty history populated with rootless folk serving vacationing boaters.   A surfeit of neon quaffs its share of the dam’s electro-capacity. Page carries more chains per capita than a Dallas suburb.  Eleven hours behind the wheel takes its toll.   Felled by a Super 8.

Utah

Turn the Page, up and out at day break with the sun at one’s back, tacking along the shadows of Vermillion Cliffs en route to Zion National Park.  An RV’s hind end looms, which dictates a slower pace until a gap presents itself for a zoom by.  Deemed Ice Cream Trucks, the moniker stuck in days of yore when pickups carried campers in their truck beds reminisce of Mister Softy ice cream lorries that once roamed the neighborhood.

Ironically, many of these home-on-wheels bear the name Winnebago, a product label poached from a Native American tribe for the sturdiness the word connotes. The Winnebago people once dominated Lake Michigan’s western shores and Upper Peninsula, but American expansion pushed them off their land to a reservation in Nebraska. The mobile home namesake has about as much in common with the Winnebago tribe as Greenland has with lush grasslands.  Like the white man’s covered wagons before it, RV’s continue to multiply.

Zion National Park

It takes a better pen than man possesses to describe Zion.  The park’s canyon road runs a serpentine path through tunnels and gooseneck turns to reach the valley.   The Virgin River meanders through the deep canyon, walled on both sides by 2000-foot mesas.  Notable geographical features include the Virgin River Narrows, with sheer vertical red walls; Hidden Canyon; Angels Landing, Great White Throne, Checkerboard Mesa and The Three Patriarchs.  The names evoke the awe of Zion’s majesty.

National Parks beg crowd avoidance.  We ‘over-love’ our parks, our numbers stressing the eco-system and pressing the infrastructure.  The proximity of booming Las Vegas erased the park’s one-time isolation.  Indeed, Zion holds loads of gawkers, so best to tour early morning, nosh at noon, then chill with a dip in the Virgin River.  Re-enter the fray when numbers drop in late afternoon and on through dusk’s fading light. 

An exit from the park leads to a high side mesa gravel road back inside the park boundary to the Cable Mountain trailhead. A three-mile trek ends at the mesa’s edge 2000 feet above the canyon floor, a view of Angel’s Landing opposite.  Axe men bestowed this broad mesa with the appellation when they employed a cable system to lower cut timber from mesa top down to Zion valley.  A wooden replica hoist remains bearing a plaque that recounts the day when lightning struck the turn-of-the century original.

The calm dry dessert air seems so light that a bird’s wayward feather could not find terra without a string to pull it down.  The Gibbons moon half-smiled as the evening sky surrendered to a star-filled night.  No need for a tent.

But Thor grumbled in the wee hours; his thunder echoed off the canyon walls.  An abbreviated rain followed.  Most drops evaporated into thin air; the balance bounced off a pulled-over tent fly employed as makeshift cover.  Disconcerting lightning bolts flashed near this high point amidst magnetic pine trees, and the aforesaid plaque that told of an earlier lightning strike.  The rain passed as quickly as it came, and the stars twinkled again, amused with the bemused.

Highway 89 runs due north beyond Zion, running in the shadow of the ubiquitous red rock flanking the valley road into Panguitch, an old town that maintains its crust.  The Cowboy Diner serves java with tart-sweet rhubarb pie as mounted game heads stare down upon the human grazers.  Nothing finer than the simple things in life.   

Bryce

At Red Canyon, three French maidens, one a real eye-catcher with tight shorts and gold arched shoes better fit for a model’s runway inquired:   “Was Zeye-oun’ crowded?”    A tutorial on crowd avoidance went astray in translation.

Bryce Canyon sits atop a table cliff of the Colorado Plateau. An eight-mile hike on aptly named Fairyland loop trail embarked before eight.   Hoodoos are pillars or spires of rocks in fantastic shapes, an amalgam of reds, oranges and yellows colors.  Walt Disney himself could not replicate their splendor.  I am the Walrus:  Hoodoo Ca-choo

The park brochure describes the erosion process that created the Hoodoos:  “Carrying dirt and gravel, rushing waters gully the edges and steep slopes of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.  Over time tall, thin ridges called fins emerge.  Fins erode into pinnacles and spires called hoodoos that, weakening and falling, add their colors to the hills below.”  

Thousands of colorful, irregularly shaped and fantastically colored spires ranging from 5 to 150 feet tall adorn the park.  A jaunt from mesa top to the valley floor, and back again stands alone as the most surreal peregrination of colors and shapes like no other.

Grand Stair Case-Escalante and Capitol Reef

Highway 12 carves its way 122-mile route through the infinite Grand Stair Case-Escalante, providing wonderful views and unending smiles.  Established in 1996 as a national monument, the Staircase encompasses 1.9 million acres, the largest—and most isolated —national monument in the lower 48.  

Mining companies and some Utahans objected to the so-called federal land grab.  Former President Trump reduced the Staircase’s man-drawn boundaries in half; President Biden reinstated the original boundaries.   Who knows the future of this timeless land?

As its name suggests, the Grand Staircase steps down as it were from Boulder Mountain to the Grand Canyon.  Eroded by millennia, this vast land consists of benches, terraces and plateaus, with cliffs of distinctive color, sandstone labyrinths and slot canyons.  Hiking remains the best way to experience this unique land.  Summer’s aridity proves challenging for those who explore.  Sufficient water a must; the desert punishes aqua errors with extreme prejudice.

Highway 12 runs up to Capitol Reef, a park known for its terrestrial creased Waterpocket Fold, golden sandstone and eye-arresting rock formations.   Pioneers settled in Fruita where they created an irrigated oasis to plant orchards amidst the red rock country. Their work still bears fruit while providing a shaded place to erect a tent.   A brief downpour turns the Fremont River into a red torrent.  Rain comes and goes in a hurry in the Utah desert.  

Road Home via Colorado

Alas, the eastbound highway sign points the direction home, linking up to Interstate 70, and on into Colorado.  Mountain gaps determine the highway’s course, so much of the road runs along the majestic Colorado River.  Construction of Interstate 70 through spectacular Glenwood Canyon proved an engineering marvel.  But tourists and increasing local populace require maintaining one’s vehicle within traffic’s cadence.  Best to pour onto this road early in order to serenely sip this stretch of high-speed interstate highway.

Beyond the mountain villas of Vail, Frisco, and Silverthorne, the drive towards Denver turns into a downhill, high-speed slalom course of vehicle weaving, which oft slows bumper-to-bumper on weekend evenings.   This length of the road conjures the story of The Tragedy of the Commons. Too many have seen nirvana, and want a piece of their own.  There seems to be no abatement in construction.  The Crane roosts as Colorado’s new ‘state bird’, their presence seen everywhere.

Interstate monotony beckons beyond Denver.  Once fixed aboard that broad-backed four-lane highway means adventure’s end.  But 50 miles east near Strasburg, Route 36 veers off I-70 for a stay of execution.  That lonely two-lane highway runs its course into Kansas extending the trip’s life force.  

Kansas.  Again.

The Sunflower State collects pejoratives from Interstate 70 travelers who curse its 400 plus mile length as they covet the start of vacation beyond its borders.  They find the race home via that same non-descript interstate mind numbing.  But in their haste, they miss the chance to find the true Land of Ah’s discovered on I-70’s parallel roads via Routes 36 or Route 24, or a meander on parallel state roads like the out-of-the way Sunflower Hwy 9.  

With the world filling up around us, these two-laners deliver casual pacing along empty space vistas.  Kitsch survives in places like the Garden of Eden in Lucas, or the largest ball of twine in Cawker City.  Historic places like St. Fidelis, “Cathedral of the Plains” in Victoria, and Fort Hayes present themselves for a leg stretch and contemplation for those exiting the interstate race of rats.

Driving at night beneath a Great Plains waning moon, one recalls the words from William Heat-Moon: 

“A tourist makes a deeper penetration into the landscape and into people’s lives. The traveler is moving slower, and many times on foot rather than with wheels. Wheels can turn a traveler into a tourist very quickly.” 

Time enough to hustle home.  Once locked onto the interstate in Lawrence, we become slack jawed tourists, eyeing the next stack of vehicles to jockey.  

Home to Missouri

A last supper beckons at one of the many KC BBQ joints.  Step inside Gates to be greeted with “Meh I hep you’; served a slab of ribs; handed a boxed case of sauce for the road.  Ingress I-70 aboard the final a 250-mile, four-lane swath of concrete that serves as a means to an end of the road trip, where one’s mind returns home well before the body.