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DAY 8 – Sunday, March 21
START: Garden City, KS
END: Pitkin, CO
MILEAGE: 391 miles

HIGHLIGHTS: Rocky Mountains, Pitkin Hostel

After a week on the road, I was getting pretty good at loading and unloading the car every morning and night.  The first couple of days were tricky.  I kept trying to figure out a way to keep anything and everything we might ever possibly want during the day organized in its own special place within arms reach inside the car.  I guess I didn’t realize just how small a radius my arm had while reaching blindly behind me doing 75m.p.h.  No matter how hard I tried, everything always ended up getting scattered everywhere and I kept frustrating myself trying to compartmentalize it all.

Once I started thinking of this trip like a camping trip, it made everything easier.  When you’re backpacking, you just accept the fact that you’ll be carrying everything you need for several days on your back. As such, you can only keep a bare minimum of items instantly accessible: water, map, compass, and maybe a few strips of beef jerky in your pocket.  Everything else – food, knife, stove, first aid kit, clothes – is buried inside your pack.  And since you have to distribute the weight in a certain way, you can’t necessarily keep the items you use more often near the top.  That means whenever you need something, you have to stop, take the pack off, open it up, dig through it for whatever, then repack, zip up and hoist that heavy sumbitch onto your back again.  It’s a pain, but if you’re going to backpack, you just accept that fact of life and make do.

I finally accepted that fact about the road trip and saved myself a lot of aggravation.  Our big duffel bags full of clothes were shoved into the trunk next to our big box full of food.  With the exception of a few choice vittles that we kept in the front seat with us, we had to stop the car and open the trunk every time we wanted a different snack.  Stuffed into the trunk’s remaining nooks and crannies were our overnight bags, bathroom bags, winter jackets, a radio, my laptop computer, an emergency roadside kit and all necessary automobile fluids. 

In the back seat on the passenger side was our cooler, which we filled with Gatorade and water, as well as the occasional stick of string cheese and jar of grape jelly.  It wasn’t safely accessible from the front seat, so if we were thirsty, we had to get out and open the back door.  The rest of the drinks were jammed behind the driver’s seat under a spare blanket.  Every morning and periodically throughout the day I would dig underneath the blanket and transfer new drinks from the floor to the cooler.  Pillows, blankets, sweatshirts and backpacks occupied the back seat on the driver’s side, squashed down just enough so I could see out the back window. 

Accessibly sandwiched in the middle of the back seat was a box containing our “survival gear” – travel books, city maps, road journals, Motel 6 and Super 8 directories, binoculars, Lauren’s purse, magazines, pens, highlighters and Mad Libs.  On top of all that was our trusty Rand McNally road atlas.  Our film camera sat wedged between the travel box and the center console, which was just big enough to store my wallet and our pocket-sized digital camera.  CD’s and comedy tapes resided in the side compartments while our cell phones and sunglasses sat on a sticky pad on the dash.  Only the bare necessities, things we might need at a moment’s notice, were within easy reach from the front seat.  Everything else required us to shuffle off the proverbial backpack and dig it out.

Every night, I would haul our overnight bags, cameras, travel box and cooler out of the car and into the hotel.  If we were lucky enough to get a room with a refrigerator, all the contents of the cooler would go inside.  The icepacks never completely refroze in that tiny freezer compartment, but they came close.  On the nights when we weren’t so fortunate, I would make several trips to the ice machine and turn our sink into a makeshift fridge.  Our overnight bags contained enough clothes to last about three days, so every couple of nights I also had to haul in our two huge duffel bags to replenish them.  Every morning while Lauren was getting ready, I hauled everything back outside and began the now-methodical task of packing the car all over again.  By the start of the second week, I had it down to a science. 

The car was re-packed and we were on the road today by nine.  We had originally intended to check out a local church for some Sunday worship, but we were planning to make it all the way to Pitkin, Colorado, almost four hundred miles away, by day’s end.  So instead of church, we opted to make use of the dozen or so Praise and Worship CD’s we had in the side compartments.  We headed west on U.S. Route 50 toward Colorado, singing along as we went.  With few exceptions, the road was so straight and devoid of traffic, that I was able set the car to cruise control and guide it with my knees so I could eat my morning oatmeal with both hands for a change. 

We were out of Kansas in less than an hour and from the moment we crossed the border it was obvious that we had left Middle America and were officially in the West.  The “Leaving Kansas” sign was your typical metal highway marker with reflective paint.  The hand-painted wooden sign welcoming us to Colorado looked as though it belonged at the entrance of a national park.  Made with wooden planks nailed to thick wooden fence posts and painted brown, the sign definitely had a western – even an OLD West – look about it.  Rather than wood and aluminum siding, all the houses in the first town we came to were built with that stucco material that ninety percent of the buildings in California seem to be made of.  No longer spaced far apart like everything in Kansas, each town we entered had a compact main street shaded by trees with all the buildings crunched right up next to one another.

Even the landscape changed the moment we crossed into Colorado.  Kansas had fertile farmland everywhere you looked, with only grass and soil as far as the eye could see.  Colorado almost had the look of California’s high desert with lots of shrubby bushes and chaparral growing out of the ground that was more dust and rocks than soil.  And trees.  There were virtually no trees in Kansas.  Now all of a sudden they were peppering the landscape.  Something just didn’t seem right about all this.  We hadn’t crossed any kind of natural boundary like a river or mountain range.  The border between Kansas and Colorado is a straight imaginary line drawn by men.  How could everything right down to the landscape have changed by crossing it?  Was it just that Kansas had decreed itself a farming state and they took steps to keep it that way?  Maybe the people in Kansas do like the Indians used to do and burn off the grass every year to prevent things like bushes and trees from growing?  Maybe the people in Colorado, who don’t depend as much on farming, never take the time.

As if to accentuate the point that we were now in the west, we ran over a ball of tumbleweed as it blew across the road.

After a couple hours, we began to see the faint outline of the Rocky Mountains in the distance.  Hazy and purple, one might have initially mistaken them for low-lying clouds.  The farther we drove, the clearer they became, a giant wall slashing across the countryside shooting straight up out of the plains.

We stopped for some forgettable burritos and enchiladas at a Mexican restaurant in Canon City at the base of the mountains.  While Canon City makes some of its money off of tourism, its biggest revenue comes from something much more ominous: prisons.  With nine state and four federal prisons within the city limits it’s a wonder the town has managed to hold onto its 15,000-plus residents.  Notable prisoners at the federal penitentiary, locally known as “Supermax”, have included Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramsi Yousef and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.  Driving past several of these giant slate gray fortresses loaded up with razor wire, we made sure to keep our doors locked, and our eyes glued to the mountains in front of us. 

I was honestly expecting to not be impressed by the Rocky Mountains.  I’d seen plenty of mountains in my days, from the coastal ranges in Southern California to the Continental Divide in New Mexico.  So I knew what tall mountains looked like.  The way I saw it, anybody could be impressed by sheer size.  But I was able to see so much beauty in the things that most people scoff at: the barren desert, the wide open nothing of Kansas, the miles and miles of empty Texas prairie.  A big part of me expected to look at the Rockies and think, “Yep, more mountains.”  Even as we approached Canon City, they still looked like any other mountains I’d ever seen.  Big and tall, and nothing more.

But as we proceeded into the Arkansas River Valley, these soaring majesties won me over.  Instantly. I kept wishing the road didn’t have so many sharp twists and curves, because all I wanted to do was gawk.  I spent a good hour trying to figure out what exactly it was that made them different from any of the other mountains I’d seen in my lifetime.  Then it hit me.  The color.  Driving over the southern ranges in California and New Mexico, I was always in the desert where everything is one of various shades of brown.  Even the pale greens of California’s coastal ranges are merely that of parched low-growing grass.  But in here in Colorado, the rocks were red and the trees were bright vibrant green.  The river running alongside the road, the one that helped carve the valley we were driving through, was a brilliant and sparkling blue.  The purple peaks in the distance were covered with bright white snow and surrounded by clear blue sky with puffy white clouds.  Every element of the landscape was alive with color. 

The shape of the mountains was much more dramatic too.  Formed by a combination of plate tectonics, volcanic activity, receding oceans, recurring ice ages and millions of years of erosion, the Rockies are ten times as sheer and jagged as the mountains I’d crossed in the past, with rocks jutting out and shooting up at all seemingly impossible angles.  Entire peaks appeared not as one colossal hunk of granite, but made up of thousands upon thousands of gigantic red sandstone boulders, fashioned together like a jigsaw puzzle – and appearing to need only one minor shift in the continental plate to bring them all crashing down on top of us.  I realized that as easy as it was to be impressed by mountains, it was even harder to not be impressed by the Rockies.

Funny thing I’ve noticed about mountains in this country.  In the east, where the mountains are smaller and more dome-like, the scenic routes go over the tops of the mountains and you’re in awe of the view looking down.  Out west, where the mountains are taller with more extreme edges, the only safe way to make a road is to send it through the passes and canyons, so you’re in awe of the view looking up.

We crossed the Continental Divide via Monarch Pass at 11,312 feet above sea level.  From this point on, any rivers we saw would be making their way inexorably toward the Pacific, rather than the Atlantic Ocean.

Our destination for the night was the Pitkin Hostel in Pitkin, Colorado.  A friend had put Lauren and I onto the idea of staying in hostels during this trip, both to save money and to meet interesting people.  Neither of us had ever stayed in a hostel before and, to be honest, hostels were always something I’d associated more with Europe than the United States – which isn’t an inaccurate appraisal. 

Originally conceived as a movement in 1907, the first hostel was created in an empty rural classroom in Germany by schoolteacher Richard Schirmann in order to give students visiting from the city a safe and inexpensive place to sleep.  It was his belief that touring the countryside by foot or bicycle was an essential part of adolescent development.  Of course, such excursions would be impossible without a cheap place to stay since most students couldn’t afford the rates of your average inn.  Schirmann envisioned an entire network of hostels within walking distance of one another all over Europe.  While his dream is still far from reality, Europe does have plenty of places for traveling students and backpackers (or anybody, for that matter, who’s traveling light) to stay, with more than two thousand hostels continent-wide. 

The United States, with only slightly less landmass than all of Europe, has just over three hundred.  That’s only six hostels per state in a nation where some states are the size of several European countries.  And, of course, they aren’t spread out quite that evenly either.  The state of Hawaii has ten hostels to itself, while California boasts the most with forty-eight.  Most of America’s hostels are concentrated around major cities that tend to have a large influx of college students – as well as hippies, beatniks and transients.  There are eighteen hostels in or near San Francisco alone.

Before the trip, we bought the book HOSTELS USA by Paul Karr and Martha Coombs, which contains listings and reviews of most every hostel in the country. In years past hostels were a service only available to students and other youth up to the age of about thirty.  These days, hostels are open to pretty much anybody looking for a cheaper, and hipper, lodging alternative. Hipper, because when you stay at a hostel you’re not just getting a room, you’re getting an experience.  Hostels generally have one or more common rooms with comfortable chairs and couches that encourage all guests to hang out and mingle with one other.  So while the monetary factor was a good incentive for Lauren and me, the real reason we were excited to bypass the Motel 6’s of the world was to meet other people in transit and add to the overall road trip experience.  

We were a little more discriminating than your average hosteller in that we would only stay in hostels that offered private rooms.  Most hostels are set up like dormitories, with sexually segregated bedrooms containing several twin and bunk beds – sometimes twenty or more per room.  Genders are often separated by entire wings, with boys on one side of the building and girls on the other.  Lauren and I were all about enjoying the hostel experience for what it was.  We looked forward to swapping stories over Ramen noodles with other travelers, students and drifters from all walks of life.  But at the same time we were like, “Hey, we’re married and about to have a baby.  We don’t want to sleep in separate beds, much less separate rooms.”  Unlike hostels in Europe, which generally only have dormitory-style housing, most hostels in the United States offer at least one or two private rooms.

On the first night of the trip, we had intended to stay at a hostel in Virginia, but a school group had already booked the entire place.  We tried booking a private room at a hostel/Christian retreat center in eastern Tennessee, but they only rented out their private rooms for long-term stays.  After that, there wasn’t another hostel along our route until Colorado.  Well, technically, there was one in St. Louis, but after our experience at C.K. Barbeque, neither of us were about to spend the night in that city.  The entire mid-section of this country is pretty sparse as far as hostels go.  I guess there aren’t a lot of neo-hippies making mass-pilgrimages to Cawker City, Kansas. 

It was late afternoon when we turned off Route 50 onto an unnamed road toward the town of Pitkin.  Tucked snuggly into its own little cul-de-sac in the mountains, this quaint little hamlet, eleven miles off the highway, wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Swiss Alps, with only a few dozen small wooden houses huddled together amidst the snow.  Most of the houses appeared to be empty, although there was smoke puffing from a few chimneys. 

The hostel was hard to miss.  Apart from the abandoned former town hall, which sits right next door, the two-story white stone building is the most prominent building in town.  With wooden planks forming a sidewalk around the perimeter, and a large wooden balcony on the second floor, the hostel looks like it could have been an Old West Saloon in another life. 

I felt myself getting nervous about the prospect of staying in our first hostel.  I feared that people would see our car (with Jersey plates) loaded down with all the stuff I’d repacked that morning and think Lauren and I were some kind of posers.  Fancy lads from the city who didn’t know how to travel light.  The kind of people who would bring an espresso machine to a camping trip.  I desperately wanted us to seem culturally cool and hip to the whole hostelling lifestyle.  To that end, I had repacked our overnight bags that morning to ensure that we would bring in the bare minimum of stuff.

We walked inside and the place felt immediately cozy.  The downstairs consisted of one giant rec room with a kitchen in the back.  The rec room had hardwood floors with couches, rocking chairs and tables all about.  There were shelves piled high with books, plants, board games, art supplies and miscellaneous knick-knacks.  They had even nailed pieces of antique farming equipment to the walls just for character.  At the far end of the room was a wood-burning stove next to the audio-visual area, which consisted of some couches, a TV and VCR, and over a hundred movies on VHS.  The room reminded Lauren of the many retreat centers she’d visited on youth group trips during her childhood.

We met the current caretaker, Jay, an older “mountain man” type in jeans and flannel with a beard and long gray hair.  We asked for a private room for the night and paid the twenty-five dollars in cash since they didn’t take credit cards.  Jay wrote our names and amount paid in a wrinkled green notebook that, I assume, served as the hostel’s accounting register.  All the rooms were on the second floor and Jay told us we could pick the one we wanted.  We selected one that was small and cute with ten times as much charm as any of the Super 8’s we’d been staying in.  Rather than plain tan or white sheetrock, the walls were covered with yellow and flowery wallpaper with a couple of paintings.  The sheets were soft and the covers resembled the bumpy white afghans my grandmother used to have in her house.  They even gave us an electric blanket in case it got too cold. 

Lauren of course made use of the bathroom where a sign above the toilet paper said, “Our septic system is delicate.  Please place used toilet paper in covered waste-basket.”  She confided to me later that on one of her many trips, she forgot about the warning and had to go fishing.

After checking in I brought in our overnight bags, bathroom bags, the road journal, a few travel books, the cooler and the bag of groceries we’d bought back in Salida.  This was far less than I usually brought into the hotel each night, but still seemed like too much for a seasoned hosteller to be carrying.  We transferred the contents of the cooler to the refrigerator and finally put the icepacks into a real freezer where they could re-solidify.  At a hostel, it’s generally considered good practice to write your name on any food you don’t want others eating.  But the only other guest was a lone twenty-something kid from Pennsylvania who seemed as though he had been there for a while and didn’t strike us as the mooching type. 

Lauren and I cooked a simple dinner of pasta and tomato sauce in a kitchen that was far better stocked with pots, pans and utensils than you’ll find in most any hostel.  While some hostels, in the spirit of keeping lodging costs down, will assign you an actual chore to do, most simply ask that you clean up after yourself and generally do your part to keep the hostel looking neat and clean.  So we made sure to wash our dishes and even cleaned the others that were already in the sink. 

We brought our gourmet hostel meal out to a table in the rec room where Jay and the kid from Pennsylvania were watching Mission: Impossible.  Every now and then, Jay got up to smoke his pipe or add wood to the fire.  Other than the low sound of the movie, the hostel was completely silent, and Lauren and I found ourselves whispering to each other as though we were in a library.  We felt guilty every time we had to walk around because we worried that the sound of creaking boards would disturb their movie. 

We were a little uncomfortable at first, feeling as though we were intruders in somebody else’s home.  But the smell of the fire and Jay’s pipe made everything feel so comfortable, so homey, and Lauren and I finally just smiled at each other and relaxed, enjoying the laid back atmosphere.  After dinner, Lauren read while I wrote in our journal.  When the movie ended, Jay and the Pennsylvanian went upstairs to bed and we had the large rec room to ourselves.  Lauren popped in The Sandlot, while I continued to write for another half-hour before heading up to bed ourselves.  I don’t know if it was the elevation, the thin air, or just the relaxing vibe of the hostel, but we were both exhausted and fell asleep by nine o’clock.

ONTO DAY 9