June 21st
Last night we stayed in Spanish Fork, Utah with some friends I’d made when I stayed there earlier this year. With laundry washed, body showered and stomach full of bacon and eggs, I said goodbye to my friends this morning, and we were off to cross the Rockies.
The drive from the Salt Lake area to Denver is roughly eight hours if you don’t stop for anything, and as I write we’re on hour seven. What a menagerie of landscapes we’ve witnessed today! Broken earth heaped into mounds, striped with sediment, shaped by the wind, pinnacles jutting from the rutted ground, faintly pink and blue through the heat distortion. Craggy mountainsides, the western peaks of the Rockies, stained with gray water and bleached to the color of sand. The Colorado River, muddy rapids slicing a vein of mountain life beside the highway. And now, massive mountains swathed in evergreen, the trees packed together, interlocking their needles to hold each other together lest they tumble over and fall. All the while, an alpine sky whisks along its carefree clouds, bumping over the tops of mountains. Communing with the mountains from a sweaty van. It’s good to be in Colorado.
~Lisa Shafter
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