The Drive Out
Fifty miles at thirty miles an hour, an hour's queue into a national park, and the weekenders bagging a fourteener on a forty-eight-hour furlough.
We left a little later than expected. Before setting off we checked the map to see if we still had plenty of time to get out of the black hills, it was just the lighter snow before the real storm was to come in around 4:30PM. We saw that it was coming from the northwest in a southeastern direction, and decided the only way to get out without backtracking was a due westerly exit winding on switchbacks through the black hills forest. 244 to HWY 385 to Custer with an open shot west to the Wyoming Border to Newcastle. Finally, a southward push to Cheyenne at 85 mph to escape the storm that would more than likely freeze our car solid and trap us for a few days in the Dakotas, possibly even ruining the vehicle.
For all of the tourists that were at the park, none of them were on the road as we left. The snow fell, and it seemed like the plow driver was on a lunch break. It is best to have some form of manual transmission in such driving environment so that you can place the proper amount of torque down on the road in slick, snowy driving at intervals of incline, decline and with windy hairpins and switchbacks. Jenny Lynn ever the navigator looking at the twists and turns like a rally car co-driver,
"Ooooh god, another one is coming up and its BIG!!! It's going to be right."
It's best to have a vehicle that gives the option to at least be in 3rd,2nd, or 1st gear. Luckily the VW has a versatile Tiptronic style transmission that offers the opportunity of driving in automatic or popping the gear shift to the right and be able to manually shift between all the gears. This is quite useful to gauge traction and power transmission over spots of snow and black ice. It's nice to be able to manually shift the car as it accelerates up an incline as to not spin the tires in icy areas, as well as controlling the speed of descent without relying on the brakes that will slip with the moisture and cook with the heat buildup. Overheated brakes will cause brake fade, and you won't be able to control yourself during long graded descents. You should always manage your decent with the gearing of the vehicle. This is more apparent towing a car or driving a heavier vehicle, but you are going to have more control in manual. Albeit with a wife and son in the car with nobody in the road during a blizzard in a vehicle set up in Houston, mountain driving is a bit nerve-wracking.
After about 50 miles at 30 mph maximum, we made it out alright to the howling wind and blowing snow outside Thunder Basin National Grassland. At least it was flat again. A story was playing on NPR of an elderly lady who's vehicle froze, overheating and boiling the engine. She was found frozen to death inside the car waiting for a passerby to stop. About that time as the story was playing on the radio, Jenny Lynn knitting some hats, and Marco on Netflix, Jenny Lynn said, "Doesn't your cousin Matthew live in Denver?" "Oh yeah, he does. I'll message him when I get the chance." We drove without incident through thunder basin as we made our way to Cheyenne, WY. We stopped out into the balmy 30-degree air into the local Target parking lot. Tennis shoes, no boots, thin cotton socks, and no heavy wool, and no jacket, just a thermal shirt.
My face was chapped and dry. We Went in for a bottle of Milk for Marco and went to the motel to stay the night. We made our plans for the next day to make our way towards Fort Collins and Estes to camp at Rocky Mountain National Park that night. Matthew responded later that night, we told him our plans, and he said cool, see you on New years eve.
The drive into the park was a traffic jam, a scene probably repeating over and over and over, copies of Jack, Wendy, and Danny going to get away from it all to work on their novels at the overlook hotel. It was blue and orange, warm in the sun and frigid in the shadows. There was a herd of domesticated elk and the Estes town welcome sign, the overlook hotel was to the right where everybody from the road was turning off, we took a left towards the park, not before cruising through the strip of rental properties, pizza places, and go-cart tracks.
The entrance into RMNP was a long winding traffic jam, a one hour wait of holiday tourists taking their families out from Denver to drive the park and see the mountains. What struck me as worrisome of not being able to find a spot to set up camp, the attendant said once we finally got to the front gate was that camping is relatively empty during the winter months, though she thought it was strange that few were camping given the warm weather. We drove around Morine park and found a nice empty spot in shaded from the wind with a small ridge that opened up into an open valley with Longs Peak dominating the background. It was absolutely understandable what fascists saw in the symbolism of nature and of 14 thousand foot mountain peaks significantly, or why you always see a boiling sky of cumulonimbus clouds are synonymous with God, it is a phenomena that evade easy understandings of human perception and control of its symbolism is a powerful force within the human psyche.
Think of all the ads you have seen with families fitted with dayglo Patagonia or marmot without care, hiking through a world like that could have Maria Von Trapp with outwardly stretched hands, twirling in the landscape. RMNP is one of those campgrounds that instill healthy respect towards bears. Grizzly bears are not around, mostly being hunted out of their traditional range by the end of the 19th Century, and reside in the Canadian and Alaskan Rockies.
The sole remaining bear is the black bear and has a spotty range through the lower 48. The black bear prefers to not engage with people and sticks mainly to berries and roots. What is threatening to a black bear is our impediment on their landscape and the food we bring. The fear of bears that is placed on a car campsite is mainly to protect the bears from the kitchen sink we bring to a campsite. At Chiricahua national monument in southern Arizona, we camped next to a party that brought an entire line of camping gear to do a youtube review on. Tents, Yeti coolers, cases, and cases of beer. When we went to sleep, we listened to the party and review into the night. We woke up the next morning to look over at their site strewn about with mess everywhere and the morning birds plucking the remains of their boutique camping cookware. A bear has the sense of smell eight times greater than your dog. A bear will smell easy food and get it any way they can. They aren't after the meat on your bones, they are after your trail mix and Cheetos. Think of a mellow stoner coming up curious to see if they can get some free food. Believe me, you would too. This is a problem for both species, consumer campers attract bears that lose their abilities to find their own berries, roots, and animals in the wild because they can easily get free calories from dirty campers and dumps, they become less fearful of humans, freaking out campers who in turn will need ranger and hunters put down the fearless animals. Don't be afraid of a black bear in the sense that they are ruthless predators, be afraid of bears in the sense that you are in their land being a shit pig.
Usually, car camping sites in bear country have bear lockers to place your food. They are designed for a bear to not be able to get into the locker. It is not advisable to keep food in the trunk of your car, because the bear has been known to break the glass or peel the doors off your car like a sardine can to get inside the trunk for your Cheetos. If you have three-year-old son, he knows none of this and will take no for an answer as he eats Maria crackers and granola inside your tent, crying out if you rip away episodes of Masha and the Bear on the tablet from his hands and try to get him to eat outside in the wind and cold air. It was empty in the large campground of rows and rows of sites with an odd tent or micro trailer dotting the 100 unit grounds. I walked around to the dumpster in the full moon and snowy ground that was about a half mile from our site. I through our nightly junk in the bear-proof trash can and looked down at the volume of bear tracks, taking the flashlight on my phone to illuminate it. I stretched my fingers out to see how big I could make my hand in reference to the bear tracks. The bears were a little bigger. I decided to keep that anxiety inside and not tell JL or Marco about it, because I figured if a bear was going to sniff in our tent, then so be it. I have a camping knife that I keep when I get unreasonably anxious but laugh the next morning when I am twisted up beyond belief in my neg 0 sleeping bag, wondering where the hell the knife went to find it pushed down towards my feet around where my shoes are.
I use these opportunities to try to teach Marco the fears that I have acquired when he watches Madagascar, I try to show him that these animals are not your friends in the sense that they will not balance on a ball, eat a picnic, or dance with you. They are predators that will eat you. He has no sense of fear, which elevates mine. For me, that's the core feeling that is hardest to make peace with as a parent. I never gave much thought about what's going to eat me before Marco, fear of predators permeates my identity. The next morning, we went down the mountain to get cell phone reception, and my cousin texted back, we were to go into Denver later that evening. We decided to stick around and go hiking for a while before. I decided to take a quick walk around an icy trailhead without proper footwear. I was just going to saunter around and hear the wind and see the aspens and rocks. I didn't have to go very far before I saw a rock that was suitable for me to sit, warm up in the sun and watch the hikers come from the parking lot staging area. It was about half a mile from the staging area, wrapped a little around some bends in the trail, looking outward into a vast grassy valley, my back to the start of the mountain trek upwards. I wasn't geared for adventure, just some introspection.
Others were geared for adventure, dayglow-ed out, metal spikes on their shoes, Name brands on every article of clothing. A mid-twenties art director paying every bit of attention of the kerning of the brands on their puffy coat, the shoes, the spikes, the backpacks, the walking sticks, the goofy hats, and probably the underwear, though I didn't get a view of those. I said hi as they came around the bend boisterous as to scare away any bear or mountain lion they might come into contact with. It's always best to travel in large groups to stave off fears and anxieties.
Many were out from Denver for the weekend. A 48 hour Furlow between mundane weeks to intensely bag a 14 thousand foot Mountain. Pushing themselves to the peak of some mountain face as they all become indistinguishable from one another from the top. Families were enveloped by the tools and brands of the lifestyle industry, appearing like the idyllic families of an REI print ad if only for 48 hours before turning back to a pumpkin, forced to go back into the grind for another week. I didn't have the gear brands or money to take part in the lifestyle, but I was cool with getting to that one tiny rock on the trail. The drive out was just as packed, and we made it to a little bar in Denver to meet my cousin, somebody I hadn't seen in 19 years.--- title: The Drive Out dek: "Fifty miles at thirty miles an hour, an hour's queue into a national park, and the weekenders bagging a fourteener on a forty-eight-hour furlough." slug: the-drive-out issue: winter-2019 date: 2019-01-03 status: draft series: interior seriesTitle: Interior readingOrder: 16 credits:
- role: Words and photographs by: [Scott Cartwright] tags: [issue-3, interior]
We left a little later than expected. Before setting off we checked the map to see if we still had plenty of time to get out of the black hills, it was just the lighter snow before the real storm was to come in around 4:30PM. We saw that it was coming from the northwest in a southeastern direction, and decided the only way to get out without backtracking was a due westerly exit winding on switchbacks through the black hills forest. 244 to HWY 385 to Custer with an open shot west to the Wyoming Border to Newcastle. Finally, a southward push to Cheyenne at 85 mph to escape the storm that would more than likely freeze our car solid and trap us for a few days in the Dakotas, possibly even ruining the vehicle.
For all of the tourists that were at the park, none of them were on the road as we left. The snow fell, and it seemed like the plow driver was on a lunch break. It is best to have some form of manual transmission in such driving environment so that you can place the proper amount of torque down on the road in slick, snowy driving at intervals of incline, decline and with windy hairpins and switchbacks. Jenny Lynn ever the navigator looking at the twists and turns like a rally car co-driver,
"Ooooh god, another one is coming up and its BIG!!! It's going to be right."
It's best to have a vehicle that gives the option to at least be in 3rd,2nd, or 1st gear. Luckily the VW has a versatile Tiptronic style transmission that offers the opportunity of driving in automatic or popping the gear shift to the right and be able to manually shift between all the gears. This is quite useful to gauge traction and power transmission over spots of snow and black ice. It's nice to be able to manually shift the car as it accelerates up an incline as to not spin the tires in icy areas, as well as controlling the speed of descent without relying on the brakes that will slip with the moisture and cook with the heat buildup. Overheated brakes will cause brake fade, and you won't be able to control yourself during long graded descents. You should always manage your decent with the gearing of the vehicle. This is more apparent towing a car or driving a heavier vehicle, but you are going to have more control in manual. Albeit with a wife and son in the car with nobody in the road during a blizzard in a vehicle set up in Houston, mountain driving is a bit nerve-wracking.
After about 50 miles at 30 mph maximum, we made it out alright to the howling wind and blowing snow outside Thunder Basin National Grassland. At least it was flat again. A story was playing on NPR of an elderly lady who's vehicle froze, overheating and boiling the engine. She was found frozen to death inside the car waiting for a passerby to stop. About that time as the story was playing on the radio, Jenny Lynn knitting some hats, and Marco on Netflix, Jenny Lynn said, "Doesn't your cousin Matthew live in Denver?" "Oh yeah, he does. I'll message him when I get the chance." We drove without incident through thunder basin as we made our way to Cheyenne, WY. We stopped out into the balmy 30-degree air into the local Target parking lot. Tennis shoes, no boots, thin cotton socks, and no heavy wool, and no jacket, just a thermal shirt.
My face was chapped and dry. We Went in for a bottle of Milk for Marco and went to the motel to stay the night. We made our plans for the next day to make our way towards Fort Collins and Estes to camp at Rocky Mountain National Park that night. Matthew responded later that night, we told him our plans, and he said cool, see you on New years eve.
The drive into the park was a traffic jam, a scene probably repeating over and over and over, copies of Jack, Wendy, and Danny going to get away from it all to work on their novels at the overlook hotel. It was blue and orange, warm in the sun and frigid in the shadows. There was a herd of domesticated elk and the Estes town welcome sign, the overlook hotel was to the right where everybody from the road was turning off, we took a left towards the park, not before cruising through the strip of rental properties, pizza places, and go-cart tracks.
The entrance into RMNP was a long winding traffic jam, a one hour wait of holiday tourists taking their families out from Denver to drive the park and see the mountains. What struck me as worrisome of not being able to find a spot to set up camp, the attendant said once we finally got to the front gate was that camping is relatively empty during the winter months, though she thought it was strange that few were camping given the warm weather. We drove around Morine park and found a nice empty spot in shaded from the wind with a small ridge that opened up into an open valley with Longs Peak dominating the background. It was absolutely understandable what fascists saw in the symbolism of nature and of 14 thousand foot mountain peaks significantly, or why you always see a boiling sky of cumulonimbus clouds are synonymous with God, it is a phenomena that evade easy understandings of human perception and control of its symbolism is a powerful force within the human psyche.
Think of all the ads you have seen with families fitted with dayglo Patagonia or marmot without care, hiking through a world like that could have Maria Von Trapp with outwardly stretched hands, twirling in the landscape. RMNP is one of those campgrounds that instill healthy respect towards bears. Grizzly bears are not around, mostly being hunted out of their traditional range by the end of the 19th Century, and reside in the Canadian and Alaskan Rockies.
The sole remaining bear is the black bear and has a spotty range through the lower 48. The black bear prefers to not engage with people and sticks mainly to berries and roots. What is threatening to a black bear is our impediment on their landscape and the food we bring. The fear of bears that is placed on a car campsite is mainly to protect the bears from the kitchen sink we bring to a campsite. At Chiricahua national monument in southern Arizona, we camped next to a party that brought an entire line of camping gear to do a youtube review on. Tents, Yeti coolers, cases, and cases of beer. When we went to sleep, we listened to the party and review into the night. We woke up the next morning to look over at their site strewn about with mess everywhere and the morning birds plucking the remains of their boutique camping cookware. A bear has the sense of smell eight times greater than your dog. A bear will smell easy food and get it any way they can. They aren't after the meat on your bones, they are after your trail mix and Cheetos. Think of a mellow stoner coming up curious to see if they can get some free food. Believe me, you would too. This is a problem for both species, consumer campers attract bears that lose their abilities to find their own berries, roots, and animals in the wild because they can easily get free calories from dirty campers and dumps, they become less fearful of humans, freaking out campers who in turn will need ranger and hunters put down the fearless animals. Don't be afraid of a black bear in the sense that they are ruthless predators, be afraid of bears in the sense that you are in their land being a shit pig.
Usually, car camping sites in bear country have bear lockers to place your food. They are designed for a bear to not be able to get into the locker. It is not advisable to keep food in the trunk of your car, because the bear has been known to break the glass or peel the doors off your car like a sardine can to get inside the trunk for your Cheetos. If you have three-year-old son, he knows none of this and will take no for an answer as he eats Maria crackers and granola inside your tent, crying out if you rip away episodes of Masha and the Bear on the tablet from his hands and try to get him to eat outside in the wind and cold air. It was empty in the large campground of rows and rows of sites with an odd tent or micro trailer dotting the 100 unit grounds. I walked around to the dumpster in the full moon and snowy ground that was about a half mile from our site. I through our nightly junk in the bear-proof trash can and looked down at the volume of bear tracks, taking the flashlight on my phone to illuminate it. I stretched my fingers out to see how big I could make my hand in reference to the bear tracks. The bears were a little bigger. I decided to keep that anxiety inside and not tell JL or Marco about it, because I figured if a bear was going to sniff in our tent, then so be it. I have a camping knife that I keep when I get unreasonably anxious but laugh the next morning when I am twisted up beyond belief in my neg 0 sleeping bag, wondering where the hell the knife went to find it pushed down towards my feet around where my shoes are.
I use these opportunities to try to teach Marco the fears that I have acquired when he watches Madagascar, I try to show him that these animals are not your friends in the sense that they will not balance on a ball, eat a picnic, or dance with you. They are predators that will eat you. He has no sense of fear, which elevates mine. For me, that's the core feeling that is hardest to make peace with as a parent. I never gave much thought about what's going to eat me before Marco, fear of predators permeates my identity. The next morning, we went down the mountain to get cell phone reception, and my cousin texted back, we were to go into Denver later that evening. We decided to stick around and go hiking for a while before. I decided to take a quick walk around an icy trailhead without proper footwear. I was just going to saunter around and hear the wind and see the aspens and rocks. I didn't have to go very far before I saw a rock that was suitable for me to sit, warm up in the sun and watch the hikers come from the parking lot staging area. It was about half a mile from the staging area, wrapped a little around some bends in the trail, looking outward into a vast grassy valley, my back to the start of the mountain trek upwards. I wasn't geared for adventure, just some introspection.
Others were geared for adventure, dayglow-ed out, metal spikes on their shoes, Name brands on every article of clothing. A mid-twenties art director paying every bit of attention of the kerning of the brands on their puffy coat, the shoes, the spikes, the backpacks, the walking sticks, the goofy hats, and probably the underwear, though I didn't get a view of those. I said hi as they came around the bend boisterous as to scare away any bear or mountain lion they might come into contact with. It's always best to travel in large groups to stave off fears and anxieties.
Many were out from Denver for the weekend. A 48 hour Furlow between mundane weeks to intensely bag a 14 thousand foot Mountain. Pushing themselves to the peak of some mountain face as they all become indistinguishable from one another from the top. Families were enveloped by the tools and brands of the lifestyle industry, appearing like the idyllic families of an REI print ad if only for 48 hours before turning back to a pumpkin, forced to go back into the grind for another week. I didn't have the gear brands or money to take part in the lifestyle, but I was cool with getting to that one tiny rock on the trail. The drive out was just as packed, and we made it to a little bar in Denver to meet my cousin, somebody I hadn't seen in 19 years.