Travel Log: Six Months & 11,000 feet
or How I Spent My Thanksgiving Vacation Last Year
Last March, I discovered the Mestaa’éehehe Mountain Fire Lookout on recreation.gov. Recreation.gov, in case you aren’t familiar, is a website that allows the public to plan trips and reserve accommodations at federal recreation areas. The Mestaa’éehehe Mountain Fire Lookout is one such place.
Reservation opportunities to stay at the now defunct lookout, located near Idaho Springs, Colorado, are released one day at a time, at a specific time each morning. Now, if you are lucky enough to be online at the exact right moment, before anyone else snags it, you can make a reservation, and if you’re really lucky, you can book more than one day at a time. If you miss the time window or someone else got there first, you’ll be setting your alarm to try again tomorrow. And the day after that. And so on until you hit it just right to get a spot. Sounds like a lot of effort, right?
Checking the website each morning for the two months was, in fact, an effort. It took me from March to May 21st to get to the website at the exact right time to snag the lookout for three days. I was so excited that I didn’t even realize that those three days started on Thanksgiving Day. But I had the reservation, so there was no way I was giving it up.
About a week before Thanksgiving, I began checking the weather in the area of the lookout and the weather all along I-70 since it closes so often during the winter. All looked pretty good until Tuesday, when it began snowing in the mountains. I called the US Forest Service to get their insight. They suggested we bring snowshoes or skis if we thought we could tolerate the cold once we got up there. You know what is relatively hard to find in Kansas? Snowshoes. We couldn’t find them, but that wasn’t going to stop us.
We drove out of Kansas along a relatively snow-free I-70 on Thanksgiving Day and made it to the base of Mestaa’éehehe Mountain on Friday. After arriving at around 3pm on Thursday, we had decided not to chance having to do the 2-mile hike with about 1,000-feet of elevation gain in both the snow and the dark.
The climb was cold, and the trail was covered in snow - up to three feet along a few of the switchbacks. We were passed by folks on snowshoes and skies. And did I mention we were carrying our two-day supply of food, water, and clothes? But the sky was clear, and the sun was shining. At every turn up the mountain, the view got more and more beautiful, and once we could see the lookout in the distance, it was all we needed as a final push to carry on.
We spent two days isolated from the real world and high above it, keeping warm with space heaters, electric hand warmers, sleeping bags and multiple layers of socks. But the view from the lookout was unforgettable, so the cold didn’t matter.
We were living among the clouds, quite literally. Each evening, the city of Denver sparkled just for us, and the clouds and surrounding mountains drenched themselves in a spectrum of red, pink, and yellow, like a cloak across the sky each morning as the sun rose.
We read through the guestbooks; we laughed and cried over the stories of so many others who had been there before us. We were one little piece of the puzzle of magical stories that lived within the Mestaa’éhehe Mountain Fire Lookout.
It was an experience I will never forget.
Something present in all my journeys, though I didn’t realize it until my stay at the lookout, is that with each place you visit, you become part of the story of that place. One little piece of a story that was started long before you and will continue long after.
On Sunday morning, with gusts of cold wind blowing in our faces and the realization of a seven-hour road trip back home, we made the journey back down the mountain. Looking back often, as the lookout got smaller and smaller, it was hard to believe our time there was our real life. I was already mentally calculating how long it might take me to make a second reservation so that I could bring my son.
P.S. For those of you who know me, that seven-hour road trip back home was, of course, more like a 12-hour road trip. After a morning coffee break, lunch at The Grateful Gnome: Sandwich Shoppe and Brewery in Denver, and self-guided tours of three small Kansas towns along I-70, we finally arrived home.