The drive on the paved, winding roads was easy. While Dad kept the jeep going, I leaned out the window to take in the sights and smells of the mountains I was born and raised to love. Remnants of Colorado's rich mountain history were everywhere. The road we were on was once a well-traveled mule trail. Entrances to mineshafts were still clearly visible in the rock right alongside the road. Many had long since collapsed, but a few were still too deep for the sun to shine completely through. Rusted pieces of ancient mining equipment were still scattered on the side of the road. And, every quarter mile or so, we'd come across old mining tailings that had poured down the side of the mountains, some with ponderosas rising up out of them.
Even older history was visible, too. Before European settlers encroached on Colorado's gold-rich mountains, the Mouache band of the Ute tribe primarily resided in the area of the mountains my Dad and I were exploring. Many of the trails my Dad and I would travel that day were initially carved out by the Indigenous population hundreds of years before the first white settlers arrived. They, along with the Arapahoe tribe, were the first people to find and establish what is now called the Indian Hot Springs, nearby Idaho Springs. They considered (and still do consider) the mountains of Colorado sacred. And, I can see why.
Out of all the places around the world I've been to and lived in, those Rocky Mountains and the red rocks to the east will forever be my favorite place to be. Those rocks and those mountains are millions, if not billions, of years old. They seem to have been specially crafted by God Himself. There's nothing quite like laying one's hand on rocks and landscapes that have virtually been unchanged for millions, if not billions of years. Those rocks, that land, has remained virtually the same since man still had a tail and lived in trees somewhere in modern-day Africa, seven-million-or-so years ago.
As Dad and I ascended further and further up the mountain roads, I sat transfixed on how the layers of mountain rock seemed to move like waves as we drove by. Within those layers weren't just deposits of valuable metals and minerals. There were probably countless fossils left behind by life that went extinct millions of years ago, smashed between those layers and layers of slate, granite, and clay.
And there I was, twenty-one years old, riding up those ancient mountains in a 1992 Jeep, feeling ancient myself. In a strange, strange sort of way. I know I'm only twenty-one years old, but I often feel like I'm ninety, emotionally at least. I guess Cystic Fibrosis does that to a person, among other things.
But, I digress.
