Part II: Paradise Without a PR Agent, The San Luis Valley

The West Less Traveled: Scaling an Intergalactic Spaceport, Mt. Blanca

By Ted Alvarez, 12-29-05

This is the second installment of "The West Less Traveled" writer Ted Alvarez's exploration of Colorado's storied San Luis Valley. To read the first section, click here. To go blow-by-blow with Ted as he summits Mt. Blanca, which some locals believe houses an intergalactic spaceport, read on:

	Blanca Massif. Photos by Ted Alvarez

After such phenomenal success at Colorado Gators (gators seen: hundreds; fingers lost: zero), it's probably too much to ask for the rest of our trip in south-central Colorado's San Luis Valley to go as smoothly. Mother nature concurs, and the storm we saw engulfing the Blanca Peak massif earlier blooms out and over the whole of Great Sand Dunes National Park, which sidle right up against the Sangre De Christo range. While we drive north towards the park on Highway 150, we can only watch as our view of the brownish-yellow humps fades behind an angry violet-gray curtain.

By the time we reach the adobe ranger station, the sky has been pouring over the dunes for at least an hour. The friendly ranger who assigns us a campsite doesn't dissuade us from camping, however: She thinks the rain will stop by nightfall, and as long as we're comfortable and well-equipped, conditions will be ace for a glorious night hike. As a bonus, most other visitors will likely bail or cancel their plans because of the horrid weather.

Emboldened by this news, we continue down the rutted sand road into the park towards our campsite. The deeper we get, the more it feels as if we're driving in a minor creek with a sand bed. Unlike White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, Great Dunes National Park doesn't allow camping on the dunes, but we chose a campsite as deep in as you can go without a specially equipped vehicle. This put us within 300 yards or so of the dunes, and as impressive as the conglomeration looks from afar, up close they loom like a mountain range. Topping 750 feet, these are the tallest dunes in North America, formed over thousands of years as sand particles washed in from the nearby Rio Grand River got swept into the cradle of the Sangres. The major dune formation covers an area more than 30 square miles, and continued accumulation means it's getting bigger all the time.

When we pull into our campsite, the rain has reduced to a trickle, and my carsick-prone brother is rarin' to go, so we decide to brave a hike while we still have daylight. We grab our rain gear and supplies and head out for the nearest crest. While we wind our way through a wet path spiked with cacti and thorny brush, the air cools off and the rain picks up. Not enthused with the prospect of getting soaked, we turn back. I goad my brother on with the promise of warm cheese and beef jerky in the car. What could be more fun than that?

On cue, as soon as the sun ducks behind the hills, the rain quits and the clouds break into a clear purple sky. We drop the snacks and get back out there, crossing the swollen and frigid Medano Creek to enter the proper dunes area. The walls of the dunes rise up steeply, and they've been painted a dark cocoa by the rain: each of our footsteps kicks off the thin, wet layer, revealing the natural mottled beige color underneath.

Climbing the dunes is damn hard work. Huffing and puffing our way to the top of a rise, we stop for water and look out over the expanse southwest, towards the High Dune (which, incidentally isn't the highest; it just looks that way). In a moment of triumph, Jeff yells out over the park and waits to hear…nothing. Surprised, we both spend a few seconds yelling all manner of proclamations and obscenities, waiting to hear a repeat performance bounce back. It turns out that sand is a magnificent sonic insulator, so 4.8 billion cubic meters of the stuff makes for fantastic soundproofing. Perhaps it's the lack of any noise or reverberation, the utter dead silence over such a large expanse, that makes the dunes feel less like a desert and more like an outpost on another planet.

	The Blanca Trail

The sun sinks behind the San Juans on the opposite end of the valley, creating a final surge of orange and pink before everything goes black. Standing at in the center of a silent, darkening valley of sand on a nearly moonless night, it's easy to feel lost and alone, even if you know exactly where you are. Only the faintest starlight reflects off the whorls of the dunes. The last thing we need is to lose our way, so we take twice as long to retrace our steps on the return trip through the darkness. (Following footprints in a shifting desert is generally a horrible idea, but the sodden upper layer and lack of wind or other travelers ensured that our trail remained undisturbed).

Crossing back over Medano Creek, the funereal quiet of the dunes gives way to the familiar sounds of the wind rustling through trees and the chatter of the creek itself. To experience the dunes at night is to experience an alien landscape with your waking eyes -- a stark, shifting topography that is, paradoxically, both peaceful and unnerving in its stillness. I had looked forward to surfing the dunes in the daylight hours, maybe taking a few glory jumps while trekking. But it was worth the tradeoff to have the entire park to ourselves, when most visitors have retreated to their tents. Local wisdom claims that winter visitors experience the same solitude, even in the daylight hours, along with the surreal sight of the Great Dunes dusted in a coating of snow.

Back at the camp, I chose to peruse the guides to climbing Mt. Blanca I'd brought along. We would face a strenuous Class II climb tomorrow -- no scrambling or technical climbing, but it would require hiking over broken talus and maybe some route finding. What troubled me most was the description of the road to Mt. Blanca; every guide featured a description of Lake Como Road as "one of the worst roads in the U.S." We were already attempting to cram a multi-day hike into one day, and legends of rusted-out auto carcasses along the trecherous drive up to the trailhead didn't bode well for success tomorrow. But the 14,345 ft. peak had dominated the vistas of the San Luis Valley for our entire visit, and if we didn't even attempt it, I felt it would mock us all the way home. We chose instead to abandon our camping plans and see how far up the devil-road we could go tonight.

Worst. Road. Ever.

Lake Como Road isn't marked, and it's easy to miss even in the daytime. After blazing past it, we turn back around down a dusty track; it's merely sandy and doesn't seem too tough. But as we pass a mostly blank Public Lands sign, the grasses close in and the sand turns to gravel; the gravel turns to pebbles, and the pebbles soon grow to baseball-sized chunks of rock. Less than half a mile from the entrance, the road tilts upward at a sharp angle and shoots straight up the shoulder of the Blanca massif -- no switchbacks or turns. The higher we climb, the worse it gets: potholes and ruts get deep as baby pools, and we're forced to stop and get out of the car every hundred feet or so to chuck potential car-crippling boulders out of the path. I give up when they get bigger than basketballs.

	Jeff, ready to tackle the dunes.

When my brother hears the telltale scrape against the chassis, he (after changing his pants) begs me to stop, so we park in a rare turnout and step outside to set up camp ... in a minefield of broken rock. The front seats look pretty comfortable after all. After stumbling over rock in the blackness, taking off contacts and "washing up" with baby wipes, I watch the mist gather in the lightless valley below and drift off into an uneasy sleep.

Working out the kinks the next morning, we soon learn that walking over the broken rock path of Lake Como Road is worse than driving it. There are only intermittent stretches of dirt along the entire eight-mile stretch left to the actual lake, so we have to be extra careful not to snap an ankle -- especially at the slavedriving pace we've set to make the summit. Along the road, we never see any of the rumored vehicular corpses, but some of the larger rock ridges are stained with slick from busted oil pans and the like, and stray nuts, bolts, and small scraps of metal lay scattered about as markers of past automotive misadventures.

Though we started with a clear morning, as soon as we cross into the dense alpine firs near Lake Como, wisps of clouds start chasing us into the forest, cutting our chances of summitting in half. We hasten the pace, crossing streams and hopping from rock to rock, marveling at the few cars that have made it up farther than we have. Every once in a while a high-clearance SUV sits parked, teetering on the edge of a rock spine as a testament to the driver's bravery (or idiocy). No people though...

We finally encounter our first late-season Fourteener climbers as we approach a cluster of burned out, antique cabins. We stop, say hello, and wonder aloud who might've chosen to live so far up and out, and how long they might've lasted. As with nearly all the climbers we passed, they all had already summitted after camping near the lake. Each and every one waved politely or said hello, but even their sunglasses couldn't conceal their true sentiments: "These jerks'll never make it."

The Summit Breaks

When we finally arrived at the pristine, emerald Lake Como and broke for lunch, fog already began to filter into the forest around us, and the handfuls of grizzled hikers left began to pack up their gear and go home. Yesterday, the cloud system centered on the massif exploded into a deluge that stretched all the way to the dunes; we knew would need a serious break to get to the top.

We got it, but not in the way we'd hoped. Instead of glorious, Face-of-God sunlight breaking through the clouds, the fog stayed...foggy. We moved through stark and beautiful mountain landscapes -- mossy tundra, glimmering glacial lakes, white-stained lumps of rock crouching like frozen trolls -- but all of it was screened through a gray haze. As the vegetation lapsed, the temperature dropped to the high 30s, the fog grew denser, and splashing waterfalls would bisect our path, seemingly coming from nowhere. As we came within half a mile of the summit, the cairns disappeared, and we were stuck route-finding up slippery, broken talus and glacial moraines in 40 feet of visibilty. Our reward was a summit crowned with 360-degree views ... of the blank gray mist 30 feet beyond our sight. Sweet!

	The summit .... seriously.

But them's the mountain breaks ... you can't take away the accomplishment, even if the prized summit photo looks like a couple of rocks suspended in dishwater. 14,345 feet is 14,345 feet, dammit, and now all we had to do to hold on to our prize was hike ten miles of slippery-staircase back. Double Sweet!

Midway through our hike down, we entered Hiking Zombie Mode (HZM): This is that special condition all avid hikers know and love, when feet are locked in a metronomic lockstep, and the mind drifts away to counter the exploding joint pain. My reptile brain knows that I'm crossing my 4,622nd switchback down, but in my frontal lobe, I'm doing shooters on the beach in Cabo. (I think my brother was playing through the original Castlevania game for the Nintendo Entertainment System ... he got stuck on Frankenstein).

These natural opiates kick in to sweeten an excursion that is generally at least 50% pain. We lovers of the outdoors head out, experience the duress and struggle, and come home ready to turn around and go right back out. Without zombie mode, the recidivism of outdoor junkies would drop sharply, for we would remember the pain all too well. As the sage Will Ferrell once said in an educational film, "it's Science."

Then again, maybe that just happens to idiots like us who pack a 2-3-day hike into ten hours.

We hobble back to the car hours later, our muscles lactic to the point of collapse. My brother begs me to amputate his calves, but I can't because I'm trying to pry open my multitool to carve out my own. Before attempting amateur surgery, I decide to try and write a few notes to maintain journalistic integrity. I look down at my scribbles; they're as illegible as if I'd done it on an Etch-A-Sketch while drunk .

But then my brother lets out a whoop of either intense joy or pain.

"WHAT IS IT?"

"EMMAAAAAAA'S!"

I stop and look at our itinerary: Next stop is Emma's, a legendary Mexican restaurant in San Luis, the oldest town in Colorado. If we stop whining and focus, we might just make it before closing.

My brother and I exchange glances deep with meaning, and our adrenaline surges: As lifelong gourmands of quality Mexican food, this could be our finest hour.

Before we can even speak, my brother launches the Subaru down Lake Como road, never once noticing the deafening clatter against his car's chassis.

Tomorrow's installment: Emma's, Alien Research, and Crestone -- The Spiritual Center of the Universe.

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