The Angle

Mountains' Majesty

THE TRIP – Day 2

Lincoln, Nebraska – Denver, Colorado

470 miles

We spent most of the day driving I 80 through the Platte River valley in southern Nebraska, another flat farming area for two-thirds of the state. Nebraska seemed a little like Iowa on steroids. Where Iowa was neat and compact in its farm fields, Nebraska was large and sprawling in its agriculture, as though the farms of the Midwest collided with the expanse of the West in Nebraska and suddenly every crop field exploded in size. Nebraska was also the first place we started seeing new nature – six-lined racerunners, cute little lizards with iridescent green stripes, magenta wildflowers I had never seen before. The Platte River was everywhere along the interstate, which was also lined with small, neat lakes, some looking like public parks, some like private waterfront residences. Though I had no intention of buying out-of-state licenses to fish on this trip, I couldn't resist picking up the state's fishing literature at the visitor center and found a pamphlet entitled “Fishing Across Nebraska: A guide to Public Fishing Lakes in the I 80 Corridor”. The cover showed a trucker, rod in hand, standing in a lake, with his rig parked close by. The first paragraph of the pamphlet read in part:

It's 455 miles across Nebraska on Interstate 80 – about seven hours if you obey the speed limit and don't make any stops. But that's a long time to sit in a car...you might want to do some fishing.

The pamphlet explained that those small lakes we had been seeing everywhere were “borrow pits”, holes dug in the valley to supply the sand and gravel for the construction of the interstate. Someone in the state's fisheries division had the wisdom to know the holes would easily fill with water due to the high water table in the Platte River Valley and provide fishing and recreational lakes. Fifty of them were eventually formed and forty of them have public access. Need a break from the road? Come and fish right off the interstate!

The farms of Nebraska eventually faded as we approached Colorado and were replaced by a hillier more barren landscape. I started looking for mountains. The mountains – the Rockies. My husband and I had never seen them in person. We've seen, and climbed, some of the Adirondack and Catskill Mountains, as well as traveled through most of the other east coast ranges, lovely, green hills, many with rock outcroppings. But the highest peak in the U.S. Rockies, Mt. Elbert at 14,440 feet, is almost three times higher than the venerable Mt. Marcy of the Adirondacks at 5,344 feet. I kept my eyes fixed on the western horizon as we left Nebraska and entered Colorado. About 60 miles outside of Denver, I spotted a low white line of strange looking clouds above the horizon. When they didn't move like clouds should, I realized I was looking at the snow-capped peaks of the Rockies. We spent the rest of the day, into sunset, chasing them. We checked into a hotel just north of Denver, grabbed something to eat, and then went looking for a west facing vantage point from which to watch the sun set over the Rockies. I showed my husband where we were on the map and where I thought we should head. He recognized the name of the town we were headed toward. What followed was the first of the trips many unplanned “surprise adventures”.

Anyone who knows my husband knows he is a vast storehouse of rock music knowledge (trivia?). The town he recognized was the location of a church pastored by Richie Furay, singer, songwriter and musician from Buffalo Springfield, The Souther, Hillman, Furay Band, and Poco. Richie had come to Boulder, Colorado, found God, and by the early 1980s was pastor of a Calvary Chapel in nearby Broomfield. We now found ourselves looking for a church as well as a mountain sunset. I'm very fond of locating random places in towns I've never been to before. I take it as a challenge. (No GPS, remember?) With an address and a glance at Google Maps, we found the small, simple church nestled in a residential neighborhood, with Richie Furay's name on the church sign. No sign of the pastor, of course, but these two groupies took a few pictures of the sign and the church and went on to see the sunset.

We found a clear quiet place on a hill on the west side of town, the sun just beyond the mountains, the snow on the peaks reflecting the pink of the sky. Though still a good way off, the Rockies were majestic in their breadth and height. We were finally in the mountains...