Why I Live in Colorado, for February 2018 Reasons

When the light is just so.

My wife sends me out for coffee. I drive up to the westside supermarket on a blustery midday Thursday, find the coffee, and oh-so-heroically don’t buy anything else but the coffee. (I returned the energy drink to its endcap fridge; another bad habit I’m giving up.) I drive back home—run upstairs, grab my camera, and go right back out. There was a curious clarity to the San Juan foothills and its environs on the western frontier of Monte Vista today. The high, thin strata that haunt the skies this time of year seemed slightly higher and more diffuse, and created an interesting ambient light.

So what does it look like where you go to the store to buy coffee?

This shot and the ones that follow are all due south of the Big R/Top Value Supermarket/ San Luis Valley Federal Bank complex, looking west across the pastures.

Most rural Colorado towns, and even Old Colorado City in west Colorado Springs, have their town blocks bisected by narrow dirt and gravel alleys. This is the one between Morris Street and Chico Camino, looking south from where I came.

A calendar shot if there ever was one.

Imagine you’re here in the days before permanent human settlement, wading through miles of this grass to the forbidding mountains beyond.

I lived alongside the Front Range in Colorado Springs for nine years, and as frustrated I would become with the cultural and infrastructural entropy there, I never got tired looking at Pikes Peak. Never. I had a view from the kitchen window, the living room windows, and the master bedroom window. There’s something about a mountain that never grows old.

It’s the same out here. I look around at these peaks on a range whose name I’ve forgotten (and is harder to Google than you’d think; the available topo maps being abbreviated and unhelpful) coming off the San Juans. I marvel once again how the land out here looks so different from the land three miles east on the opposite side of town. As the song goes, there’s a feeling I get when I look to the west. I can feel all the promise of Utah and Nevada and California right behind it all. Deserts and forests and mountains. Mountains all the way to the sea.

No, I can’t honestly say it “calls” me, or anything like that. I’m happy where I am. I’m happy everything is where it is. As for the east coast where I’m from, that belongs to the past. As a wise old Russian observed, the past is another country, and they do things differently there. I’m somewhere else because it’s better for me here. Nothing personal.

Well, okay, so it is, but no hard feelings. We’re all where we want to be.

The one shot I took of the complex, looking at it towards the northwest. Note the green utility box in the middle of the field. Parcels of land on this field are for sale for those who want to build with a view of the back end of a three-tenant complex to the north, and all those wide open spaces everywhere else.

Zoomed in halfway, the perspective is especially wacky here. The lightboard sign over US 160 W is warning motorists that they will need chains for Wolf Creek Pass half an hour down the road, and that oversized vehicles are prohibited. Don’t like the weather here? Take a drive 40 miles in either direction; you’re bound to run into a change.

The perspective works a little better pulled back here.

This shot just about says it all for west of Monte Vista. You see those strange, conical, teepee-shaped hills and mountains stretching off to the Rio Grande National Forest and the San Juan Mountains, and the traffic on US 160 stretching away another mile or so before it turns northwest towards Del Norte, 15 miles away.

Wide open spaces. They’re not for everyone, thank God.

Oh, and I forgot to mention—these shots were taken at the western edge of the parking lot of the bank.

So how’s the view from your bank’s parking lot?

I feel fortunate to have gotten all these shots, as it was so bright, along with chilly and blustery, I couldn’t see what was on the screen. I squinted at the vague shapes, squeezed the lens-clicky thing, and hoped for the best. Faith was rewarded.

Photos I took towards the beginning of this shoot seemed the most appropriate way to conclude this photo essay. I’m down by the edge of the grassy parcels behind the shopping and banking center, where the road ends...for now. One hopes this place doesn’t fill up with lousy little crackerbox modern construction, but give it a few decades.

For now, I love this barricade, and the empty, grassy spaces behind. I love that Jeep-sized trail leading off around the right edge of that barricade even more. It means something to me. Maybe it’ll mean something to you, too.

Soon.

All photographs Copyright © 2018 by Lawrence Roy Aiken. All rights reserved.