It’s late in the day as I sit in my hotel room in Lamar, Colorado, at 9:30 p.m. and try to find where my mind was fourteen hours earlier. I know that my physical being was leaving Farmington, New Mexico, after coffee at a local Starbucks, and I know that I crossed the San Juan River in Blanco (seen here). From there, I merged into a 389-mile (626km) blur of sights, sounds, and thoughts, but this isn’t how a blog post chronicling the experiences of a day is supposed to unfold. Nope, grand insights and spectacular vistas are to be shared, and certain enough, those are ahead, but I’m contending with a state of tiredness while simultaneously being aware that I can’t fall behind in writing duties because there is no time to catch up during this trip. What isn’t finished tonight will only eat into the next morning and the opportunity to capture the greatest sunrise image I’ve taken yet. So, without further ado, I need to move away from sad excuses and put my fingers to work telling of this day to the best of my ability.

I’d stopped near Pueblita Canyon to take a photo from a bridge crossing La Jara Arroyo. I thought it would be a nice image with all of the green plants, curvy hills, and a sandy dry wash bed, but it turned into a washed-out bunch of stuff that lacked detail, while the trees of the forest on the side of a mountain in this photo I felt looked pretty nice in contrast.

There are very few cars out here this morning, and maybe that makes sense, seeing it’s Sunday. Not only that, kids have gone back to school in many parts of the West, so vacation season is largely over. Maybe Labor Day the following weekend will be the last hurrah. There are plenty of gas and oil service vehicles out here tending to wells and tanks, along with some quiet space, temperatures in the low 60s, and some birds such as the Woodhouse’s scrub-jay and Cassin’s kingbird. Stopping for this stuff is peculiar; no one else is with me, and no real plan is being played out other than the need to drive the remaining 1,843 miles to reach Buffalo, New York, in time to pick up Caroline next Saturday. So, it’s just me, my thoughts, the camera, and moments of near silence.

I have an overwhelming familiarity with the topology of the United States, which lends a sense of melancholy due to the knowledge that I’m driving out of the Southwest today. While I’m generally excited by the prospect of new roads and sights starting much later today, I’m keenly aware of how much I love this corner of our country. Bare rocks, canyons, and jutting cliffs are uncommon in the Great Plains and Eastern Seaboard. At this point on my road trip, I’m on U.S. Highway 64, east of Dulce, New Mexico.

I’m still traveling familiar roads, and while we’ve not been to this particular train station in 15 years, it’s not for lack of trying, as we were supposed to attend engineering school here at the Cumbres & Toltec Train Station to learn to pilot one of their 100-year-old steam trains that run these lines a couple of years ago, but Covid and then the big uptick in tourism put that on hold. There’s a rumor that the 4-day classes will possibly return in 2025.

The landscape is changing, most likely because I’m approaching another state.

Like refrigerator magnets of yore, Caroline and I used to collect images of all the state signs with us standing next to them for proof that we’d been where we claimed we’d been. Notice how you can’t really know if I took this photo or stole someone else’s. Then again, I could just as easily Photoshop myself into it or maybe generate one with AI.

I can see the writing on the wall that the relatively straight line drive across America will not have been enough, that a circuitous zig-zagging 90-day meander will be needed in order to best feel that we are seeing all the nooks and crannies. I’m fairly certain this road has been driven before; this old blog post from the July 4th weekend, 2009, seems to attest to that.

What a nice stroke of luck! I arrived at Cumbres Pass (elevation 10,022 feet or 3,055 meters) while this old coal-burning steam train of the Cumbres & Toltec line was in the mountain station. I wish I could have made a video of it pulling out of the station with the chug-chug sound, blowing steam, and the beautiful sound of the whistle, but it was photos or video, and as I don’t tell stories with moving pictures, I had to hope I’d get a half-decent image to share here, I think this one worked best.

Fifteen years ago, I took this photo from the exact same pullout, but the contrast between the images couldn’t be stronger. This time, I’m able to identify the location: that’s Elk Creek Meadow and the Canejos River down there, with my viewpoint being on Route 17.

Photographed this ruin of the San Isadore Church in Las Mesitas, Colorado, west of Antonito, Colorado, back in 2009, looks the same.

Somewhere in that general direction to the left behind Blanca Peak lies the Great Sand Dunes National Park. Believe it or not, the tallest of those peaks is 14,350 feet or 4,374 meters high. I had to go digging in our past, where I found that we last visited the dunes back on August 31st, 2003; yep, there’s a blog post for that day.

Goodbye mountains; from here forward, it gets flat and flatter.

This defunct gas station, which last sold fuel at the bargain price of $1.14 a gallon, marks the point on the map that I can be certain I’m traversing new roads. I’ve passed through the town of Walsenburg and under Interstate 25 to get here 679 miles from Phoenix, Arizona. I’m on State Route 10 driving east, and as you can see to the south, bad weather is rolling in.

Two small gravestones not far from this one noted the passing of two children, born a year apart, with neither of them reaching their second birthday. We can never know a thing about their brief lives other than their untimely passings. We might find descendants of family members, but the likelihood that anyone knows the fate of those children is next to zero, and that’s the reality for most of us. Like thunder in the distance, we’ll have made a noise and just as quickly fade away. During these days of our own awareness, we can feel that we are at the center of a universe, yet a plurality of people, from my perspective, self-relegate themselves to living in a sterile box and will make little noise in their lifetimes.

We need to be the bright spot, the flash of lightning in each other’s lives. Make a splash with the deafening crack of thunder, so others know of our existence. This is done when we attempt the difficult things in life and strive to challenge one another, find inspiration in our lives, and seek the world anew. Routine is not a way forward; we must break free of those shackles that leave us in fear.

Some might say that there’s nothing out here on Colorado State Route 10, but maybe the same could be said about the universe. The more important thought is, what meaning do we give things when little else can be found?

I’ve reached Lamar, Colorado, out in the middle of nowhere. This is the last photo for this day of intense traveling where I didn’t drive all that far, a mere 398 miles (640km), but averaging only about 38 miles per hour and jumping from the car some 50 times or so, that’s right, you only see a fraction of the photos I took today, I’m tired and would love to go to sleep early. As I said at the top, I need to keep up with these blogging chores and knock them out before the thoughts and impressions of these days of driving solo across the United States start to fade after I meet up with Caroline again.