There's Snow Place Like Home Peter B. Steiger 06/02/03 I just flew back from Houston (and boy are my arms tired!) following a week of "vacation" which consisted primarily of preventing my children from killing each other, the local population, and their grandmother. I wisely padded the end of my week in Houston with two extra days back home in Cheyenne so I could have time for all the other important vacation activities like getting stranded in a mud bog 150 miles from home during a thunderstorm. The whole thing came about because my lovely and talented wife had to rent a car to take us to the airport in Denver, due to the fact that our own car, a chariot made in 704 BC, requires us to stop and replace an expensive part every 52 miles. It doesn't matter which part, as long as we go to a mechanic and give him money in return for a new car part; as long as we keep that up the car is happy. So Sylvia calculated it out and figured that it would be cheaper to rent a car - or a space shuttle - than to drive our chariot to Denver and back. As a result, when we returned from Houston we went home in an SUV slightly larger than France. That would have been the end of the story, except the car rental people claimed they had TOO MANY cars, and offered to pay us to keep the SUV a few more days until they had a hangar large enough to house it. So we continued to rent the SUV for $36 a day, and they paid us $26 a day, and everyone was happy. I'm still working on convincing Sylvia we did not profit from the deal. There I was with two more days of vacation and a huge all-purpose vehicle that can operate safely on the surface of the moon, so we figured we should take advantage of the situation. For me, that means driving 150 miles to a gigantic hot tub. See, there's this hot spring in the town of Saratoga, a couple of hours west of here as the SUV flies, and the nice people of Saratoga put a sign up that says "DANGER INTENSE HEAT KEEP OUT", only someone else scratched that out and wrote "Free Hot Spring, Open To The Public". What better way to relax on a warm spring afternoon than sitting in boiling water? Actually Saratoga was only part of our planned Day Of Incredible Fun, as it soon came to be known to the kids when we could pry them away from their handheld electronic games. Sure, any fool can drive along Interstate 80 past the giant face of Abraham Lincoln and get to Saratoga the easy way, but when you have a giant SUV you go the way of the pioneers, up through the Snowy Range. Just like the pioneers who blazed the trail before us, we loaded up the SUV with Diet Cokes and peanut butter sandwiches, and drove off at the crack of dawn, which is to say 10 AM for us, into the general direction of mountains. The Snowy Range Scenic Highway O' Splendor starts in the town of Centennial, where the entire police force consists of an old car painted black and white with blue and yellow soup cans on the roof to look like siren lights. They park this at the foot of the mountain road in the hopes that people enjoying scenic splendor at 124 miles an hour will slow down before they hit the town's only remaining cow. The last time we took friends through the Snowy Range, it was nothing of the kind; we're in the middle of a long drought and we kept pointing at places where snow should have been, saying "This time last year it was only 25 degrees here!" while we all fought for the seat nearest the air conditioner vents. So I was pleasantly surprised to find that even though the drought is still putting every rancher in the state out of business, this spring brought enough water to at least give us a few inches of scenic splendor here and there. Some of the best snow was conveniently placed at a rest stop near the top of the pass, where there is an observation platform and a telescope to help you view ants and patches of snow up close. We got out to feed the ants with our peanut butter sandwiches and let the dog terrorize other sightseers. Candy is part Border Collie, the world's smartest breed, and part total nincompoop. She celebrated her freedom from the rear of the SUV by leaping up to the top of the observation deck and trying to hurl herself joyfully over the wall onto the cliffs below. When we convinced her this was not the way to take in all the natural wonders below, she contented herself by running up to every stranger on the mountain and sniffing body parts I'm too embarrassed to mention here. When we finished lunch, I took Candy's ball out of the SUV and let her dig for it in the snow, which was great fun until I forgot where I buried it and she couldn't find it either. The next half hour saw all of us crawling through melting snow, digging with tree branches and bare hands to find that stupid ball. Amazingly, the dog found it first before the rest of us died from hypothermia. My last important need before we left was to get pictures of the kids playing in the snow. I commanded them to laugh gaily and hurl snow towards the camera in a funloving way, only the camera wasn't focusing on the incoming snow so I kept telling them to throw more snow and continue laughing merrily while they did so. After 206 failed attempts, their laughter became noticably less delighted and carefree, and I found myself snarling "you're going to throw that snow in a delighted and carefree manner if it's the last thing you do!" We finally got the perfect picture, so we wrung all the melted scenic splendor out of our clothes and got back on the road for the next opportunity to admire natural beauty. That opportunity came at a park ranger station, where they sold numerous books telling us how much we were enjoying all this splendor, and there was a hummingbird feeder outside the door. While Sylvia and the kids went inside to spend all my money, I started stalking the hummingbirds. I had just about convinced them to playfully throw snowballs towards the camera when it was time to go again. Having an SUV means nothing if you don't drive through impossible-to- navigate tangles of mud tracks and deep snow, so rather than stay on the main pass we detoured down a couple of side roads that looked "interesting." This turns out to mean "completely blocked", but we didn't know this until we made it to a narrow point where there was mountain on one side of us, perilous cliffs on the other side, and 3 feet of snow (in June!) on the other. Sylvia, who has formerly driven New York taxis, Miami ambulances, and I think famous monster truck "Bigfoot", whipped the SUV into reverse and zipped straight backwards for a half a mile until she managed to perform a textbook example of a 17-point-turn, executed in such a way that I could admire all of God's creation for 11,000 feet directly below me outside the passenger side window. Finally we got to Saratoga, but before I could melt away my cares in the hot spring we stopped at a museum where they collect old license plates, little clay models of Indians driving a herd of buffalo over a cliff, and an ancient Victrola which my innovative son attempted to take apart in his charmingly inquisitive way. At last it was time for that hot spring, locally known as the "Hobo Pool" or "Pit of Searing Death". Vultures circled the pool waiting for another hapless victim who forgot to leave before the flesh melted from his or her bones, and the smell of sulfur alerts everyone to the location of the pool for 500 miles around. I grabbed my towel and the kids, and we ran up the walk to where the heat waves from the pool knocked us to the ground 10 feet before we reached the water. Daniel made it about 2 inches into the water before he lifted vertically into the air 10 feet like a cartoon character, and ran screaming in pain to the ice cold water of the nearby North Platte. Irene and I managed to dangle our legs into the water; with tears of delight streaming down our faces we chuckled with other visitors about the soothing benefits of scalding water. One man was actually swimming under the water nearest the source of the spring, where it was considerably hotter than the edge where we stayed, and I'm pretty sure he had scales and gills. Irene and I eased ourselves into the cauldron bit by bit and were actually becoming quite comfortable just about the time the thunderstorm started directly over our heads. Lightning came down and zapped everyone else in the pool, so we figured maybe we had enjoyed enough of the soothing benefits of the hot spring and headed back for the SUV. Sylvia had still not wrung enough SUV power out of the vehicle to feel like she was really gaining an advantage with excessive horsepower, and, not having learned from our backroad experience on the mountains, took off into uncharted territory that allegedly runs between Saratoga and the quaint picturesque town of Elk Mountain. She did indeed make it easily through mud bogs that would have swallowed our Korean car, but the one obstacle she couldn't get past with that enormous vehicle was the herd of cows taking an evening nap in the middle of the road. All we could do was scowl at them until they moved. This happened three or four more times before we finally got back onto paved road and made our way into Elk Mountain. The only thing was, we had no idea what we wanted to DO there. I insisted that I wanted to drive around and look at examples of quaint and picturesque town life, but we couldn't find any on the map so with a resigned sigh Sylvia drove through town until we saw a bridge that looked like it had been up since the continent was formed. I agreed that it met my needs for quaintness and we headed back to Interstate 80, with one last detour that would put our patience and the SUV to the greatest test. I remarked that our map showed a nearby windmill farm just down yet another unmarked back road. We randomly picked the next back road we saw branching off the Interstate, and headed up it "for maybe six or seven miles," I said confidently as I used my fingernail to measure fractions of a mile. By this time it was starting to rain, and the dirt road quickly became a mud road. We would occasionally slide a little and Sylvia laughed gaily at the way the SUV handled under the circumstances, and we all agreed we were sure glad we didn't have our cheap, ill-equipped car and by the way where did the road go? This last observation came when we realized the gentle rain was now a full force monsoon, and even at 5 miles an hour the SUV was handling like a greased pig on a frozen pond. If any of us could have seen the road at all we would have turned around, but we couldn't and besides that according to the map we were "only" a few more miles from Medicine Bow, another nearby quaint and picturesque town in that area known primarily to folks outside the state as the setting for Owen Wister's historically accurate documentary "The Virginian." There's The Virginian hotel, countless boarded-up abandoned houses, and at least 63 liquor stores doing a booming business. It's times like this that you really get bold in telling God how to do His job. "You know, it would be a big help if you could keep us on the road... and a little more visibility would be great, if it's all the same to you." All those demands must have paid off, because somehow we managed to find the turn that took us into Medicine Bow, onto the main highway and into Laramie, where the five of us - including the dog, who was NO help at all in scouting out signs of civilization - found ourselves cold, tired, and hungry but not necessarily in that order. Downtown Laramie doesn't have parking lots in the sense of "within three miles of where you want to go"; we parked a couple of blocks away from a restaurant Sylvia remembered fondly from a previous visit and ran like crazy through the horizontal rain to a restaurant that looked like it was collecting two of every species of animal. We only left when the manager started pulling the chairs out from under us, and out of our 250-mile around trip the last 35 miles were blissfully uneventful. So the next time anybody asks me if I want to go exploring back country roads, I'll reply "That'll be a frosty Friday in June!" Oh wait, we already had one of those.