Mountain Roads

I've just come back from a driving tour of Colorado and New Mexico, staying with our daughter in Colorado Springs and taking either day tours or three to four day excursions.  One excursion took us to the Taos district of New Mexico; on another one we went north to Steamboat Springs, Colorado via Highway 40, a road marked scenic on which you cross the continental divide three times and pass 11000'.

All of the country we passed through is beautiful, whether it is sere grassland inhabited by scruffy buffaloes, tiny lilac strewn communities in river valleys or stark mountain majesties viewed from the plains.  This has been our fourth trip through parts of the southwest and I would go back again tomorrow. 

I would go back even though my husband can't see a mountain pass on the map without wanting to drive through it.  We are both flatlanders, but JG seems to be able to surmount the vertigo and enjoy crawling up the side of a mountain.  I don't. 

I can't drive on roads like that and when it gets to the switchback with no guardrail point, I can't breathe either.  I clamber out of the car at the top of the pass and stagger off on rubbery legs to take photos before once more clenching my teeth and squidging up my eyes preparatory to enduring the descent. 

I really wish I wasn't such a chicken.  As a young woman I drove the Going to the Sun parkway in Glacier National Park; I wasn't happy but I did it. In middle age the vertigo appeared, as I recall it, fairly suddenly.  I walked up an open cliff path with my daughters and when I started down again I got so dizzy that I ended up walking with my eyes closed and my hands on one daughter's shoulders, while the other steered from behind.  One of life's memorable and shaming moments.

It's worth the vertigo and feelings of inadequacy, however, to experience the mountains.  The Enchanted Forest circuit out of Taos, the Capulin Volcano National Park, Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado, the quick running ephemeral mountain streams, the colour and the glory of the mountains; worth paying any price to see and experience.  And so, yes, I will go back even though JG is determined to drive Independence Pass on the next trip, 12000'+ and one lane roads and all.  But he's going to have to do the Pike's Peak road without me.

This is an original post for Canada Moms Blog by Mary G.  When she is not hyperventilating on the mountain roads, you will find her posting at Them's My Sentiments.