Big city became woodland, farmland, river. From downtown Chicago to the suburbs, from the urban to the sweeping plains. Across Illinois – over the Mississippi – through Iowa and into Nebraska. The train carried us on and on, steadily traversing the Midwest as afternoon grew weary and darkness descended.
And we slept – surprisingly, curled up across two seats each, the hum and rhythm of the train gently rocking us to sleep.
I opened my eyes to golden grassland: the sun was rising and we were already in Colorado, around one thousand metres higher and one hour behind where we had started. Still we trundled steadfastly onwards, the landscape undulating gently, silently, as far as the eye could see.
Now there was a shadow against the horizon, a smudge of purple-blue. Clouds? Or mountains? Whispering darkly in contrast to the golden quiet of the plains, giving nothing away.
Gradually, the jagged lines and angles of the Rocky Mountains came into focus. I felt… nervous. We had planned as best we could, paper map spread out across the living room floor. Yet the contour markings had not conveyed the murkiness of the real thing. The weather forecast was dismal. And what would we do if we encountered a bear?
Twenty-one hours after boarding, we repacked our belongings and disembarked the train.
Denver. We had breakfast, rented a car, bought a tent. Navigation became easier as we left the metropolis behind: just head for the high ground. Mile by mile, the whisper grew louder, became something much more imperative.
The mountains were calling.
The higher we drove, the less nervous, the more elated I felt. We stopped for lunch at a picnic spot in the woods, only a stone’s throw from the road but already telling a different story of tree and leaf and earth. And then up and over the continental divide, the land falling away on both sides of the watershed until somewhere – far, far away – an ocean.
After receiving a wilderness permit and a briefing from the ranger – ‘we are very fond of our bears’ – we followed the trail along Tonahutu Creek. The blackened trunks were ghosts of their former selves, scarred by a forest fire several years ago. Perhaps that was why both humans and bears kept themselves scarce; for three days, it was just us and the moose.
There was too much snow to reach the top of the mountains on foot. Even the road through the national park had only been open for a few days. After returning to the visitor centre, we took the scenic route by car along with a horde of other tourists, huge walls of snow on either side of us.
That night, we were serenaded to sleep by the sound of a motorhome’s generator. At least the campground’s electricity supply allowed me to charge my phone; but the facilities didn’t extend to a shower.
We headed south, driving through sleet and into high-altitude sunshine that glittered and gleamed off a large freshwater reservoir. One hotel, one kayak and two sunburned noses later, we turned west again and chased the culprit of our reddened skin through the increasingly colourful rock formations that gave the state its name.
Off the highway, through dusty land to another geological phenomenon: a mesa – a lonely, flat-topped eIevation that rises emphatically up from the surrounding plain. And not just any, but the largest of its kind in the world (we later discovered). I loved its national forest with the green shadows and pale light, where the frogs sang gentle lullabies to us as we lay by the shore of a lake.
We hiked. We camped. We swam.
And we moved on to explore other trails in this vast place of desert and snow, canyons and mountains.