The Albuquerque Conservation Association

My first concern is no hot shower. The phone is charged, which is good because otherwise I would have missed the notice on my weather app about a “Regional Planned Emergency Power Outage.” That’s the wording.  As a former city planner I’m especially amused by the oxymoronic term, ‘planned emergency.’ Apparently it provided “plausible deniability” for hotels that rented rooms in spite on knowing what was coming. 

Up until then I liked my big bright corner room in the grand old hotel. The fire escape door at the end of the hall was tied open and there was a smell of room deodorant masking a sewer scent in the bathroom. But the mountain view – incomparable and stunning.

Red Mountain White Knuckles

The drive on US 550 between Durango and Ouray is intense. As kids we called the whole stretch the “Million Dollar Highway.” It probably costs at least that much every year just to maintain it. It is now apparently only called that between Silverton and Ouray. According to wiki, it’s the portion twelve miles south of Ouray – that last hair raising portion through Uncompagre Gorge, that gives the highway its name. Quick glances at faces in oncoming cars show passengers expressing worry or terror. 

The highway is a staggering and impressive drive all the way from Albuquerque. It’s US 550 the entire way – Bernalillo on the Rio Grande Valley to Montrose on the Western Slope – through some of the most interesting geology in the west. Portions follow routes used in prehistory and the Old Spanish Trail. In the San Juans a man named Otto Mears built the first tollroads on parts of what became 550. Then he built the first railroad to Silverton. Collectors of railroad memorabilia love his Silverton Railroad passes, printed on buckskin and adorned with silver filigree. 

It’s nice to divide the drive into two parts with a stop in Silverton for relief from the cliff-clinging road. A free Shakespeare production of As You Like It in intimate little Anesi Park that night was delightful. Multiple sponsors included UpstART Theater That Moves. The play was also preformed in Ouray.  

The Silverton history museum has expanded from the old jail to a mining boarding house donated to the San Juan Historical Society and moved to town. In and under those buildings is everything related to mining but a live burro. A mineral exhibit has me transfixed and I stare at innocent looking yellow uranium powder for probably too long wondering if it’s safe.  

My second concern on the morning of no electricity, is no hot coffee. I thank my stars for the cold brew I bought yesterday in Durango and sit in my car taking big gulps while admiring the looming mountainsides. They’re illuminated like a stage backdrop by the rising sun. No stage production could match it. Somewhere someone is whistling. 

The whole county seems to be lined up in the one coffee shop with a generator. There are delicious pastries. A hot cup takes over ten minutes. Everyone is listening to city workers – big guys in work clothes talking loud and greeting each other as they file in between the tourists. One guy says marijuana is a gateway drug and another says it sure was for him. The whole place erupts in laughter.

I love old places, including big richly storied western hotels. I worked at an old resort near Denver for a summer in college. It was memorable. I can smell it now – old wood and dust. The work was grueling – dragging an old vacuum cleaner to hillside cabins, cleaning all day after serving breakfast then cleaning up to serve dinner. The six of us lived in a bunk room under the porch with no insulation and touchy wiring. No one could use a blowdryer without blowing a fuse and this was the late seventies so that was a problem. We got one day off a week, separately. I would drive to Denver in a borrowed VW beetle alone to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

It was pretty – that canyon and the trees and the grand old three-story tower. We rattled the bones of that building at square dances in the lobby, attendance at which was mandatory. Sometimes people played the piano. The whole place seemed alive. 

Give me an old hotel over a new dull and anonymous one any day. But some people think that’s what a hotel should be. They don’t want character, just sleep. Preferably with electricity.

Silver City

A few weeks later I drove west to Silver City from I-25 through the Black Range. It is a magical and less scary for the height conscious passengers. I remember boys at NMSU hauling bicycles up and riding them down the curvy steep bits above Kingston. I drove the pickup. No one was hurt, remarkably.  Tiny grey deer under ponderosa watch the occasional traffic. I try and take photos but end up attempting watercolors  later for the first time in years – simply inspired.

Silver City is a good and interesting. It’s one of those places where the rolling Wheel of Fortune has been very visible and left an indelible track. Artists and seekers sometimes come to places like this.  Sometimes money or popularity “ruin it” and we’ll talk about how Vail or Durango or Santa Fe used to be. Silver is like that now.  I’m sure it’ll change again. Cultures have been displacing, absorbing, undermining each other from prehistory. Land and landscapes used and abused. Mountains turned upside down for copper. Rebellion over cows to controversial feral cow elimination.

It’s always the end of an era. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes (usually) long after “we” are gone. Like how a flood in 1895 washed out Silver City’s Main Street leaving a 55 foot deep trench. Main street became the next street over. Now the trench is a pretty linear park. 

The copper mines could be a set piece for the recent Netflix series “KAOS” with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus sitting in a giant excavator observing the miles-wide pockmarks, seeping festules, funny-colored fake mountains. A friendly cowboy in the brew pub said when dust from blasting settles on cars it eats away the paint, “and that can’t be good.” He knows dust, being from where dust storms frequently close I-10. I asked if the mines employed many people. He said he didn’t really know but that they’ll never close them. They’ll always keep “a skeleton crew” to avoid the costs of reclamation work required when they close.

I stayed at the Murphy Hotel, a downtown classic. It is solid, simple, nice. I like to pretend I’m the Hotel Inspector. That reality show follows famed hotelier, Alex Polizzi, around Britain as she visits and critiques hotels and B and Bs. I don’t have her background, experience, heritage or chops, but I know good vibes and clean sheets when I feel and see them. I also see that cool Mondrian inspired mural on the back wall across from restored old brick buildings. I can smell the sweet little bakery downstairs around the corner.

Mimbres pottery is a reminder of prehistory and that spinning wheel of time. Western New Mexico University has a huge collection housed in a beautiful 1917 Arts and Crafts building. The distinctive black on white Mimbres pots with animal images became so popular with collectors that ancient sites where the pottery originated have been routinely destroyed. A century of looting resulted in several large private collections that this museum has acquired for analysis and display. 

Mimbres means little willow in Spanish. We don’t know what these people called themselves or the beautiful river valley where many villages were located. Similarly, the Mimbres are classified as part of the Mogollon culture, named after mountains that were named for a Governor of New Spain. 

The Sonoran Desert

Interstate 10 is very bumpy and busy past the Arizona border. It’s best viewed as it stretches out in the distance on the descent from Silver City. Trainline-like lines of tractor trailers move back and forth. You barely see the cars, seemingly outnumbered by big trucks.

This was part of  the Gadsden Purchase – 45,000 square miles the US ripped-off from Mexico in 1854 for a transcontinental route and a railroad magnate’s aspirations. Mexico pretty much ripped it off from the Apaches who ripped it off from the Mogollon and Hohokam and Ancient Puebloans. All this within a millennium. 

It never stops. Subdivisions punch holes in the delicate Sonoran desert. It is an honor and a tragedy to be this close. Like petting an endangered fish. I baby talk to javalina from a swimming pool and sketch quail from the bedroom window. The relentless wheel spins. What will be next, you can’t predict. 

So breathe the delicate morning air. Enjoy the native desert. Come back when it’s cooler.