metal, mettle, everywhere - #5
Sinking my nails in.
It’s raining. I can hear it on the roof. I’m watching American Pickers and I keep pausing the show just to check. We’ve been here two months and I’ve seen it rain and blow and thunder and snow. And this week, the leaves began their sleepy bedtime routine, sighing off their green.
The whole slope across from the cabin is a smear of aspens, a few mingling with the pines. We set up a camera in the front room to capture the scene day by day, as the green gives way to yellow gives way to white.
But the change is short. A friend (a friend!) said we’d be skiing that aspen-littered slope by November. Neither of us even have skis. Two former ski hill employees, what good are we. In college, when I adopted a new screen name to go with my new identity, I went with ktonic158: my nickname and the length of my skis. I’m really looking forward to good skis. For now though, the only new goodie is a pair of trail shoes to replace the old ones as I spend 12 hours a week sniffing out old mine roads before they’re lost in the snowfall. There's snow along the ridge even now — rain below, snow up high.
The thing that sticks with me the most on those trails isn’t the beauty—though it is beautiful—it’s the sheer quantity of metal. There is metal everywhere. Rusting pipes and handmade iron nails and mine carts and shovels everywhere. In places most people can’t hike to. And I can’t help it, if I see a piece of rust jutting from the earth even 100 yards off the trail, I have to go look at it. These are my pyramids. I cannot wrap my head around the engineering and the lifestyle of then compared to now. Mine roads sliced into the sides of cliffs, slipping away to the earth below, still covered in old signs and old tracks.
And these people that sermonize the burdens of winter. Please! I mentioned briefly the mailman of the 1880s, but here, now let’s tell the tale. I’ve referenced the pass road here, and all things considered (tires, wheels, modern vehicles in general, forest service maintenance, grade, construction) Ophir Road Pass is not a difficult road. It takes a high clearance vehicle, a confident driver, and at the very least, a locking differential, to get to the other side, but you can do so in air-conditioning listening to Miley Cyrus drinking a kombucha. The saddle to the other side reaches only 11,789 feet — a gentle climb compared to the 14ers surrounding it.
The earliest known use of the route dates back to the Navajo, pre-1870, as a hunting route. Then, moose, elk, and other hoofed creatures were more common in this valley, along with the usual mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes, beaver, porcupine, etc. Mostly I just see weasels. When the town was incorporated, the pass became known as Ophir Pass, named for the biblical region that purportedly brought King Solomon so much wealth. The point of a pass road is to go somewhere faster than going around the whole range, and that somewhere was Silverton, Colorado. (Photo curtesy of Western Mining History.)
Ophir Pass became a toll road in 1881, charging wagons (wagons!) to use the pass. But it was also regularly used by foot to travel between Ophir and Silverton, including by a mailman named Swan Nilson. Good ole, Swan.
Swan was a Swedish mail carrier who carried the mail by foot between the two towns. That’s 12 miles, 2300 feet of climbing, by foot, carrying 60lb bags of mail, in the snow, in 1880. Swan would make the trip in old snowshoes, and made good money doing it. The trip was so notably treacherous that he made $200 a month. But money doesn’t stop weather. Our old pal Swan disappeared on the pass in December 1883 while carrying Ophir’s Christmas mail from Silverton.
The town lost it. Swan had absconded with their Christmas mail! Thankfully Swan’s family had a little more faith. His brother searched for his body all winter, into the spring, summer, fall, and through the next year, finally finding his body frozen in a snowbank in August 1885, the mail pouch with its rusted lock still strapped to his back.
I drive in a giant truck with heated seats two miles down a flat dirt road to get my mail. I think we’ll survive the winter.
But before winter gets here, I want to enjoy my first true autumn in eight years. This is typically the time when I’d lob all my hair off, and in LA, that’s how I told time. Is my hair reaching down my back? It’s been a little over a year. But everything else stayed the same: the palms, the weather, people’s faces, all preserved in a perfect 72 degrees of botox. Where there’s an obligation to enjoy the outdoors in LA, here there’s an urgency. Summit before the storms. Ride before the snow. Ski before the mud. Train before the sun. Swim before the chill. There is an omnipresent readiness here, and it absolutely sings with time.
I don’t yet know how to read this valley, how to decipher the clouds and the winds for what they bring. They’re new houseguests, and I’m learning what they really mean when they knock on the door. Last night brought rain and snow, and the valley feels peaceful today. I had plans to do a 14-mile hike with Cooper up to an alpine lake. The forecast says clear. The clouds do not. And until I get to know them, I just have to believe them. So we’ll likely stay low today, maybe take the mountain bike to the tacky, wet ground, play amongst the yellow leaves with stiff joints and tired muscles, a body aware of time in a place that reeks of it. But that’s the beauty of Shangri-Llogs.
When we named this cabin Shangri-Logs, we did so because it was our utopia, an earthly paradise separate from the world around it. But another myth of Shangri-La was that the people barely aged. They were so happy, they were nearly immortal — and here, I see it. No one looks their age. No one. Our neighbor looks 45. He is 60. People who look 30 have 20-year-old children. Even Jack, the man who built this house, was pocketing beers as he hopped into his truck to hit the slopes when we met — a dashing, tan, cowboy-hatted man still spry and full of the life of this valley — 82 years old.
And maybe it’s in these places where each season thunders in that our awareness of time helps us play with it, like Anasi or Loki or Coyote. It’s the existence of hard and fast rules that opens the door to play with them. Maybe it will keep us young, maybe it just keeps the valley old. But the one thing it doesn’t do is keep you inside, and it seems all you need to thrive in it, is the ability to survive in it.
Follow our journey of high-altitude relocation and renovation at @shangrilogs.