The Journey East

Grand Junction to Denver, Colorado

During my boyhood summers in upstate New York, I always looked forward to our annual voyage from Newark Valley to New York City.

Each year, on a hazy, sunny August morning, my family and I would pile into the blue Chrysler station wagon and begin the incredibly long drive (or so it seemed to me at the age of ten) down the impossibly stretched and twisted asphalt snake called Route 17. From my backward facing seat at the rear of the Chrysler, I would watch the retreating highway as we passed between mounded hills covered in dense forests of deciduous trees – maples, oaks, hickories, and ash – sometimes pacing the Delaware River, wide but shallow in the summer heat, flowing over grey shale rocks formed in an ancient muddy ocean. Occasionally, we would cross broad, mysterious valleys with farms and fields and intersecting roads. And, of course, there was the parade of towns – Windsor, Deposit, Hancock, Fishs Eddy, Roscoe, and so on – all of them sleepy clusters of clapboard houses, grocery stores, and gas stations, the old kind with wood siding, big plate glass windows, bubble pumps out front, and a shadowy, mysterious garage on the side. My favorite town was Liberty, where we would stop for lunch at the Liberty Diner, a classic art-deco glass and steel eatery straight out of American Graffiti.

An hour or after Liberty we would hit the outer edges of the urban world, announced by far more buildings, businesses, and streetlights. Near Goshen we would join US 6, which would take us to Harriman and the New York State Thruway. As we neared the city, four lanes would become six, even in 1966, while the buildings would rise higher and higher, and brick and wood would give way to steel and glass. Finally, we would enter what to me was the incredibly exotic world of the biggest city in America.

For a quarter century now, my trips from Grand Junction to Denver with my wife and daughters have replicated my childhood journeys to New York City. 

There are remarkable similarities – the general movement eastward, the sinuous path of the highway as it follows major rivers, the passage through forests, the succession of small towns, stopping midway for lunch, even how the route to Denver joins with US 6. All of this creates a powerful and nostalgic echo of those magical journeys of my youth. So while the landscape and the towns I pass through to reach Denver are quite different from my childhood world of upstate New York, I am still sharply reminded of those boyhood car trips to “The City” whenever I drive to Denver. 

These days, our Denver voyages begin by negotiating the sinuous canyon east of Grand Junction, the one formed by the Colorado River out of surreal, wind-carved sandstone. After breaking out of the canyon, we cross the long, broad Plateau Valley between high chalk-colored ramparts and bluffs. At night, the gas wells blaze like sinister futuristic towers with their rows of electric lights topped by an orange flame. In this valley, Interstate 70 arrows past De Beque, Parachute, Rifle, Silt, and New Castle – but unfortunately the traveler doesn’t see much of these towns since they repose outside the highway’s unstoppable surge.

About an hour from Grand Junction, I-70 enters Glenwood Springs, and we pass the grand red brick Colorado Hotel with its century old memories of Teddy Roosevelt and the steaming Olympic size hot springs pool. With the railroad on the other side of the Colorado River, we traverse the serpentine Glenwood Canyon – carved from cliffs and pagodas of ancient limestone and granite hundreds of feet high. Occasionally, a Union Pacific coal train will snake through the canyon, appearing and disappearing in the route’s many tunnels.

Next is the long climb into the Rockies through Gypsum, Eagle, Edwards, Avon, Vail, and Silverthorne – the mountains growing higher and higher, the grey pyramids past timberline often tipped with snow even in the summer. Then, at 11,000 feet, we plunge into the nearly three kilometer long passage of Eisenhower Tunnel, with its overhead lights pulsing past like something out of a Kubrick movie. Past the tunnel, there’s the long winding descent through granite mountain cliffs and chasms and gorges through Georgetown and Idaho Springs, and soon after the houses and buildings begin to increase – just like when entering the New York City area from Route 17. Finally there is a vision of the vast prairie stretching all the way to the Kansas border and beyond – and on that prairie, clustered like a formation of quartz crystals stand the steel and glass towers of Denver, hazy and golden in the daylight, a galaxy of lights at night.

Thus, my adult sojourns from Grand Junction to Denver create a powerful echo to my childhood journeys from Newark Valley to New York City. Both of them are magic voyages I’ve made time and again through mountains and valleys, rivers and forests, to metropolises filled with art, music, wonderful cuisine, and the shining towers and stadiums of a great American city.