I wake in the morning and get a cup of coffee. It’s an incredible summer morning in the Rockies, the Colorado River coursing by, cloudless but still a bit cool. A bird flies in through the open cabin door and briefly hovers above me before heading back outside.
I hike along the old abandoned stage road along the Colorado River. While crossing the new State Bridge (the original is only pilings), a van with PERCEPTION spray-painted on its hood passes by. A quarter-mile down the trail, I startle a five-foot long yellow snake, and vice versa. It stares at me, poised to strike, but the confrontation is avoided. I pick up a small stone in case another serpent is sunbathing on the trail.
I try to psychoanalyze myself and consider the possibility that my anger is the result of pent-up, misdirected hostility towards—and anxiety about—women. Not a bad theory.
I stop at a footbridge, consider the creek and the river and the world’s water as another aspen-like connectedness metaphor, then think of Gunnar, who told me he’d hitched 100,000 miles one year and traveled the West extensively, in a far different manner than my typically car-bound M.O. with travel writer’s perks. I think about perception and trying to see myself from others’ point of view.
On the hike back, I prepare for another encounter with the serpent. I ready my rock, imagining it waiting there for me. A train shows up to add noisy tension to the moment as I round the bend where the first run-in occurred. But the snake is nowhere to be found.
I make it back to my cabin without further incident, except for passing a middle-aged guy with a mullet, Oakley sunglasses, and a tie-dyed Rolling Stones tee.
“Somebody might be sitting there,” K.K. tells me as I slid into a barstool at her empty outdoor bar and grill a stone’s throw from the Colorado River. “I don’t know if he’s particular about his seat.” She is joking, but I didn’t realize just how much personality she had at this early time in the day.
I decide to move down two stools for good measure and start to learn exactly why K.K.’s BBQ at Rancho Del Rio is indeed the center of the universe. After all, that’s what the sign says, in all caps.
K.K. is perhaps the most skilled one-person bar and grill in the history of mankind. With a propane grill, a pina bar, and the help of the occasional regular, she serves up rib after rib after brat after “4K” after “Little Beauty” after “Orgasmatronic Sundae”. Help yourself to beers out of the cooler, but be sure to keep track of exactly how many you have.
And K.K. dispenses as much warped wisdom and funny jokes as she does beef and beer.
On complainers: “Go across the street.”
I look across the street and see a mountain. “What’s across the street?”
“Exactly.”
On the cops: “They’re getting a little nosy for as far out in the country as we are.”
On cowboy foreplay: “Get in the truck, bitch!”
She only allows one napkin per customer, because she doesn’t promote waste. Everything is served on wax paper. She sells beer and airline bottles of booze, but no non-alcoholic beverages, get them at the store up the hill. She also likes to ring a bunch of bells.
I have a 4K (short for K.K.’s Klassic Combination: split Italian sausage atop a cheeseburger with fresh jalapenos) and a couple of Buds, then mosey a hundred yards or so to the Colorado River Center, where I rent an inflatable kayak and paddled four miles down the Colorado to State Bridge, where a shuttle picks me up and takes me back to a barstool at K.K.’s.
On the river, it hits me that it is the perfect day. My aspen/river Zen radiates from deep within. I spin slowly in the slow blue water under the sun, occasionally perking up for a splash of low-key whitewater.
Rancho Del Rio started as a commune in the late 1960s and evolved into what it is today: a community of 20 or so residents in cabins and trailers, several rafting companies and fishing guides, and the Colorado River snaking by under the green-studded red and grey mountainscape. And K.K.’s BBQ.
At my second stint at K.K.’s bar, I have a few more Buds and a couple of beef ribs. I feel great. Wandering the trailers and rafting shacks, I have a beer with Steve, a Vietnam vet who’s called an Airstream at Rancho Del Rio his full-time home for several years. He calls K.K. a thief. I take his photo and he acts like he is going to pull out his cock. He has a bong sitting about 10 feet away, plain as day, and takes a bonghit. I take one, too. Then I go back to State Bridge.
My seemingly infinite inner peace lasts about five hours. I wake up a bit frazzled and hungover, without the beer buzz and exhaustion that led to my emotional crash and burn the night before. I feel placid, but ready for another change of scenery.
I bid adieu to Scott, the general manager of State Bridge. “Safe travels,” he says.
“I don’t know where the fuck I’m going,” I tell him.
Actually I do know where the fuck I’m going. I take four highways and a semi-paved mountain road 160 miles to the Shambhala Mountain Center near Red Feather Lakes. I get a canvas-sided tent cabin, complete with foam-pad mattress. In a week, I’d moved from a cushy suite at the Ritz to a tent with pine needles on the dirty wood floor and no electricity. I might be getting somewhere.
I set out up the hill for the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya Which Liberates upon Seeing, perched high in a mountain valley. I see it and feel moderately liberated. Before making my final approach, I leave the snake rock (my metaphoric bad temper) and my favorite pen, which was running out of ink anyway, in the offering bowl at the base of the staircase that leads up to the Stupa. It is meant for people to leave favorite possessions to cast off the shackles of the material world and the relevant suffering. Others had cast off money, a Barbie doll, a small framed picture of Mister Rogers, even a cell phone.
Then I do two counterclockwise laps around the Stupa’s base. I ponder, and realize it was simply mind over matter. I can only control my reaction to outside situations, and not the situations themselves, and countering external stimuli with external stimuli will get you nowhere. Inner peace is called inner for a reason.
I took off my Chuck Taylors and ballcap and enter the Stupa to meditate at the foot of the statue that contains Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s skull. I breathe deep and exhale, breathe deep and try to be the breath.
It feels good.
Vail Cascade: 1300 Westhaven Dr., Vail, 970/476-7111, www.vailcascade.com
Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch: 0130 Daybreak Ridge, Avon, 970/748-6200, www.ritzcarlton.com
Home Ranch: 54880 CR 129, Clark, 970/879-1780, www.homeranch.com
State Bridge Lodge: Sadly closed, due to a 2007 fire. Check www.statebridge.com for current information.
I hike along the old abandoned stage road along the Colorado River. While crossing the new State Bridge (the original is only pilings), a van with PERCEPTION spray-painted on its hood passes by. A quarter-mile down the trail, I startle a five-foot long yellow snake, and vice versa. It stares at me, poised to strike, but the confrontation is avoided. I pick up a small stone in case another serpent is sunbathing on the trail.
I try to psychoanalyze myself and consider the possibility that my anger is the result of pent-up, misdirected hostility towards—and anxiety about—women. Not a bad theory.
I stop at a footbridge, consider the creek and the river and the world’s water as another aspen-like connectedness metaphor, then think of Gunnar, who told me he’d hitched 100,000 miles one year and traveled the West extensively, in a far different manner than my typically car-bound M.O. with travel writer’s perks. I think about perception and trying to see myself from others’ point of view.
On the hike back, I prepare for another encounter with the serpent. I ready my rock, imagining it waiting there for me. A train shows up to add noisy tension to the moment as I round the bend where the first run-in occurred. But the snake is nowhere to be found.
I make it back to my cabin without further incident, except for passing a middle-aged guy with a mullet, Oakley sunglasses, and a tie-dyed Rolling Stones tee.
“Somebody might be sitting there,” K.K. tells me as I slid into a barstool at her empty outdoor bar and grill a stone’s throw from the Colorado River. “I don’t know if he’s particular about his seat.” She is joking, but I didn’t realize just how much personality she had at this early time in the day.
I decide to move down two stools for good measure and start to learn exactly why K.K.’s BBQ at Rancho Del Rio is indeed the center of the universe. After all, that’s what the sign says, in all caps.
K.K. is perhaps the most skilled one-person bar and grill in the history of mankind. With a propane grill, a pina bar, and the help of the occasional regular, she serves up rib after rib after brat after “4K” after “Little Beauty” after “Orgasmatronic Sundae”. Help yourself to beers out of the cooler, but be sure to keep track of exactly how many you have.
And K.K. dispenses as much warped wisdom and funny jokes as she does beef and beer.
On complainers: “Go across the street.”
I look across the street and see a mountain. “What’s across the street?”
“Exactly.”
On the cops: “They’re getting a little nosy for as far out in the country as we are.”
On cowboy foreplay: “Get in the truck, bitch!”
She only allows one napkin per customer, because she doesn’t promote waste. Everything is served on wax paper. She sells beer and airline bottles of booze, but no non-alcoholic beverages, get them at the store up the hill. She also likes to ring a bunch of bells.
I have a 4K (short for K.K.’s Klassic Combination: split Italian sausage atop a cheeseburger with fresh jalapenos) and a couple of Buds, then mosey a hundred yards or so to the Colorado River Center, where I rent an inflatable kayak and paddled four miles down the Colorado to State Bridge, where a shuttle picks me up and takes me back to a barstool at K.K.’s.
On the river, it hits me that it is the perfect day. My aspen/river Zen radiates from deep within. I spin slowly in the slow blue water under the sun, occasionally perking up for a splash of low-key whitewater.
Rancho Del Rio started as a commune in the late 1960s and evolved into what it is today: a community of 20 or so residents in cabins and trailers, several rafting companies and fishing guides, and the Colorado River snaking by under the green-studded red and grey mountainscape. And K.K.’s BBQ.
At my second stint at K.K.’s bar, I have a few more Buds and a couple of beef ribs. I feel great. Wandering the trailers and rafting shacks, I have a beer with Steve, a Vietnam vet who’s called an Airstream at Rancho Del Rio his full-time home for several years. He calls K.K. a thief. I take his photo and he acts like he is going to pull out his cock. He has a bong sitting about 10 feet away, plain as day, and takes a bonghit. I take one, too. Then I go back to State Bridge.
My seemingly infinite inner peace lasts about five hours. I wake up a bit frazzled and hungover, without the beer buzz and exhaustion that led to my emotional crash and burn the night before. I feel placid, but ready for another change of scenery.
I bid adieu to Scott, the general manager of State Bridge. “Safe travels,” he says.
“I don’t know where the fuck I’m going,” I tell him.
Actually I do know where the fuck I’m going. I take four highways and a semi-paved mountain road 160 miles to the Shambhala Mountain Center near Red Feather Lakes. I get a canvas-sided tent cabin, complete with foam-pad mattress. In a week, I’d moved from a cushy suite at the Ritz to a tent with pine needles on the dirty wood floor and no electricity. I might be getting somewhere.
I set out up the hill for the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya Which Liberates upon Seeing, perched high in a mountain valley. I see it and feel moderately liberated. Before making my final approach, I leave the snake rock (my metaphoric bad temper) and my favorite pen, which was running out of ink anyway, in the offering bowl at the base of the staircase that leads up to the Stupa. It is meant for people to leave favorite possessions to cast off the shackles of the material world and the relevant suffering. Others had cast off money, a Barbie doll, a small framed picture of Mister Rogers, even a cell phone.
Then I do two counterclockwise laps around the Stupa’s base. I ponder, and realize it was simply mind over matter. I can only control my reaction to outside situations, and not the situations themselves, and countering external stimuli with external stimuli will get you nowhere. Inner peace is called inner for a reason.
I took off my Chuck Taylors and ballcap and enter the Stupa to meditate at the foot of the statue that contains Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s skull. I breathe deep and exhale, breathe deep and try to be the breath.
It feels good.
Vail Cascade: 1300 Westhaven Dr., Vail, 970/476-7111, www.vailcascade.com
Ritz-Carlton, Bachelor Gulch: 0130 Daybreak Ridge, Avon, 970/748-6200, www.ritzcarlton.com
Home Ranch: 54880 CR 129, Clark, 970/879-1780, www.homeranch.com
State Bridge Lodge: Sadly closed, due to a 2007 fire. Check www.statebridge.com for current information.