In My Life

Crystal clear creeks, steep escarpments, dramatic rock formations, barren hills, evergreen hills, and trees with leaves already fallen – the Rockies are all that and more. This is one place I’d love to explore in a car and on foot. I guess this is also just like the Grand Canyon with diagonal, rather than horizontal, layers of rocky sediment, everything from volcanic red to ashen white. Dotted along the way are log cabins and luxury houses and skiing lodges.
Right now I can see an orange-coloured cliff hovering menacingly above our train.
Since this morning we’ve been followed by a strange cloud formation. Now the cliffs are cream-colored. The leaves of just a few trees are yellow: still haven’t been blown away. These views bring back to mind scenes from cowboy movies. Now up ahead, I can see newer and higher mountains with areas gouged out by what must have been madly rushing waters. Now the mountain sides are shades of ochre towering over wide open valleys. Though I’ve never been to Uluru, this reminds me of it – but this is no monolith, but a fully blown range of mountain ranges. Sometimes words cannot describe. The foothills on the left look like the paws of some extinct creature.
I am stopping continually to photograph the evidence I’ll need to prove what I’ve written. Thankfully the train is moving slowly as we wait for a goods train to pass by. Many of my photos have been through dirty train windows but if the settings are right they turn out okay. This is certainly picture postcard country.
There are no showers for coach class passengers like us, but this morning I gave myself a sponge down and a change of fresh underwear. Feels good. We still have 26 hours to go on this the California Zephyr before we reach San Francisco. By then, we will have passed through: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas (just), Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.
Tunnel coming up.
Those creeks have become the Colorado River and we are down beside it and are dwarfed by the canyon on either side of us. And now there is a super double decker highway on the other side of the river – sometimes disappearing in tunnels. Now we see a dam and locks. Every bend brings new wonders of both creation and engineering.
I’m afraid Mt Coot-tha and Mt Coolum are anything but mountains.

This entry was posted on October 10, 2012 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.