June 22nd - Denver, Colorado

For the second walk of the convention, we drove to Estes Park, Colorado, which lies at the entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park. The drive into the mountains was a tight, twisting little 2-lane road thru a picturesque canyon with a stream in the middle. The driving itself was no fun, but the scenery was great—a pattern that happened repeatedly during our time in Colorado.

The Volksmarch at Estes Park circled the town and a reservoir formed by a small dam. We had driven thru Estes Park in 1972, but I didn’t remember either the reservoir or the spread-out lower part of the town. Our trail continued up a creek feeding the reservoir to a narrow street with shops on both sides, and that did seem faintly familiar. That part of Estes Park reminded me a bit of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, due to the single narrow street and the chock-a-block tourist stores lining both sides. In Estes Park, however, the stores tended to art shops, boutiques, and nice restaurants—none of the T-shirt shops or wax museums of Gatlinburg.

We finished the walk in pretty good shape and drove on down Interstate 25 to Denver for the afternoon walk in the capital. The traffic was very heavy on I-25 and there was lots of construction, so the driving was tense and we were glad to reach Denver and park the truck. The afternoon walk started at a restaurant on the edge of the downtown district. We reluctantly chose the shorter 6-kilometer route as we were tired and worried about time; after all, we still had to drive a fair distance south and find our campsite in the mountains outside of Colorado Springs before nightfall.

The short route wound thru a pedestrian mall area to the Capitol building before turning around and returning along a parallel street. There was a street art fair going on along the first part of the route, and we saw what seemed to be professional artists drawing very nice paintings on the pavement with colored chalk. It was rather amazing what they could do—maybe not so surprising given some initial talent and years of training and practice! Still, some of the compositions were very pretty and all of them were interesting.

At the part between the Capitol and the Colorado Surpeme Court building (I think), there was a large celebration or demonstration of some kind. It was apparently a gay and lesbian festival, but the tents offered a wide variety of services apart from the usual food and drink, including psychic readings while-U-wait. We skirted the edge of the festival area on our way back and had no trouble aside from being accosted by one young man who was either drunk or high on something. Our overall impression of Denver was that it was an economically and socially vibrant city, but not a particularly friendly one. Quite possibly other weekends with other things going one might have given a different impression, but that’s how it struck us.

After some more tense driving south along I-25, we did manage to get to our campsite and get the tent set up by dusk, but just barely. The sun was setting after we finally had it up, and we saw what the Germans call “Alpenglueh” on the range the to east—the setting sun turned them a ruddy orange color that is quite unique.