After the Gold Rush

The heavens opened while we were in The Old Homestead, then it was fine again and we decided to go and look for some old mines, and ended up in another old mining town called Victor which hasn’t been reinvented and seems to be slowly giving up the ghost. Even the Masonic Lodge is up for sale! That's it there on the left.

It was like walking into an old film set – lots of empty business premises – but there’s still a functioning hardware store which was more of a museum than some museums. Take a look at the photos.

Yet, for us, the town was much more atmospheric than the old Western towns that have been tarted up. There’s a few sad pictures here.

Taking the bull by the ……

Rocky Mountain Oysters are a local delicacy but basically they’re just bulls’ bollocks - sliced, coated and fried. We knew we should try them, so we did and we ate them all up - and then we were allowed pudding.

We’re spending 3 nights in the most lovely privately-owned hotel
in Manitou Springs, a Victorian spa town which was very popular with tubercular sufferers and thousands of other visitors who used to come and take the waters in the 1880s. It reinvented itself in the 1970s and the old Western-style buildings now house shops with names like The Trippin’ Troll, Whimsy and Healing Hearts selling crystals, dreamcatchers and Navajo jewellery (made in China). There was a Vietnam veteran busking on the sidewalk the afternoon we arrived and I saw a hippy wearing a teeshirt saying “Flying happens” on it. I’ve put a few photos here.

The hotel was built as a boarding house in 1886 and is full of antiques and everyone sits down for breakfast together under the porch at 8.30 sharp . This is French toast stuffed with cream cheese covered in fresh strawberries. Served with sausages.

The pattern of the weather has been the same for days: sunny and warm all morning, getting humid by the afternoon then absolute humdingers of thunderstorms with torrential rain and flash flood warnings. High up in mountains like this, the storms are spectacular. So we get out and about straight after breakfast and are holed up at the b and b as soon as the storms start, chilling in our enormous room - with 2 elegant drawing rooms available as well. I’ve been reading The Lacuna by Barbara Kinsolver and Steve’s reading short stories set in Wyoming by Annie Proulx.

Just up the road is Pikes Peak. You may wonder why, as it was named after Zebulon Pike who tried to climb it in 1806, there isn’t an apostrophe after Pike, before the ‘s’. Well, after a massive signage discussion in 1891, it was decreed that there should be no apostrophes on geographic names in the USA, so who am I to challenge policy?

So this guy Zebulon Pike decides to climb the mountain in mid November when the snow is waist deep. He gives up after a couple of days and says “I believe no human being could have ascended to its pinnacle.” Wrong! Someone climbed it in 1820, a woman climbed it in 1858, but my favourite has to be the guy in 1929 who went up on his hands and knees, pushing a peanut with his nose all the way to the top! He got through 3 pairs of shoes, 170 pairs of trousers, 12 pairs of gloves and 150 peanuts.
You can drive up to the top, go on the cog railway or if you are extremely mad do things like walk, run, cycle – or crawl up pushing a peanut with your nose. Guess which we did.

The drive up takes a good hour as you have to take it slow and you need to stop and do the views. But this ranger advised us to keep going straight to the top as the clouds were coming down, so we got there with minutes to spare. Click on her pic to make it larger and see her hat.

At over 14,000 feet above sea level with just 53% oxygen available and, being just the second day, the altitude knocked me for six – but at least I wasn’t chucking up behind a rock like one woman I saw. There are some photos here including one of me proving I was there (feeling as sick as a dog and clearly abandoning all thoughts of fashion just to stay upright), a chipmunk up close and personal, our massive Jeep and an elderly Amish couple walking along the cog railway tracks.