Monthly Archives: July 1988

Walden, CO

camping

I set out at about 8:30 on Monday morning. Just before the northern border of Colorado, I waved to the westbound BikeCentennial group as they passed. I talked a minute with someone named Eric from Mississippi. He gave me two pieces of advice: 1) Stay at the city park, it’s nicer than the rest stop, and 2) there was a woman 5 minutes ahead of me – named Stephanie, from Virginia.

Encouraged, I pedaled harder into the wind. At the border of Colorado, there were several obvious changes. The road got rougher. The fine for littering was $1000, rather than the $25 in Wyoming. And everything got humid and green again. It was as if someone drew a line between the good land and the bad land: the bad land they would call Wyoming, and the good land they would call Colorado.

Colorado border. The road condition got worse, but it the scenery became green. Also, there seemed to be less debris on the road. Could it have been because the fine for littering was 40 times what it was in Wyoming?

At Cowdrey, the proprietor of the store told me that a woman on bike had stopped by about 30 minutes before me. Strange. Could she actually be pulling away from me? Eric had told me five minutes.

Walden. Dark clouds and thunder all day.

Arriving in Walden, I went straight to the city park. And there was Stephanie! She said she had been there an hour. It was too windy that night to start a fire, so I just had sardines in pita bread for dinner. I think Steph had a pot of ramen, cooked over sterno.

That night, I set up my tent, as it had been raining off and on. Stephanie went across the street to sleep under the eaves of a school. “I’m getting too lazy to set up my tent,” she said. I wondered if she didn’t trust me. It didn’t concern me very much.

The sign is hard to read, but this is the Vic and Sigrid Hanson Memorial Park. If you look carefully, you can see the blue of my tent in front and to the right of the building.