Dear Friends and Family,
The blog is back! Sorry for the delay, I got busy over the holidays and with the job and stuff. Things are going well, and I still fully intend to finish the blog. I spent 142 days on the road in total and it only seems fair to try and complete the tales of my travels in the same length of time. I got back on September 6th, 2023; that puts the end date for my storytelling at January 26th, 2024. We still have a lot of ground to cover 🙂
So anyways!
After leaving Tensleep, I drove south on I-25 heading for Colorado:
Laramie Mountains, in the sort of east-central part of the state.
A long time ago, at the start of the trip, I had planned on spending some time at Rocky Mountain National Park. I got some bad information though on whether or not that park needed reservations, which it did, and you had to make them way back at the start of the year to camp or visit the area. Not unreasonably so, just like Glacier National Park, I’m sure Rocky Mountain NP needs to be protected.
So I said “Ah, what the hell. Let’s move on down the road.”
It’s a looooonesooooome traaaaaaiiilll.
There was one other thing I wanted to see in Colorado: the Zachariah Zypp Store in the town of Crested Butte:
Crested Butte is a tourist town nestled pretty close to the middle of the state. It is indistinguishable from really any other tourist town in the Rockies whose economy cycles between mountain biking, wine touring, and snowsports as their drivers, with little time for the locals to enjoy anything about the area in which they live. But hey, ice cream and mini-golfing and bumper stickers aren’t going to sell themselves!
Or sell whatever the heck this thing is.
So why come? Why come to this obscure tourist town square in the middle of the squarest state?
Rocks.
Beautiful.
Blue.
Gay little rocks.
This, my dear readers, is Crested Butte Lapis Lazuli. And I am maddeningly, heartachingly, obsessively in love with it.
Lapis Lazuli is a metamorphic rock famed for millennia for its deep blue color. In the Old World, it has been mined in Afghanistan for over six thousand years; its deep and sovereign hues adorned the jewelry of Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The Sappheiron with which Solomon was smitten was almost certainly Lapis Lazuli, as gem Sapphires would not be introduced to the middle east from India for another thousand years. It dotted the eyes of Tutankhamen’s mask and dyed the headwrap of Girl with Pearl Earring. It is the most beautiful gem in the entire world, and the carved feather necklace of it I was gifted by my Mom, I have worn around my neck every single day of my life.
But Lapis is a rare gem, being mined in only a handful of locations on Earth. The mines of Afghanistan have continued their supply of beauty to the world through the centuries, with scant help from a single mine in Russia and another in Chile. But in North America, Lapis has only ever been commercially mined in one location:
Crested Butte. That is why I’ve come to this indistinguished town I never again shall see, to worship and love at the hallowed, cerulean temple of *Checks Notes* Gunnison County.
Just LOOK at this fucking thing!!!!!!!
A favorite motif of the artists at Crested Butte is the hillock from which the town gets its name:
I think they did a pretty good job, to be honest!
Perfection is embolden by imperfection. One of the most wonderful qualities of Lapis is its inclusion, which vary by deposit. In Afghan Lapis, pyrite flecks the stones like stars in the night. In Crest Butte Lapis, sodalite clouds drift in and out of the lazurite sky.
God, if I were the richest man in the world, I would buy the whole store.
If I was the second richest man, I would reopen the mine.
No, I am not a rich man.
But with these two little bobbles, I sure feel like one 🙂
And so it was time to move on.
I started moving south again, and at some point stopped at a roadside on the Continental Divide:
Now in many western states, you are required by law and custom to stop at all crossings of the continental divide and take a photo for folks back home. I mean, I’d already done this about a trillion times on this trip (most recently a mere week ago at Isa Lake), but why not stop again?
But then I noticed something:
It’s on a slope!
This sign is clearly not the continental divide. I endeavor to say that the entirety of this milepost is in the Pacific drainage basin, what with its free-loving hippies and recreational marijuana and *gasping, pearl clutching* hybrid cars!
Evan you literally drive a hybrid what the fuck are you talking about.
And I can prove this sign is in the wrong place! Take my water bottle here. I went and poured some of it out and found:
The rain in this area is CLEARLY draining to the west. I expect some white guys with dreads to be rafting in this water in merely a week’s time.
I do not approve.
BUT it you move over to the highway sign just a few feet away:
And repeat our experiment here:
Look! The water drains nowhere! Caught on the exact top of the continental divide, the water is superpositioned between east and west. This water doesn’t know if it should be swallowed up by a salmon or a catfish, if it should pass beneath a kayak or a towboat. It doesn’t know if it better belongs in a pretentiously overpriced Dasani at an I-95 rest stop or sudsing in a 90 IBU can of craft beer sold to a scraggly, homeless-looking “influencer-manager” in Seattle making well north of 280k.
If you try to make conversation with this puddle of water, it will simultaneously try to ask you “Where are you from?” and “What do you do?” which will come out like “WWhhearte daor ey yoouu dfor?om?” Best to just leave it alone, really.
Inane shitposting approved.
That’s all for now 🙂
Stay well everyone,
Evan 💙
P.S. I saw this sign in the bathroom at a hostel in Leadville, Colorado and I thought it was hilarious:
