TRAVEL Hiking to Heaven

You’re not supposed to talk about Crested Butte, lest it become like Telluride, which you’re not supposed to talk about, lest it become like Aspen. Up in the ski area, glass-fronted condos and houses shimmer like oversized diamonds, but the town itself is still OK. The Victorian-hippie flavor still wafts up and down Elk Avenue, just as I remember from my first visit 12 or 14 years ago. In late afternoon, the same big old dogs sprawl patiently outside the same old haunts waiting for their same old masters to come out and take them home. Nobody, it seems, has gone anywhere.

Crested Butte isn’t my Brigadoon, my Utopia; it’s more my Room of One’s Own, because, although I’m a ridiculously easy to please tourist, the happiest wanderer ever, whenever I consider running away from it all, holing up some place and actually staying put, I think of the mountains, first, and then, Crested Butte in Colorado.

Thirty miles north of Gunnison, the town’s about a 16-hour drive from Dallas. Or you can fly into Denver or Colorado Springs and rent a car or, certain times of the year, fly directly to Gunnison from D/FW. Regardless of how you get there, you need a car. Something with four-wheel drive is nice, but you don’t want anything fancy or people will think you’re showing off, and it’s not a show-off kind of town. For instance, I remember a wedding write-up in the Crested Butte Chronicle that, after naming the maid-of-honor and the best man, said, “Bridesmaids were anybody who showed up in a bridesmaid dress.” Now, isn’t that a friendly, unpretentious way to run a wedding? The whole town’s like that. Friendly and unpretentious. You never have to dress up, either, even for the plethora of first-rate restaurants, like Soupcon, Penelope’s, Timberline and Le Bosquet, where I once had some garlic soup for lunch that was so good that I went back that night and had some for dinner.

I’m sure right this minute some Crested Butte kid is whining to his mom that there’s nothing to do, but I always find plenty. I’ve been rafting, jeeping and bicycling, my companions have gone horseback riding, and other people’s companions have gone hang gliding and ballooning. What I like best, though, is simple and cheap: hiking. I don’t mean the hard-core stuff, either. I mean simple day hiking, where all you need is a backpack roomy enough for your lunch, sun screen, water bottle, rolled-up windbreaker and map. Last summer I took about half the hikes described in Denis B. Hall’s Hiking In Heaven, which lists and describes the trails around Crested Butte. I wished I’d discovered the book sooner. Some of the trails are loops, some are in-out treks, a few are very difficult and others a snap. I don’t know why I like hiking so much because I’m not very good at it. My lungs suffer mightily from the altitude, but then again, my sturdy legs, trained on five city miles a day, can make it up almost any trail, as long as I don’t mind going very slowly. And I don’t. Others sometimes do, so under my breath I mutter, “What the hell’s the hurry, buddy?” and keep on putting one foot in front of the other. Last summer, I fell out of love with a man who hiked with one of (hose gadgets strapped to his chest that kept track of his heart rate. Beep-beep, beep-beep, beep-beep. Believing he could get into shape in a day, he set the gadget for a range higher than his training rate, so he was always red-faced, out of breath and 200 yards ahead of me, hands on his hips and looking exasperated, beeping like crazy all the while. I’d have to bop him on the head to make him look at the view.

Ah. The view. I can’t say I’ve known any metaphysical moments while hiking. It’s relaxing, of course, and I’m partial to pursuits wherein I’m captain of my own ship. Sometimes I take along my notebook, expecting to have some really significant insights, but I don’t think I’ve even once jotted down anything other than some essential item I need from the store, as soon as I get back into town. Mosquito spray. Often, I run into other hikers at rest; surely they’re experiencing a life-changing revelation; then again, maybe they’re like me, simply catching their breath. I’ve never lived anyplace that’s so knock-out gorgeous, and I just know that hiking around in all that silent serenity, that eye-misting majesty, makes you a better person. It just has to.

A friend, who’s no greenhorn, spent two cold, scary nights lost in the mountains, so I’m cautious. On all but the easiest trek I take somebody along and I pay attention to the warnings and suggestions in my hiking book and tell somebody where I’m going. ’’Well, I’m off to a nice day hiking on Trail 409 to Walrod Cutoff, page 20 of Hiking In Heaven,” I say to those in my condo office. They don’t appear especially interested, but they could’ve found me if my mama got worried.

Lately, I’ve been taking some side trips from my Crested Butte base. Telluride and Ouray are two of the best. Ouray has an amazing number of art galleries and hot baths that will steam away your worries and woes. The Wiesbaden Hot Springs are beneath a *50s style, no-frills motel. You go down some stairs and into a stone room for wonderful, hot soakings and saunas and/or a massage.

Both Telluride and Ouray offer great hikes as does the rest of Colorado. I followed several trails I discovered in The Colorado Guide by Bruce Caughey and Dean Winstanley, the same book that told me about Lake City, another splendid day trip from Crested Butte. One route to tiny Lake City, which sits in a canyon at the confluence of Henson Creek and Lake Fork, takes you by Blue Mesa Reservoir and into the high country of the San Juan Mountains, and every mile’s a treat. Lake City’s the kind of place where people have summer homes and return every season, bringing their kids and grandkids. One guidebook called it the best-kept secret of Colorado, so I guess we should keep quiet about it, too.

I’m not sure I want a summer home, even in Crested Butte. And as much as I’d like to return every year, I don’t. Usually I’m happy with every other year, often enough to feel at home but seldom enough to keep me a wide-eyed visitor.

But, one of these days I’m going to take my computer, my scrawny little city dog and my CD player and rent a place in or around Crested Butte for a couple of months, maybe someplace near Gothic, an almost ghost town about seven miles north of Crested Butte. I’d like to see how I handle that much independence and find out firsthand if a person ever takes all that beauty, that majesty, for granted.

My mother says she can take mental pictures of certain views around Crested Butte for reviewing when she’s back home in Fort Worth. There, weeks later, if the weatherman says it’s snowing around the Gunnison region, she simply wills a brilliant snowfall on her summer scene. What I like to do, especially this time of year, when it’s as hot as blazes in our part of Texas and as gray and dried-up as yesterday’s chicken-fried steak, is picture Crested Butte in mid-September, the aspens fiery gold and bushes blazing red against the hunter green of mountain pines. And me, of course, on some intermediate trail high above the pretty little town, slowly, very slowly, climbing to the next overlook. If you see it, too, don’t tell anybody. We don’t want it to become another Telluride. Although, come to think of it, what’s wrong with Telluride?