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Perhaps my environmentalist friends will quit speaking to me, but it's a risk I'll have to take in order to be honest.
Here's my confession: Wilderness bores me. Put me on a trail in the woods, and even if the scenery is grand and the views are superlative, I soon become accustomed to mere rocks and trees, and my interest wanes.
The route is infinitely more interesting if it's an old railroad grade, and even a washed-out wagon road or rock-strewn burro trail is a big improvement on the normal backwoods path which seems to exist only in the present with no discernible history.
And if I encounter an old prospect hole, or even better, a collapsing mine adit or shaft, especially with rusting machinery, then I'm totally absorbed. The same holds for derelict logging camps, abandoned homesteads and forsaken line shacks.
Some people may see all these ruins as blemishes on a landscape that should be pristine, but I figure they're part of our heritage. Also, they serve as useful reminders that despite about 150 years of energetic American effort to inhabit the Rocky Mountains, nature and decay generally triumph.
This may explain why I have a hard time getting excited
about ridge pollution
-- the construction of
high-profile houses on ridge lines.
Like many peons who toil down on the valley floor, I hold some class resentment against the barons who dwell in their high castles with commanding views. But then again, this is America, where some people are more deserving than others, and after sober reflection, it becomes clear that arrogant ridgetop homeowners are indeed quite deserving of what they get:
· Wind. Guess what piled up the Great Sand Dunes
of the San Luis Valley, as well as the smaller dunefields
in North Park. Our forests have thousands of acres of what
lumberjacks call blowdown.
At a convenience store
in Fairplay, I once I mentioned that it looked like a
relatively calm day, being as suspended traffic lights were
tilted at only 45 degrees, instead of the usual 90, and the
clerk said There are children in here, so please don't
say the W word. We don't want to frighten them.
Get atop the ridges, which are often treeless on account of the unremitting gales, and the wind is even worse. For most of April, you have to shout to be heard over the persistent roar, even when you're indoors. It lifts shingles, it piles up driveway-blocking snowdrifts, and it blows rocks and limbs into those big picture windows.
The wind is a chronic affliction, and the ridgetop residents suffer from it much more than sensible people do.
· Lightning. It likes to strike high points, such as houses on ridges, and the result can be electrocution or a devastating fire. Even if there's no direct hit, a lightning-induced surge, arriving through the telephone or power lines, can fry all the electronics indoors, thereby putting a modem cowboy out of business for a few days.
The rest of us can enjoy watching a good thunderstorm every now and again. The ridgetop gentry don't get that pleasure; every lightning bolt and thunderclap a matter of mortal terror for them.
· Fire. Wildfires tend to run uphill. Water doesn't, which means that there's usually not much water available for firefighting when a ridgetop residence is threatened -- a threat that is often aggravated with wooden shake shingles, cedar siding and expansive redwood decks.
The local fire department's tank truck isn't going to set any speed records, either, toiling uphill with a full load.
These factors can combine to make things worse -- lighting starts a ridgetop fire that the wind aggravates and spreads to other upscale homes that offered panoramic views -- and there are other ridgetop risks and aggravations like stray bullets during hunting season and an access road that often gets blocked by earthslides after storms.
Considering all this, it seems obvious that ridgetop homes can be built and maintained only in an extremely robust economy. In normal times, there just aren't that many people with that much money to spend on ostentation.
And so the time will come when the recent ridgeline developments join the other remnants from the other booms of a boom-and-bust economy.
Tree-huggers of the future will doubtless view the crumbling foundations, overgrown driveways and tottering chimneys as blights that should be removed, but I hope the ruins remain in place, so that hikers in the future will find something of interest when they venture into the hills.
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