In Las Vegas, Baby!

Last Wednesday dawned bright and clear, and there was no snow. I bid adieu to my sister's house in Santa Fe and headed for Denver.

I stopped for lunch in Las Vegas, New Mexico. You have to get off the Interstate to drive downtown now, but I had been there before, in 1972 when the major north/south 2-lane highway ran right through downtown Las Vegas.

Then I was in a station wagon full of of young men and women from CU-Boulder enroute to Nogales, AZ so we could cross the border and spend spring break in Matzalan, Mexico. We stopped to eat in Las Vegas, at a place on Main Street called Estella's. Back then the premises seemed menacing, full of hard, sun-burned rancher-type persons who certainly were different from the soft college boys and girls from New York and California that we were.

Now the downtown seems full of aged hippies. I got into a discussion with one store proprietor and found out that the 1969 movie Easy Rider had been partially filmed there, the scene where Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper got arrested and met Jack Nicholson in a jail cell.

Here's the old Las Vegas Police Department, now a western art gallery called Tito's. The storefront is in the movie as the place where the police took the two Easy Riders after they joined a town parade around the public square riding their Harleys. The parade route in the movie is right up the street on the historic Las Vegas Plaza, where the trees are in the picture.

Go into Tito's and ask about it. They're real friendly in there. They'll show you the old town jail cells, mere drunk tanks really. People in town who know the iconic movie express sorrow that Hollywood used spacious jail cells with bars for the scene, not the jail cells from the olden days that are still there.

Directly across the street is Estella's Cafe. A shot of it, when the two bikers are being released and Jack Nicholson joins them prior to their eventual roadway execution by "southerners," is in the movie.





I ate lunch there, 36 years later. It was Ash Wednesday. Who knew? I had the Lenten Special, a delicious meatless Mexican combination plate of dough and vegetable preparations built around a salmon patty. Estella died just a few years ago but her memory is honored in that town.

I thoroughly enjoyed my lunch. Can you imagine me standing there as a 19 year old, slightly intimidated, instead of a 55-y.o. completely relaxed? Those were the divisive Vietnam days, different times. (Or maybe not.)

Once I got done re-visiting the past in Las Vegas, I drove the rest of the way to Denver. There were no adverse snow conditions, finally.
I arrived that evening in Louisville, CO, where I lived all those years as a State Patrolman in Boulder County before I went to law school. It's an old coal mining town. Here's the statue outside town hall. The next morning, the last day of my trip out west, I was going to run six miles with an old friend I hadn't seen in 22 years, who had recently taken up running just as I had. I couldn't wait.

Yes Virginia, there is a New Mexico

After arriving in Santa Fe last Monday, I relaxed on my sister's back porch until she got home from work.

She took me out to dinner where I saw her son and grandaughter for the first time in several years.

After dinner, I went out with her husband to run around on the hillside she lives on in the dark. He does this all the time apparently. We're both wearing headlamps. His is bigger than mine. Believe me, I can assure you that size does matter.

This is the hillside we scrambled around for an hour Monday night. I stepped out my sister's back door and shot this the next morning.

Then I went downtown to the Plaza. Santa Fe was a colonial capital before any settlers arrived at Jamestown. The Native Americans have been selling their wares here for hundreds of years.

Oh, yes, it started snowing. I was driving back to Denver the next day.

Running on Sun Mountain

In the light cast out by my flickering headlamp, I could see S's breath coming out in silver plumes about his head. I wanted to keep right on his heels because his lamp was more powerful than mine. In its illumination I could survey the depressions and obstacles which lay under two inches of powdery snow on the narrow mountain trail better than in mine.

I was trail running at night! On the slope of a hillside at 7200 feet. Snow was falling.

Santa Fe lay below us in a spherical orange glow. I paused once to drink in the splendor of the view and to calm my ragged breathing. Although I had run on trails a few times before, and even on a steep incline once, I had never done it at altitude, in the snow or at night.

S, who lives in Santa Fe on Sun Mountain, which is a popular daytime hiking destination, can run trails merely by walking out his back door. He runs trails at night, on hour-long runs. I had taken him out to run my "neighborhood mile" when he visited me years before, and now he was returning the favor by taking me out to run his trail.

Since the snow was powdery and unblemished except for some animal tracks, it wasn't too slippery. We had to take care not to trip on the innumerable granite rocks, with their sharp edges, which littered the hillside and trails under the snow. We also had to watch for above ground hazards such as waist-level cactus and the face-level branches of spruces. I had already poked my thigh on the sharp point of a yucca plant. (Left: Running into a yucca plant in the dark hurts!)

S was leading at a modest trot. He was forging a path by running along a slight concave concourse which wove between close-in pine trees, where snow had settled onto the trail differently than upon the surrounding hillside.

Running under a canopy of short evergreens in the deep darkness of the hillside, a blackness tempered by the brilliant shine of the stars overhead and the glow from the city lights below, was both liberating and exhilarating. The funk I was in from my fourth day in a row of driving for hours in wretched snowy conditions with low visibility, over mountain passes on snowpacked roads, fell away. I became suffused with the joy of physical performance applied to a heretofore untried strenuous challenge.

Two miles out we paused in a slight clearing just before the last row of trees lining the back quadrangle of St. John's College, which lay on the other side of Sun Mountain. We had skirted around the base of the small mountain along its slope in 23 minutes. We headed back, following our tracks in the snow. Halfway back, as I grew tired from my extreme exertions in the snow and cold, I paid the price of vanity for my supposed physical ability to do this novel and difficult task. I tripped or slipped and fell heavily upon the trail, banging my left knee upon a rock under the snow.

S hovered over me protectively while I applied a snow pack to my injured knee for a few minutes, and then we walked it in from there. We arrived back at S's and my sister's house at just over an hour's total time. This was a magical run unlike any other that I have ever done.