Finding Your Roots In The Garden Of The Gods
*I originally wrote this as a travel piece for a journalism course in college.
Garden of the Gods is a special place about half way between Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs in the state of Colorado. The local Indians believe it to be a sacred place. Besides being spectacular, for me it's a place where I can go to sit and ponder on life. The answers to my unspoken questions just come to me. It's as though the mountains themselves are speaking to me. The mountains are all around you, but if you get high enough the sky goes on forever. It's also the place where I can go to restore myself. I have always felt that the power in mountains could be transferred to me in a way that I would be renewed.
I had been in Colorado for about two weeks when Tom and I decided to hike some thirty miles from Colorado Springs to Manitou Springs, just to see if we could do it. We hiked that far in basic training and we wanted to see if it was any different doing it in the Rockies.
We wanted to do some prospecting like in the old days. In Colorado Springs you can pay ten dollars and pan for gold. I suspect the ore is just sand with some crushed pyrite thrown in besides, but the tourists get a thrill and the little buckaroos go bonkers. I hoped to find some good rocks to bring home. Gold and silver mines have always fascinated me, and I heard there was an old abandoned silver mine nearby. Later, that same day I purchased a share of stock in the Louisa, an abandoned gold mine that had produced several tons of gold back in the eighteen hundreds. It was a steal at two bucks, because it was a real stock share. It was my own piece of history.
We didn't make it all the way to Manitou that day because we found Garden of the Gods and the whole day changed. Maybe my whole life changed! This is no ordinary state park. All around you are rocks with designs carved in them by people long gone from here. There are many massive rock formations that could only have been carved by Mother Nature herself. When we entered the park a strange feeling came over me. This seemed silly because although I am an Indian, I am an Abenaki from Canadian descent, not a southwestern Indian.
In my tribe there is a belief that an Indian should be as one with nature. I have never felt afraid of nature. Storms excite me. I find them beautiful works of Art. My mother was forever telling me to get in out of the rain or to stay away from the window during a storm. I believe that the earth is my spiritual mother, the Great Spirit is my father, the sun is my brother, the moon is my sister, the thunder is my grandfathers, and the lightning is my aunts. Everything has a purpose and reason and it all fits together. Garden of the Gods is a good place to make peace with nature. You can find your spiritual roots here.
Because of my heritage, I thought I was prepared for this place. Still, I trembled as we hiked higher and higher. Although it was a skin-peeling day, I was chilled. We climbed to the top of the Three Graces, well one of them anyway. It was awesome. I could feel power in these rocks. It was quiet and I felt this floaty sensation. I felt like I could take flight.
I had to control my emotions to stop me from trying it. If you shut your eyes, you can feel yourself soaring like an eagle. Is it imagination or reality? The Rockies aren't called the Cathedral Mountains for nothing.
Some of these unique spires can only be reached with special rock climbing equipment, but this is discouraged because it damages the rock face. Some of the formations are prohibited to climbers.
Tom, already glistening with sweat where he'd taken his shirt off, took off the rest. We were the only climbers for miles. I got out the camera and took a few personal snaps. If you get high enough, you can pretty much do what you want. You can really get back to nature.
We descended this spire and continued on still higher. We reached a place called High Point. From here you can see the whole of the garden. The Trading Post is also here. Besides the usual you can buy real Indian blankets, hand made jewelry, (They sell the tourist stuff, too.), Native American pottery, (Back in town you can get fancy pottery at Van Briggles and a tour of how it's made.) and rugs.
You can also literally buy a ton of rocks here. In fact you can purchase some of the more beautiful and larger rock samples like the five pound piece of obsidian and the four pound piece of pink quartz that I purchased and Tom carried, as well as about two pounds of turquoise nuggets and a few bits of amethyst and silver pyrite.
We visited the Camera Obscura beside the trading post. It sounded odd, but it got us out of the sun. He was starting to peel. Pleasantly surprised, inside we found a thirteen foot lens that gave us a three hundred and sixty degree view of the whole of the garden. It was fascinating.
We were about as far as we could go or as high up as I cared to climb when the storm clouds came. The sky suddenly turned a lot of different colors. If you've never been in the south west, you have no idea of how much sky I'm talking about. This is a sky that stretches forever.
Normally, it's the deepest blue I've ever seen, but not on this day. The thunderclouds rolled in over the mountains. They kept coming in shades of mauve and dark purple until they almost filled the sky. It didn't get black. Instead, the mountains took on an eerie green and gold glow with the sun fighting to get through where it could.
The lightning zig-zagged around us. There was no place to hide, but I didn't care! I wasn't afraid. There was power here! I could feel the spirit gods. I was flying high and I didn't need any peyote to get me there.
We were nowhere near shelter. We just continued walking back down. There seemed no point in going back to the trading post. Halfway down the mountain, the earth seemed to smoke. I saw little wisps spiraling up from the ground where the rain drops were falling.
The wind which had been buffeting before, now became fierce. Small dry bushes were tossed in the air. A few minutes passed and the rain changed to hail, pea sized at first and then increasing to golf ball size. It was extremely painful and bruising for my friend, but none of them hit me.
We came around a bend to find a small rusty pickup truck parked on the side of the path. We huddled inside with the driver while the hail did it's best to let us know we were intruding. I felt somebody must have angered the gods that day. While the golf balls exploded on the roof making fresh dents in it's already pitted exterior, the man in the truck told us his story.
When he wasn't crouched in a truck to avoid getting his skull cracked by a very angry Mother Nature, he danced for the tourists at the cliff dwellings about a mile away. He apologized for the storm. He seemed to think it was his fault because he performed for the white man. I wasn't sorry for it. I loved that storm. There was so much intense energy there. It was majestic.
When the worst was over, our companion took us to the Cliff Dwellings. After we watched him dance, we toured the site including a small museum. It's all part of the same park but these cliff dwellings are not real in the sense that they were made by the ancient ones, the Anasazi. These dwellings were carved by modern man, well 1906 modern man. Made of the same buff colored sandstone as the ones in Mesa Verde, these were built in an attempt to preserve part of an ancient culture. The most important benefit being that while tourists climb all over these, they are not wearing down the actual ones and destroying history by loving it too much.
We'd done enough climbing for one day. The next day would find us taking the bus to Manitou Springs with a side trip to the Cave of the Winds and the Kit Carson museum. There is a lot to be seen and done in this area.
*As you can see, I fudged a little on the timing of events because in truth the visit to Cave of the winds and the Cliff Dwellings was another day entirely. The rest is true. We had met the man before when he danced at the museum but I don't think he was Little deer. He not only gave us a ride home but we, well, the guys anyway split a 6 pack of beer. I think it was called Olympia. Supposedly made by tiny little men in the mountains much the same as a similar beer is supposedly made by the menehunes in Hawaii. It says online Olympia was really made in Washington State so it must have been some other brand.
* We visited Van Briggles one time. It was a large airy place with a lot of fancy pottery. None of it looked anything remotely like Native American so it didn't interest me which was great because the prices were astronomical. It was mostly arty stuff that a tourist might buy but not the average person.