On occasion, it’s interesting to examine the alternative track your life could have taken, had you ended up somewhere else. Now, make no mistake: there’s absolutely nowhere else I’d rather be at this point in my life than where I am right now. Colorado, however, has always presented me with these opportunities every time I visit. You see, Colorado was the place where I first fell in love with the Rockies, and where I made up my mind that one day, some day, I was going to live out here.
One of the interesting things about the longer trips we take for our office is how immersed you get in the day-to-day happenings of the city you’re in. Two weeks in Denver, running from one school to another, really exposes you to all different aspects of life in the region - both good and bad. It’s not a vacation by any stretch of the imagination, and the Denver schedule is nothing to sneeze at, with five to six high school visits daily, and college fairs or receptions most evenings. It’s a fundamentally different experience that really gives you a bit of a taste of what living in the area might really be like. The last time I was able to spend this much time in the area was about a decade ago, in the summer of 2009.
At that point in my life, I was dead-set on going to school to become a volcanologist, little awkward nerd that I was (am). We figured that the summer heading into Junior year of high school was a good time to visit colleges, so we spent about a week in Colorado. The area had been on my radar for a few years at that point, after a visit to Denver in 2006 for a school trip. We ended up visiting three schools: Boulder, Mines (in Golden), and the University of Denver. Along the way, we zig-zagged across the Front Range, exploring places like Evergreen, Estes Park, Georgetown, and more. For a kid who grew up in the forested flatlands around the Great Lakes, the experience was nearly indescribable. The biggest mountains I’d ever seen were the rolling, forested peaks of the Adirondacks in New York, and the Appalachians in the Virginias. To see rugged cliff faces towering thousands of feet above the railroad tracks (yes, of course we had to stop and see the trains, are you surprised?) or to see fresh snow in June at 11,000 feet was amazing, and cemented a feeling that had been growing for many years, since that visit in 2006, and a trip through Yellowstone in 2007. Here was a place so fundamentally different from what I had experienced, a place so big, and clean, and full of opportunity and promise in a way that the Eastern states had never felt for me.
Life has an uncanny ability to present some interesting twists and turns along the way. Not long after this trip, a state school in Montana landed on my radar almost accidentally, and the rest is history. Montana stole my heart, and I made a home in the Northern Rockies over the course of four years in college. In an interesting twist, it was Montana State that made my return trips to Colorado over the years possible, first for a documentary on women’s fertility, then for recruitment trips as a counselor. In fact, this job has taken me to the places of Colorado I had longed to visit for so many years: the high mountain towns of Aspen, Telluride, Ouray, Silverton, Durango, and many more. This particular trip to Denver, however, was special. It was a new travel territory for me, which came with its own excitement and challenges. It also gave me a chance to revisit those old memories from a new, matured perspective.
Walking through the campuses in Boulder, Golden, and Denver was incredibly refreshing. You’d think that college campuses wouldn’t seem all that unique after living and working on one for eight years. These ones, however, hold a special place in my heart. Being able to look around the arboretum at DU, or Pearl Street in Boulder and see those places my mom and I had experienced for the first time all those years ago provided many things to reflect on. Ten years isn’t a massive chunk of time by most measurements, but the growth that happens in people from 16 to 26 is (hopefully) immeasurable. To see students who are just entering this phase in their own lives, and the creation of their own experiences on these campuses was also touching. I see and live experiences like that every day, but to see them away from “home base” in Bozeman strikes a bit of a different and more poignant chord. Having opportunities to visit some of the old places we had explored, like Georgetown and Evergreen, was also a positive experience. Being able to think back to those earlier emotions, and what it felt like to experience them for the first time, left me feeling refreshed and with a new sense of clarity.
Ultimately, two weeks in Denver both exhausted and rejuvenated me. By the time I dragged myself onto a Delta flight to Anchorage by way of Seattle, I was ready to be back in my own bed; the trip is a marathon by any standard. That being said, the opportunity to re-visit an earlier chapter in my life, and experience the place through new eyes, was one I wouldn’t have traded for anything. Until next time, Colorado.
-MH
I Guess He’d Rather Be In Colorado - John Denver