Aspen Essay Connects Generations Through Highway 82 Landmarks

Aspen —How many times have you driven past a familiar landmark and felt the ghost of your own childhood?

That’s the question hanging in the air along Highway 82. It’s not about traffic patterns or property values. It’s about memory.

The Aspen Times published a piece titled “Saddle Sore: Just like Gramps used to do.” It’s a personal essay, sure. But it captures something specific to this valley. We live here because of the land. We stay because of the stories tied to it.

The writer starts in Lazy Glen. He’s driving with his grandson. He tells the boy about his great-great-grandfather. The old man stopped at a potato cellar on the south side of Highway 82. He was taking care of business. A car flew by. Probably the fifth or sixth one all day.

Gramps was around 60. He hurriedly zipped up. He climbed behind the wheel.

“Jump in. We’ll show him what an Oldsmobile can do.”

They backed onto the highway. They took off. By Phillips Curves, they’d caught the driver. That’s the sort of thing heroes do when you’re a little boy. It’s a silly story. Nothing of historical importance happened that afternoon. But four generations are connected by an Oldsmobile and a stretch of asphalt.

That’s not history you find in books. That’s family.

The essay shifts to mountain lions. A friend asked how many wild ones the writer has seen. Two. One was in the distance, across from Tommy and Whiter Moore’s deck. The other was on the Collins Creek trail.

There’s an old wire gate there. Unused. Obvious. Gramps and the writer had stopped there once to let the horses breathe. Gramps asked, “See that mountain lion up there?” The writer saw it.

Twenty years later, the writer rode that same trail alone. He reached the old gate. He smiled. He didn’t expect a lion. He just felt his grandfather was there again.

This is the Western Slope. We ride the same trails. We drive the same roads. The logging crews of the 1950s and ’60s changed the lay of the land. They cut down timber. They changed the view. But the trails remain.

The writer spent a week looking for a wide trail through dark timber. He pushed cows along it. It came out in Kobey Park. That was the only thing he remembered. He persevered. He found about 100 yards of it left. Just as it was when he was young.

Grandpa cussed a Hereford bull for blocking the way. “Wait here, don’t let ’em turn back,” he said. Then he went crashing through the timber to educate the bull. He hollered from up ahead, “Bring ’em on.”

Things are different now. The writer rides a different part of the cattle range. His grandchildren live less than a quarter-mile away. Their lives are busier than ours ever were as kids. They aren’t sitting still. They aren’t watching the timber.

The short version? We are losing the quiet moments. We are losing the connection to the land that built us. The potato cellars are gone. The Oldsmobiles are rusting. The mountain lions are moving deeper into the timber.

But the roads are still there. The gates are still there. You just have to stop long enough to remember.

The writer thinks he’ll ride back to that Collins Creek gate one day. He says he will. We should all pay attention to when he does.

It’s not about the destination. It’s about who was driving when you were a kid. It’s about who taught you to watch the timber. It’s about the fact that the land remembers even when we forget.