The Outside Edge

Babies, boulders and Bob Marley. Tim Miller navigates life’s wonders

Text and photos by Tim Miller
http://timotheus.synthasite.com

Sunday. June 14th, 2009. I’d planned to hike a fourteener with my friend Matt, but a Saturday night of too much fun inspired us to sleep in and pick an easier trail. Meanwhile, my mind tried to wrap its synapses around the fact that my wife was pregnant. I was going to be a father. This strange, new calling made me think of my past, so I convinced Matt to meet me in Palmer Lake, where I’d spent a large chunk of my childhood.

The sky turned gray as Matt and I drove south, in separate cars, on I-25 to the Palmer Lake exit. Drizzle dripped in through the sunroof of my wife Joni’s green Volkswagen. I couldn’t figure out how to shut the thing until I had chance to call Joni. The rain had let up by then, despite bruise-colored clouds still meandering over the western horizon. Joni’s car interior was only slightly soaked.

I rolled into the Palmer Lake Reservoir Trail parking lot with Bob Marley blaring on the Volkswagen’s speakers. Matt followed in his little gold Toyota. We got out of our cars and sprinted for the trailhead. Both of us craved a hike like opiate addicts in a poppy field. Another storm was coming. We had to hurry up the hill.

I’d been to the Reservoir Trail many times in the past three years. Way before that, I played on Palmer Lake’s dirt roads as a child. I wondered if my own kid-to-come would know a place as beautiful as this place. I call the kid “It” because we don’t know its gender yet.

Beginning in a little niche called The Glen on the outskirts of Palmer Lake, the trail snakes uphill, along a mountain creek, to two reservoirs. These man-made bodies of water serve as Palmer Lake’s water source. The hike is only three miles round trip, but you can either keep going around the mountain, or trudge further up a washed-out path to Rampart Range Road

for a better workout. Matt and I felt like cop-outs for giving up our fourteener quest, so we decided to take the trail further up the hill instead of circling back down to our cars.

For once, in the eight years since I moved from Minnesota back to Colorado, Palmer Lake’s vegetation had grown like I remembered it. Prairie grasses and wildflowers sprouted among fir and spruce trees. Fresh smells of rain-bathed plants greeted us as we hiked up the first part of the trail, at the bottom of a steep ravine. Huge pines prevented landslides by wrapping their roots around leaning boulders and the loose, orange dirt that made up the ravine walls. The sun tried to appear a few times, but the clouds kept shoving it back.

Fishermen angled in the reservoirs as hikers passed by along the trail. Soon Matt and I had hiked past the “known” part of the path, and onto the road often used by four-wheel-drive enthusiasts. After a close call with a Jeep and a Toyota Hummer wannabe, Matt and I were somewhere near Rampart Range Road. The sky turned twilight dark. The wind picked up.

“We’ll turn around at the crest of this hill,” I said to Matt. He nodded. By then, we were about an hour from the trailhead.

Icy rain began to fall as we turned around. Two minutes later, I felt something hard whack me on the head. “Ouch,” I said. Matt returned my sentiments. Sheets of enlarging hail were battering us. Nonetheless, we continued down the mountain through the ice pellets now littering the trail.

Shotgun thunder sounded overhead. The hail grew to bean size. I threw my raincoat on and looked over at Matt, who was wearing a puny, cotton jacket. “We need to find shelter,” I said. He nodded as we passed a boulder leaning over a steep hill to our right. “Let’s go under there,” I said. Matt followed me in affirming silence.

Crouching under the rock, I could only laugh and take a few pictures. “I guess we’re on the Outside Edge now,” I told Matt. He just smiled and watched the bigger brothers of snowflakes cover the ground. I won’t be able to do crazy stuff like this with my kid, I thought. At least not for a while. That shady tax collector called Responsibility has finally caught up with me. Soon, I’ll have to pay my dues to a family and country that raised me well enough to live thirty years.

When the hail lost girth, Matt and I made a break for the trail again. This time, we ran for at least a mile down the four-wheeling road. As we reached an aspen grove near Palmer Lake’s upper reservoir, the storm abruptly gave way to sun.

Steam rose from the massive rocks jutting out of nearby mountainsides. Already teeming fields of ferns and grasses drank of the hailmelt and shone neon green in the after-storm light. Sweet smells of pine decay and burgeoning life accompanied us as we descended. Glimpses of Palmer Lake’s distant emerald prairies reminded me of ancient Celtic myths about a parallel universe of magic and spirit called Otherworld. I whispered to myself, “If I can help it, my child will grow up in a place like this.”

“Huh?” Matt said.

Grinning madly, I continued down the trail.