My romance with your West continues... some more cheaty-prose - or rather, perhaps a pre-poem! :)) xx

GLORIOUS TELLURIDE!


I see him here with me as we swing ever so gently in the still, snowy silence, eyes shielded by the brim of his forward-drawn Stetson yet glinting dangerous as the needle-sharp mountain air circling this gondola. We’re at nine thousand feet and climbing, up and over the sharded peaks of the San Juan mountains, the genteel-Victoriana of gentrified Telluride diminishing far beneath.

Skin tightens over his features as, with each tiny shift in the tilt of his head, he sucks his cheeks in rugged contemplation. Sun-mirrors carpeting the snow could be flecks of gold, silver or even of the lead and copper upon which mines and ostentatious wealth here were founded long ago. He seems to measure time, distance, position of the sun; to note the town’s layout, the direction of Imogene and Black Bear Passes and the one road (treacherous yet passable), formerly fit only for pack-mules.

Smuggler-Union and Pandora Mines have long since stood emptied of their wagons. “Hippies” (mopping up in the 60s when miners fled to uranium-rich seams in Moab) were later said to turn themselves over to drugs counter-culture as Telluride, “To-Hell-You-Ride”, became a drop-off for Mexican smugglers and wealthy importers in need of respite.

Today, my moody companion, slouched in a corner of this lilting cable car, is no smuggler, hippy or famous icon holidaying incognito, though he is of the town’s “bad-boy” past: Famous for his robbery of the newly-rich San Miguel Valley Bank, way back in 1889, he’s Butch Cassidy, minus now his partner-in-crime. But the way the sun dances off these glaciers and snowfields, I am dazzled purely by thoughts of Newman’s eyes of sparkling blue…