On The Road

Recently, my gf and I and a couple of mutual friends decided it was time to get the fuck out of town for a few days. With nothing other than a vague idea of the maximum amount of travel time we wanted, we set out planning. I found a website that shows you reachable range by time and mode of transportation, and after much scouring, we settled on Silverthorne, Frisco, & Breckenridge Co, having only ever heard of Breck before.

In hindsight, maybe a little more research would’ve been a good thing. I realized the day before we left that both sites are close to 10k feet elevation. We’re all coming from Utah, so we’re used to what we think of as high altitude, but these places are more than double what we’re all used to. We’ve all been feeling the effects on and off most of the trip. Not enough to spoil things, but just enough to slow them down a bit.

Breckenridge

Tall swaying trees, air thin as hell, but so “crisp” it’s what people are referring to when they talk about crisp mountain air. There’s life everywhere here. Birds and squirrels chitter, dogs make dog sounds, and people make their various inchoate sounds. It’s beautiful here but definitely on the touristy side. I haven’t seen a single person that looks remotely like me here. Which, whatever.

Last night I had one of the best meals of my life at a place called The Hearthstone. I’m eating mostly vegetarian leaning toward vegan these days but I had a hanger steak that was indescribably good and grilled octopus that puts the recently-closed local joint I loved to hard shame. Every piece of the meal was ridiculously good, the service was exactly what it needed to be, and the location was super cool. Pretty much everything else we’ve eaten here has been great too. We found a coffee/pastry shop with seats overlooking a stream (a common thing here in Co, I’ve found), and a crepery that does any wild variation of a crepe you can imagine. It’s going to be a bit of a bummer going back to my strict diet tomorrow.

Frisco

I don’t have enough good things to say about Frisco, but I also don’t really have a good way to quantify it right now. Frisco is a beautiful town that’s just a hop away from Silverthorne and Dillon, and just over the hill from Breck. Everything is green and kind of Portland-y in a high up sort of way. There’s water EVERYWHERE, and it’s great. The little Main Street reminded me a lot of a more eclectic Park City and the whole town just had this feeling of, I dunno, alive-ness? Everyone always out walking and walking dogs, jogging, cycling, porch-sitting, and just generally being active. My gf commented that we hadn’t really seen any obese people the whole time we were there.

I guess the best thing I could say about Frisco is that I would absolutely live there if I thought my budget (and my lungs) could afford it. Plus we made some fox friends.

So I sit here, on the back patio of our condo, watching giant trees lightly sway in a pleasant breeze, and I think about heading back to Ogden.

Ogden: The town I’ve come to love over the years, but still, well..I mean, it’s Ogden Utah. As quaint and sort of hipster as it’s become, it’s still pretty run down. A lot of it has been gentrified over the last few years but the problem is they haven’t really done much to help the economy, so you have nice new developments sitting empty, and rows and rows of businesses that came in, boomed for about 6 months, and then lost everything when a fickle and cash-strapped local populace found alternatives.

But when it’s time it’s time.

I’m going to miss these places and being away from everything for a little while, and I’m going to miss the crazy clean air, even though it’s so thin I feel crippled even performing the most menial of tasks. I haven’t seen the slightest hint of inversion up here, and it always just smells clean and fresh.