Hermit Road

Trip Report -September 4, 1997

By Arthur Vyn Boennighausen

From the town of Westcliffe, Colorado Hermit Road heads almost due West. Starting as a paved asphalt road, it soon turns into a good gravel road that rises ever so gently as it penetrates the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Range. After about three miles you come to a 'Y' in the road. Stay to the left and put your vehicle into four wheel drive.

We used our Ford one ton 4 x 4 diesel pickup truck on this outing. We were glad to have the ground clearance and heavy duty suspension for this road. While the road is well maintained, the round rocks they call "baby heads" abound. These round, smooth rocks stick up three to six inches from the matrix they are embedded in. The rocks seem to develop a harmonic rhythm with the suspension that creates maximum bouncing for the occupants. We wear seatbelts at all times, not really for safety, but to have something to hold us down on the seat and keep our heads from hitting the ceiling of the trucks cab.

The four wheel drive section of Hermit Road begins by winding gently up the side of a valley and passes just to the North of the Alpine runs of the Hermit Basin skii resort. The chairlifts are still in Summer and Autumn with tall green grass waving in the breeze instead of powder snow.

We always avoid this road on the weekends to minimize the number of encounters with vehicles coming in the opposite direction. Since the number of places where two vehicles can pass one another are few and far between, you usually have to have one vehicle reverse direction to the last pull out.

"Bumpety Bump, Bumpety Bump" I would mumble under my breathe as we made our way up the road. Personally, I like walking a lot better. The 4 x 4's are noisy and we all get a little car sick after about an hour up the road. However, access to the high mountains of the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness is more achievable in a single day if you use a motor vehicle.

I thought of the book I was reading from the archives of Albert Einstein last night. I learned that his name meant "One Stone" in English. Einstein received letters all the time from adults and children. Many of the letters were of a personal nature; not of mathematics and physics. People would write to him and ask him what to do in their own lives. One thing that Einstein told people again and again was to separate your way of making a living from your Intellectual goals.

"Better to be a Cobbler with time to think than a Professor at a University always under pressure to lay another golden egg" Einstein would tell people who wrote him.

Einstein would remind people that he produced some of his best Thoughts while being a simple clerk in the Swiss patent office. The famous equation "E=MC2" arose during this period of his life.

I looked up at the grassy couloirs of Hermit Peak through the open window. The grasses and plants had turned to the Autumn colors. Like streaks of bronze reaching into the blue sky.

Bumpety Bump.... my head hit the ceiling of the truck again. I do not like to wear a seatbelt. I try to hold onto the steering wheel to keep myself in place. On one especially rough section of the Hermit Road I lost my grip on the steering wheel and bounced right out the window. Luckily, the truck was going slow, so I ran up to the truck and jumped back through the window and kept steering. Bumpety Bump... I wondered if Einstein ever owned a four wheel drive.

We reached a level area with a outdoor restroom painted lime green. We were sick of bumping around so we parked the truck and started to walk up the road for a few hours.

On foot we could see things that you couldn't see from the cab of a pickup truck. Things like hundreds of carpenters nails scattered all over the road. We wondered if the nails had all fallen out of the bed of a pickup truck owned by a carpenter or had been scattered here as a deterrent to motorized travel by a guardian of the Wilderness. We made a game of finding the nails and throwing them off to the side where they could do no harm. We also thought of all the nails we had driven over as we came up the first section of the road and wondered if we would make it back down without a flat.

About three hours after we parked the truck and started to walk we decided to turn back. The road kept going as far as we could see which was several more miles. Farther than we felt like walking this day.

We got back to the truck and headed down the mountain in the lowest gear of four wheel drive to save the brakes. Bumpety Bump I thought as I looked out to the flat floor of the Wet Mountain Valley in the distance. When we got down to the almost level section of good gravel road I got out of the truck and had Marty drive forward very slowly as I looked for carpenter's nails in each of the tires. It looked like we had successfully run the gauntlet. No nails were visible and so we headed home to our cabin.