Castle Creek Road

August, 1962. My father had just picked me up at the Denver train station. Back then, people still mostly traveled by rail, not air, and kids my age (13) could spend 36 hours or more unaccompanied in a passenger rail car, and no one thought the worse of it. While I slept off the effects of a night with little sleep hunched over in a coach seat, my father scoured the Denver Public Library for books on fishing. Although he grew up in rural eastern Montana on the banks of the Yellowstone river, he had never actually caught a fish, much less threaded a fly on a line to flick over a crystal mountain stream.

He placed great value in learning from books; he’d become a scratch golfer and taken up figure skating with nothing but self-help pamphlets. How hard could catching a trout be? We headed west, into the Rockies. There was no interstate, just endless mountain passes leading into the high country. We crested Loveland Pass, and snaked down towards the town of Dillon. There was no lake then, and no ski areas or condos in that valley. We went down along the Blue River, and tried our hand at a day trip on horses up into the Gore Range (this was something he HAD learned a lot about as a kid, how to ride horses.)

We drove back towards Leadville, along the two lane road over the pass named for Charlie Vail, the engineer who pioneered the route. The narrow little valley we descended into was just starting to sprout a couple of ski lifts and lodges; this would some day become the metropolis of Vail, but it was not our destination. Up Tennessee Pass, through Climax into Leadville, and then past Twin Lakes to Independence Pass.

Along the way, my father tried to teach me his favorite driving pointers. One, useful in the cruel winters of the Montana outback, went something like this: “You can drive as fast as you want on a snowy, icy road, as long as you don’t have to turn or stop.” Uh-huh. Another was the admonition to brake before the curve, and accelerate coming out. He seemed to think all the other drives on the winding mountain byways were doing it backwards. Finally, there was the finesse of passing on a two lane road. “Get as close as you can behind them, then peek your eyes around the guy in front. Back off a touch, then accelerate hard to get around.”

None of that was useful on Independence, though. Up above the lakes, the road turned to gravel. Down the other side, the track seemed unchanged from when it was blasted out of the granite in the early ’80s (that would have been the 1880s then.) It looked just like on old stagecoach road, with little rock walls all that protected us from the cliffs. Down into Aspen, we found a motel for the night. I don’t think it was the Aspen A’s – a bunch of teepee-like A-frames for rent, where Boogies Diner is now. It may have been the Swiss Chalet, another collection of individual small cottages, just across from the still-present Hickory House, on Main St on the way out of town.

The next morning, we headed up into the mountains again, this time to camp, and, my father promised, to catch fish and eat it for breakfast. No roundabout, no Prince of Peace Chapel, no hospital, no school, only Aspen Highlands ski area on the thin ridge separating the Castle from the Maroon Creek valleys. No million dollar houses lining the lower stretches of the road, another gravel track. After nine miles, Castle Creek Road opens up into an awesome valley, over a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, the creek a meandering swamp filled with beaver dams and lakes. At the far end stands Elk Mountain, rising up like a mediaeval church, giving its name to Cathedral Lake below.

Elk Mountain Lodge, another dude ranch, stood at the near end of this valley, commanding a sweeping view to the south, and Electric Pass leading to Crested Butte. We stopped to take another horseback ride there, braving the rugged 3 mile trail up 3,000 feet to American Lake. Once down and out of the saddle, it was time to find a camp site.

The Forest Service had set up a primitive camp area, really just a few picnic tables, at the edge of the creek. We were surrounded by old crumbling buildings, some two stories high, where no one lived, and in which you could just wander around and wonder who had built them and why. Across the road was Toklat lodge, where huskies howled all day and night. Stuart Mace kept them for Hollywood’s use, most famously for a 50’s TV show called “Sgt Preston of the Yukon” or something like that. They had used the old decaying buildings of the Ashcroft town site as a stand in for outdoor scenes set in a northern Canadian settlement.

True to his word, my father (a notorious early riser – he had a fetish about getting snapshots of sunrises the way some people enjoy collecting sunsets) woke up and tried his hand at fly fishing. With no competition, and the little buggers hungary as the dawn broke, he caught 2 or 3 6-8 inch trout, and started frying them up for breakfast.

Since I was still in my “I’ll eat it if it’s peanut butter or mashed potatoes” phase (a period of my life which seemingly has continued to this day), I passed on the delicacy. Luckily, Harry didn’t press the issue, and I snacked on dry cereal and water, I think.

Anyway, that’s my first memory of Castle Creek Valley. I’ve been there many times since, many hikes to the Lakes, a trip up to Montezuma basin in the summer, and to Conundrum hot springs in October, to Pine Creek Cook House, and the cross country ski trails in the winter, and once on my mountain bike up the Pass to Ajax ridge, then back to the Sundeck and on down the Summer Road into town, where my father picked me up so I didn’t have to bike the remaining 8 miles on roads to Snowmass. So many memories, mostly with my parents and later my own kids, and wife, and sister.

To them, I’ll add my most recent trip. Of late, of course, I’ve been doing a lot of biking – on my time trial bike, on the paved roads of the valley of the Roaring Fork. One of my go-to routes is Castle Creek Road. It’s a 3 hour, 44 mile round trip from my house here in Snowmass. The past few years, the road surface has been deteriorating from the harsh winters, with frost heaves and little potholes spreading up in Beaver Valley.

But ten days ago, the paving fever afflicting Pitkin County this summer swept up the Castle Creek valley, re-surfacing the entire 13 miles from the Roundabout to road’s end, at the little bridge over the creek which reminds me so much of the spot where my father and I camped and fished 50 years ago. In actuality, it’s about a mile up the road, but it’s the emotional sense which counts the most, and, besides, it’s a lot easier to get to. Nowadays, it costs $3 to get into the restored town of Ashcroft, and the roads are rutted dirt, no place for my sleek and skittery time machine.

As I said, the road was just recently paved. Now, if you’re a cyclist, you know the value of fresh, smooth black asphalt. This is not chip seal I’m talking about; this is the real stuff, the tar and tiny rocks providing a silky feel, not unlike about 4-6 inches of fresh powder over a groomed intermediate ski run.

And, once I hit the Beaver Valley/Ashcroft/Elk Mountain terrain (set at about 9500′), the slopes rising abruptly on all sides to 12,000 and above were covered with aspen trees in the prime of their fall explosion. The color at mid-day in the thin mountain air was electric, and the leaves shimmered and quaked with a final vigor before their inevitable fall. Oh, and the sky was a cerulean blue, not a cloud anywhere, and the sun was warm, the air was cool, not crisp, and it was just a perfect time to be on a bike and riding back downhill. I made the turn at the bridge, and headed back down.

Normally, I don’t really enjoy downhills, and especially this one, with all the cracks and ruts and heaves covering the first 3 miles. But the new pavement seemed to simultaneously grip my tires (all that recently laid tar, I guess) and send me downward faster – exactly, again, like skiing in powder, where a terminal velocity takes hold and you know it’s safe at that slightly scary speed.

That vision of the fiery aspen and the feel of the forgiving highway gets added to my long list of warm and treasured memories, in the scrapbook of my mind called Castle Creek Road. Sometimes that valley seems to take a back seat to Maroon Creek, because, well, the Bells are just so uniquely spectacular, like the Jungfrau or the Matterhorn in Switzerland. But the varied sights and fuller, subtler pleasures of Castle Creek make it a desert island type of place – if I only had one Roaring Fork Valley to take with me on a desert island, it would be Castle Creek.