Wolford Mtn. Project

October 28, 2009

     In the summer of 2006 some close friends and I took a road trip. It was, in theory, a quintessential road trip. The plan was to head west to the coast of California and back again to the comfort of our homes where we’d revel to our friends about the adventures we’d encountered. We would hit what we decided were necessary destinations—the Rockies, the salt flats of Utah, San Francisco, Los Angeles and the Grand Canyon—with little itinerary outside of that. It was a good trip, complete with the clichéd ups and downs, twists and turns and all the melodrama one would and could expect.

     In the years since that trip, I’ve grown increasingly fond of the experience, with all its contained life lessons and enlightenment, however enigmatic those might still be. However, there was a specific moment on the trip that particularly holds weight with my friends and me. It’s a moment we still talk about, as if subconsciously attempting to unravel its meaning, its place in the narrative of our lives. The moment is known simply as when we stopped at Wolford Mtn. Project.

     Wolford Mtn. Project is an expanse of land—a ranch actually—located in some disregarded terrain of Colorado. Not necessarily in the mountains, nor the plains, Wolford Mtn. Project exists in limbo, at the threshold of nothingness and extravagance. Perhaps that’s what drove us to stop on that dusky evening, its liminality containing something within us as well, a group of young guys without much direction, at the first steps on the pathway to adulthood. Or, more likely, it just looked incredible.

     Once we stopped on the side of the road we sort of just stood there, not saying much. We noted the muted blue horizon, the mountains and hills in the distance, and the fact that you could look on for what seemed like forever without seeing another form of life. It had a time traveling effect, transporting us to an era now sterilized, neatly contained in textbooks and History Channel documentaries. Our car was the proverbial DeLorean, the only cue to an existence beyond what we were seeing with our own eyes.

     Standing there was strangely meditative and consoling and I knew it meant something, though the moment paralyzed any sort of profound thought at the time. It was simplifying in a way, us four void of everything but the sight of the terrain. It was quite literally only the four of us out there and it left no way of plugging in, something admittedly too much the case back home. In the wake of sensory overload, where media has no peak and no endpoint, ridding yourself of the things in your life and unplugging yourself, even for a moment, and taking the chance to look out into the expanse is important. I think in many ways it connected us to a country we hadn’t really ever seen before, with all of its elegance, its history, how it has transformed over time. All of that somehow seemed contained in the desolateness of middle-Colorado.

     We left after 20 minutes or so, leaving behind something that really hasn’t left at all.