News, Analysis and Opinion for the Informed Boulder Resident
Saturday April 1st 2023

Support the Blue Line

Subscribe to the Blue Line

That's what she said

city council transportation energy municipalization xcel housing urban planning april fools bicycles climate action density election 2011 affordable housing boulder county open space election renewables agriculture CU local food climate change election 2013 development youth jefferson parkway pedestrian election 2015 preservation Rocky Flats election 2017 recreation BVSD mountain bikes immigration boards and commissions plan boulder farming fracking GMOs transit urban design decarbonization planning board fires colorado politics wildlife land use smart regs downtown architecture new era colorado transit village parking homeless journalism plutonium natural gas ghgs commuting radioactive waste rental coal height limits taxes april fools 2015 walkability historic preservation energy efficiency historic district Neighborhoods diversity zoning population growth growth students North Boulder flood arts gardens education University Hill water supply bus election 2010 solar election 2018 nutrition RTD sprawl water quality election 2012 groundwater bike lane electric utility safety library april fools 2016 renewable energy affairs of the heart organic flood plain wetlands planning reserve zero waste mayor blue line electric vehicle ballot right-sizing street design transportation master plan obama hazardous waste county commissioners politics hogan-pancost longmont colorado legislature climate smart loan diagonal plaza campaign finance flood mitigation bears Mapleton solar panels PV recycling comprehensive plan golden conservation easement epa boulder junction pesticide congestion food drought road diet oil bus rapid transit commercial development inequality election 2016 flooding planning daily camera public health community cycles BVCP ecocycle Newlands automobile PUC climate change deniers children david miller ken wilson sam weaver community league of women voters wind power public spaces boulder creek crime mlk civil rights west tsa marijuana technology arizona Orchard Grove EV green points al bartlett Whittier city attorney

The Way Up There


By

Boulder Canyon road and tracks, c 1909-1923 (tracks were removed in 1920) Carnegie Library

This morning, this seventh day of September of 2013, well after the Flood, the road up the Canyon to Nederland is reopened. The way up there….

I think about that word, the way and think that the first, the primordial ways must have been game trails that crossed the terrain as readily as possible. Trails that our ancestors, when they were still but hominids chose to follow until, with use, they became settled ways to somewhere else. And so, there came to be perhaps the most ancient and fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom to go somewhere else. The freedom to imagine somewhere else and go there and becoming sapiens.

And Boulder’s bridges held.

I have thought how wondrous are the bridges, grand and plain, to whose rhythms civilization has marched. Before, there were only the fords crossed by the game trails, waters shallow and firm enough to allow regular crossing. A way to get somewhere else.

Four Mile Bridge, 1928. Carnegie Library

But I had not thought so clearly about roads, ways that wore into trails, into paths, and so to those narrow ways or roads that would allow a cart to drive on to the next ford—in our drive to civilization, now bridged, sometimes beautifully.

This morning so many are so glad to have their road restored to them, surprised, themselves, at how happy the repossession of their road has made them. Their road: their need, their pleasure, their imagination of some place else, their freedom is theirs again.

In the beginning it was impossible to get up through the Narrows or Boulder Canyon, so precipitously did the canyon walls plunge vertically down into the plunging creek.

To pass the Narrows was to climb the rocks, in and out or the creek. The only practical way was a way around them, a steep climb out of the canyon toward Magnolia and so on to Caribou or Blackhawk, or Perrigo.

It was the way that got us there. Those ways  became our roads and eventually our highways over which we could drive to our very lives, to where we needed and wanted to go, fording the creeks over serviceable bridges, as over our dear Boulder Creek.

It’s wonderful.

Rate this article: 1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars (4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading...