Category Archives: Colorado

Make Way for the Wind Turbines

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The train carrying wind turbine blades had some trouble passing through Fort Collins, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

The train carrying wind turbine blades had some trouble passing through Fort Collins, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

FORT COLLINS, Colo. — On my way north out of Colorado to link back up with the Lincoln Highway’s route through Wyoming and onward west to San Francisco, I followed U.S. 287 into this city of roughly 145,000 people, according to the 2010 Census, making it the Centennial State’s fourth-largest city.

Driving north from the Jack Kerouac gas station outside Longmont and into Loveland, where Lincoln Avenue carries northbound traffic through the center of the city, the mountains of the Front Range frame the western horizon. Longs Peak, a 14,255-foot mountain is the highest point in this part of the state, though it’s only Colorado’s 15th-highest.

Peakbagger.com has described the mountain as “a craggy monster with several enormous vertical cliffs, set among the sea of 13,000 foot peaks that make up Rocky Mountain National Park.”

Fort Collins a hub for the northern Front Range, home of Colorado State University‘s flagship campus and a number of great local breweries, including New Belgium Brewing Co., Equinox Brewing, Odell Brewing Co. and The Fort Collins Brewery. Anheuser-Busch has a large facility here, too.

It was mid morning and, unfortunately, too early to take a break to sample the local beer. (I have had may fair share of beer brewed by New Belgium over the years.) On my way out of town, I was actually contemplating turning back when a freight train carrying wind-turbine blades blocked my route to Cheyenne, Wyo.

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Jack Kerouac (And Sal Paradise) Slept Near Here

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In "On the Road," Jack Kerouac slept on grass outside this gas station, which was moved into Prospect, a planned mixed-used community near Longmont, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

In “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac’s Sal Paradise slept on grass outside this gas station, which was moved into Prospect, a planned mixed-used community near Longmont, Colo.
(Photo by Michael E. Grass)

LONGMONT, Colo. — When Sal Paradise, the narrator and main character in Jack Kerouac‘s quasi-autobiographical novel On the Road, was on his way to Denver, he hitched a ride near Cheyenne, Wyo., from a guy from Connecticut driving cross-country in jalopy and painting along the way.

Taking the Denver-bound road closest to the mountains, Sal ended up here on the outskirts of Longmont for a short time.

Keroauc wrote in On the Road:

Under a tremendous old tree was a bed of green lawn-grass belonging to a gas station. I asked if the attendant if I could sleep there, and he said sure, so I stretched out a wool shirt, laid my face flat on it, with an elbow out, and one eye cocked at the snowy Rockies in the hot sun for a moment. I fell asleep for two delicious hours, the only discomfort being an occasional Colorado ant. And here I am in Colorado! I kept thinking gleefully. Damn damn damn! I’m making it!

To find the relocated Jack Keroac gas station, look for this intersection. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

To find the relocated Jack Keroac gas station, look for this intersection. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

That On the Road gas station is still around according to Brian Butko’s Lincoln Highway Companion. It’s at the corner of Ionosphere Street and Neon Forest Circle at the edge of a mixed-used development near the junction of U.S. 287 and Pike Road.

It was moved here from its former location nearby at the intersection of U.S. 287 and Colorado State Highway 119. As I discovered, the Art Deco-inspired gas station sits vacant, is surrounded by a chain-link fence and does not yet sit on a permanent foundation.

Modern-day U.S. 287 is a six-lane divided highway that runs along Colorado’s Front Range and along the eastern flank of the gas station’s new home. According to the Lincoln Highway Association’s official map, the Lincoln Highway’s Colorado Loop through Denver follows today’s U.S. 287 or parallel roads nearby.

This is the way Kerouac (and Sal Paradise) would have used traveling between Cheyenne and Denver. This route passes through Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont and Broomfield, but stays to the east of Boulder.

While there’s still some rich agricultural land and open space in this corridor, the greater expanse of Front Range suburbia encroaches along the route. During Kerouac’s time here, this area would have been considerably more rural.

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Traversing Northeastern Colorado’s Cigarette-Burn Country

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Railroad Street in Sedgwick, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

Railroad Street in Crook, Colo. (Photo by Michael E. Grass)

CROOK, Colo. — Seven or eight years ago, I came across a large but very worn United States Geological Survey map of Colorado in the garbage room of my apartment building in Washington, D.C. I rescued it, naturally — it can be difficult to throw out an old map — and still have it somewhere.

Curiously, there’s a cluster of what appears to be cigarette burns in northeastern Colorado, somewhere in either Sedgwick County or Logan County. (I’ll have to dig out that map when I return home to make certain.)

So now, I get to check out what I’ve nicknamed Colorado’s cigarette-burn country.

To get to this part of Colorado from California Hill across the border in Nebraska, I made a detour from the Lincoln Highway’s primary route west to head into the Centennial State to use the long-controversial Colorado Loop, which links back up with the Lincoln Highway in Cheyenne, Wyo.

There’s a long history to this, but Brian Butko’s very useful guide, Lincoln Highway Companion, has it summed up concisely:

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