Delta Roadtrip: Lonesome Dove High Tour
Editor's Note: Our guest contributor, Joe Seawright, weighs in on prize-winning writer Larry McMurtry and the breathtaking beauty of our American West. The Delta Dirt encourages one and all to hop in the car this summer and take the trail made famous by Captains Call and McCrae.
Captains Woodrow Call (Joe Seawright) and Augustus McCrae (Jimmy Reed) pose for their portrait in full Texas Ranger regalia.
My pal Jimmy Reed and I have always been voracious consumers of great literature, and big fans of writer Larry McMurtry's work....well, some of his work. As another friend of ours once said, Mr. McMurtry was never afraid to mix in a few pretty bad books with his good ones, and that's true enough. However, titles like The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and particularly Lonesome Dove are among the very best in American Literature, and Jimmy and I have always treasured Lonesome Dove as one of the all-time great stories of the Old American West.
I have an ancient, dog-eared copy that I dig out regularly and read as if it were my first time. I know I have read it at least six or eight times, as has Jimmy; and it never fails to fire the imagination. I would easily rank it in the top five books I have ever read, and if you've somehow missed reading it, you should go now and get a copy and prepare to spend several days doing nothing but reading, 'cause the old cliche "I couldn't put it down" definitely applies here.
I also have a DVD of the six-hour-long TV mini-series, starring Robert Duvall as the mischievous Captain Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as the stern and stubborn Captain Woodrow F. Call, and Diane Lane as the beautiful young whore Lorena Wood. It is one of those rare films where the movie is as good, if not better than the book. Duvall and Jones are two of the best actors in our lifetime, and their performances here are probably their career bests. I think the mini-series won numerous TV awards, and rightly so.
Anyway, the point of all this is that Junior (Jimmy Reed) and I for years wanted to take a grand driving tour of the West, retracing some of the steps that Call & McCrae took in their long, adventure-filled cattle drive north from Lonesome Dove, Texas to the Montana territory. They crossed some of the wildest country in America. We, however, wanted to make a slight alteration to their itinerary, moving our trek to a higher plane, both literally and philosophically.
In July of 2002, we borrowed my daughter R.D.'s Chrysler Sebring convertible, and struck out towards Texas early one Friday afternoon, driving all night to reach Amarillo, and then pushed on up into Colorado with the sunrise, to reach our starting point at Gunnison. We had given the convertible the nickname of the "Hell Bitch," recalling Cap'n Call's spirited and intelligent mare.
Once we reached Gunnison (altitude about 5,000 ft.) we started to climb up a country back road to a place called Taylor Park, a high alpine bowl with a beautiful lake, standing at 9,000 feet, with a majestic line of 14,000 foot peaks along the northern rim of the bowl, one of the most beautiful panoramas in America. I of course had selected our route carefully to hit some of the most scenic areas in the west, in an attempt to sate my appetite as an amateur photographer. I had also rigged up a laptop computer on the front console, patched into a Garmin GPS unit that gave us an instantaneous position display on the laptop's moving map, showing not only our longitude and latitude, but speed and elevation as well. We thought we were pretty cool for a couple of Mississippi rednecks! I'm talkin "high tech rednecks!"
After savoring the immense beauty of Taylor Park, we launched forth for even higher goals, following a winding gravel road up to the Continental Divide at about 11,000 feet, and then turned north for Montana. Call & McCrae couldn't have driven cattle up here, but we felt their spirit with us, nonetheless. Junior and I expected Blue Duck and Monkey John to leap on us at any moment!
We took a brief detour down into Denver to pick up our companero Johnny Jennings, who had flown in to join us on Sunday, having been unable to drive out with us because of a wedding shoot commitment on Saturday. Since Junior and I had taken to addressing each other as Woodrow (me) and Gus (he), we immediately christened JJ as Jake Spoon, with an admonishment to avoid stealing any horses (Call & McCrae hung Jake for just that in the novel).
Next was a cruise up Mt. Evans, the highest paved road in America, passable only for about 4 months out of the year. The road winds around for almost 30 miles to reach the summit, some 11,300 feet above seal level. The Hell Bitch never faltered in the rare atmosphere, but I can't say the same for three old men. Gus and Jake climbed up the true summit, another 300 feet or so above the road's terminus, and came back wheezing and puffing. Mountain goats and marmots abounded everywhere, and we felt we could see forever from our perch. It was full sun and only about 45 degrees in mid-July!
Next I thought I would treat my pardners to a little run up Oh My God Road, not far from Mt. Evans. I had discovered a reference to this twisted trail during my internet research to plan the route, and it lived up to all the hype. A steep, narrow, precipitous gravel trail, Oh My God Road is not for the faint of heart. In fact well before we made it to the top, Junior freaked out, insisting that I stop this madness and turn around. He was serious, so we carefully reversed course, avoiding a few 1,000 foot drops over the edge of the road.
We cruised up through Winter Park, over another 11,000 foot pass, and through the corner of Utah, and up into Wyoming. We stopped for the night in Jackson Hole, one of the most upscale communities in this country. In true Call & McCrae fashion, we sauntered into the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, where instead of stools, the seats at the bar are all saddles. We didn't even have to whack any surly bartenders!
From Jackson Hole we drove further north, past the spectacular Grand Teton range, and up into Yellowstone, one of America's finest treasures. Essentially a gigantic dormant volcano (the BIG question is: FOR HOW LONG?), the whole Yellowstone basin is a wonderland of flora, fauna, fumes and geological wizardry, including Old Faithful. We saw every kind of animal except a grizzly, which was okay by me, since we didn't have the Texas Bull along to protect us!
From Yellowstone we ran even further north, into Montana, along the Red Cloud Highway, another spine-tingling ride along the spine of the Divide, and down into the Little Big Horn country, where we stopped to tour the Custer Battlefield and the excellent museum there. This marked the apogee of our northern ascent, as we started back down into Wyoming, with a planned 200 mile detour to the east to see the Devil's Tower National Monument, where Richard Dreyfuss left the Earth to go with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Somewhere along the way we crossed the Powder River, one of the milestones in the book, so picture two old dudes standing under the highway sign grinning like fools. Of course, even the Hell Bitch couldn't pull all the way to the top of the Tower, so we drank a few long necks and headed back to Denver.
The rest of the way home was pretty dreary, and if you've ever been lucky enough to drive all the way across the 600+ miles of Kansas, you can appreciate what I mean. But what a trip it was! Junior, who has been around the block a time or two, says that it was the best trip he's ever made in his entire life. It was indeed memorable, so much so that we are planning a reprise tour of pretty much the same route, but with a few enhancements and expansion stops.
If you want to tag along on one of the grandest tours of the West ever, let us know. We may have to get a convertible bus of some sort to accommodate extra pardners, but I promise you'll love every minute of it. You'll need to take about 10 days off to make the full round trip, but go for it! We might just get Blue Duck's hide yet.
Joe Seawright
(Cap'n Woodrow F. Call, Texas Rangers)
Captains Woodrow Call (Joe Seawright) and Augustus McCrae (Jimmy Reed) pose for their portrait in full Texas Ranger regalia.
My pal Jimmy Reed and I have always been voracious consumers of great literature, and big fans of writer Larry McMurtry's work....well, some of his work. As another friend of ours once said, Mr. McMurtry was never afraid to mix in a few pretty bad books with his good ones, and that's true enough. However, titles like The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and particularly Lonesome Dove are among the very best in American Literature, and Jimmy and I have always treasured Lonesome Dove as one of the all-time great stories of the Old American West.
I have an ancient, dog-eared copy that I dig out regularly and read as if it were my first time. I know I have read it at least six or eight times, as has Jimmy; and it never fails to fire the imagination. I would easily rank it in the top five books I have ever read, and if you've somehow missed reading it, you should go now and get a copy and prepare to spend several days doing nothing but reading, 'cause the old cliche "I couldn't put it down" definitely applies here.
I also have a DVD of the six-hour-long TV mini-series, starring Robert Duvall as the mischievous Captain Augustus McCrae, Tommy Lee Jones as the stern and stubborn Captain Woodrow F. Call, and Diane Lane as the beautiful young whore Lorena Wood. It is one of those rare films where the movie is as good, if not better than the book. Duvall and Jones are two of the best actors in our lifetime, and their performances here are probably their career bests. I think the mini-series won numerous TV awards, and rightly so.
Anyway, the point of all this is that Junior (Jimmy Reed) and I for years wanted to take a grand driving tour of the West, retracing some of the steps that Call & McCrae took in their long, adventure-filled cattle drive north from Lonesome Dove, Texas to the Montana territory. They crossed some of the wildest country in America. We, however, wanted to make a slight alteration to their itinerary, moving our trek to a higher plane, both literally and philosophically.
In July of 2002, we borrowed my daughter R.D.'s Chrysler Sebring convertible, and struck out towards Texas early one Friday afternoon, driving all night to reach Amarillo, and then pushed on up into Colorado with the sunrise, to reach our starting point at Gunnison. We had given the convertible the nickname of the "Hell Bitch," recalling Cap'n Call's spirited and intelligent mare.
Once we reached Gunnison (altitude about 5,000 ft.) we started to climb up a country back road to a place called Taylor Park, a high alpine bowl with a beautiful lake, standing at 9,000 feet, with a majestic line of 14,000 foot peaks along the northern rim of the bowl, one of the most beautiful panoramas in America. I of course had selected our route carefully to hit some of the most scenic areas in the west, in an attempt to sate my appetite as an amateur photographer. I had also rigged up a laptop computer on the front console, patched into a Garmin GPS unit that gave us an instantaneous position display on the laptop's moving map, showing not only our longitude and latitude, but speed and elevation as well. We thought we were pretty cool for a couple of Mississippi rednecks! I'm talkin "high tech rednecks!"
After savoring the immense beauty of Taylor Park, we launched forth for even higher goals, following a winding gravel road up to the Continental Divide at about 11,000 feet, and then turned north for Montana. Call & McCrae couldn't have driven cattle up here, but we felt their spirit with us, nonetheless. Junior and I expected Blue Duck and Monkey John to leap on us at any moment!
We took a brief detour down into Denver to pick up our companero Johnny Jennings, who had flown in to join us on Sunday, having been unable to drive out with us because of a wedding shoot commitment on Saturday. Since Junior and I had taken to addressing each other as Woodrow (me) and Gus (he), we immediately christened JJ as Jake Spoon, with an admonishment to avoid stealing any horses (Call & McCrae hung Jake for just that in the novel).
Next was a cruise up Mt. Evans, the highest paved road in America, passable only for about 4 months out of the year. The road winds around for almost 30 miles to reach the summit, some 11,300 feet above seal level. The Hell Bitch never faltered in the rare atmosphere, but I can't say the same for three old men. Gus and Jake climbed up the true summit, another 300 feet or so above the road's terminus, and came back wheezing and puffing. Mountain goats and marmots abounded everywhere, and we felt we could see forever from our perch. It was full sun and only about 45 degrees in mid-July!
Next I thought I would treat my pardners to a little run up Oh My God Road, not far from Mt. Evans. I had discovered a reference to this twisted trail during my internet research to plan the route, and it lived up to all the hype. A steep, narrow, precipitous gravel trail, Oh My God Road is not for the faint of heart. In fact well before we made it to the top, Junior freaked out, insisting that I stop this madness and turn around. He was serious, so we carefully reversed course, avoiding a few 1,000 foot drops over the edge of the road.
We cruised up through Winter Park, over another 11,000 foot pass, and through the corner of Utah, and up into Wyoming. We stopped for the night in Jackson Hole, one of the most upscale communities in this country. In true Call & McCrae fashion, we sauntered into the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar, where instead of stools, the seats at the bar are all saddles. We didn't even have to whack any surly bartenders!
From Jackson Hole we drove further north, past the spectacular Grand Teton range, and up into Yellowstone, one of America's finest treasures. Essentially a gigantic dormant volcano (the BIG question is: FOR HOW LONG?), the whole Yellowstone basin is a wonderland of flora, fauna, fumes and geological wizardry, including Old Faithful. We saw every kind of animal except a grizzly, which was okay by me, since we didn't have the Texas Bull along to protect us!
From Yellowstone we ran even further north, into Montana, along the Red Cloud Highway, another spine-tingling ride along the spine of the Divide, and down into the Little Big Horn country, where we stopped to tour the Custer Battlefield and the excellent museum there. This marked the apogee of our northern ascent, as we started back down into Wyoming, with a planned 200 mile detour to the east to see the Devil's Tower National Monument, where Richard Dreyfuss left the Earth to go with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Somewhere along the way we crossed the Powder River, one of the milestones in the book, so picture two old dudes standing under the highway sign grinning like fools. Of course, even the Hell Bitch couldn't pull all the way to the top of the Tower, so we drank a few long necks and headed back to Denver.
The rest of the way home was pretty dreary, and if you've ever been lucky enough to drive all the way across the 600+ miles of Kansas, you can appreciate what I mean. But what a trip it was! Junior, who has been around the block a time or two, says that it was the best trip he's ever made in his entire life. It was indeed memorable, so much so that we are planning a reprise tour of pretty much the same route, but with a few enhancements and expansion stops.
If you want to tag along on one of the grandest tours of the West ever, let us know. We may have to get a convertible bus of some sort to accommodate extra pardners, but I promise you'll love every minute of it. You'll need to take about 10 days off to make the full round trip, but go for it! We might just get Blue Duck's hide yet.
Joe Seawright
(Cap'n Woodrow F. Call, Texas Rangers)
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