Onward to the Enchanted Mesa

After the great clothing heist from the Cortez motel laundry room, concerned parties suggested it was time to move on.

I wanted out as well...the only food in range was a Mexican restaurant at the edge of the motel parking lot. It was good, but you can only eat Mexican food so many times a week. Or day. And Cortez was getting gritty - a dry, dusty border town with occasional drunk belligerents wandering around. I would be politically incorrect to mention the ethnicity of the drunks, but many may have originated from nearby reservations.

Heading back to Mancos was the plan, and after being told the inn was full at a couple of places (they didn't want responsibility for the new editor) I landed at the Enchanted Mesa Motel on the west side of town.

So I restocked myself with sand-colored jeans at Walmart. I still had my safari-style shirts and vests, which seemed like a good initial fashion decision, but I ended up looking like some generic forest service or national park employee. Khaki and army green and lots of pockets gave an air of vague officialness; plenty of turquoise jewelry lent some style to the whole thing. It looked a like a combination of Dan Rather in the Middle East and Cher in some half-breed video.

What I didn't understand was that by dressing this way, I had turned down my hetero girly-girl signals and was broadcasting a little tough authority. I learned later that local lesbians, of which there were many, started placing bets on my sexual preference. I SLOWLY (it took months) clued in that all these really nice women didn't want to be my new best friend forever unless it was BFF with benefits. I was so dumb.

Anyway, I ended up checking in to the Enchanted Mesa with dog, parrot, safari clothes, turquoise and all the other crap I had been hauling in my car for two weeks. The rest of my belongings had been shipped to the Cortez Journal and were in storage at the mothership office.

The Enchanted Mesa was good - initially quiet, a kitchen with a separate bedroom, space for all of us. The motel was owned by a nice Mexican woman who cut me a great deal. Other guests included a VERY tough woman with Wyoming tags who was in Mancos for some forest fire training and tourists that would stay for a day and move on. The public laundry had a lock on the door.

Now in the midst of all this moving and style strategizing, I still had a newspaper to get out in about four days. There were no town board meetings scheduled and the only thing going on was talk of a massive motorcycle rally up at a dude ranch, which will remain nameless.

The ranch was owned by some guy from Wisconson - we'll call him Lars. I made him up, ok? He had partnered on the rally with some biker/promoter type who might have been a Vietnam vet and had done some jail time. He had an air of bitter bad-assness. My radar said bullshit artist.

Lars was a handsome, boyish Nordic type. When he and his wife bought the dude ranch, they felt it needed some good Mid-Western amenities, like a miniature golf course. Forget majestic Mesa Verde, forget the mighty La Platas, forget historic Durango with its spectacular narrow-gauge train ride into the old mining districts, forget the archeological centers, forget Canyon of the Ancients and ancient rock paintings of UFOs and a million other things...build a miniature golf couse.

So they flattened a pristine alpine meadow and laid down astroturf. This was a dumb move - alpine groundwater and drainage ecology is delicate and sensitive. You don't just start bulldozing stuff. There's a butterfly effect, and when you mess with drainage, downstream neighbors start having problems. To compound future crisis, Lars had laid the course near the leach fields for his sewage system. Eventually the project was abandoned, so there was this weird looking field of hyper-green astroturf with random native grasses poking through.

I learned later that the astroturf seriously interfered with the operation of the leachfields, which were the waste containment areas for guest cabins, a restaurant, sundry out-houses and laundry facilities.

This was the planned site of the rally - the promoters had announced it would be at least 10,000 strong, and were actively taking registration dollars through their website. The road to the dude ranch was gravel and dirt, winding with 90-degree turns all two miles up. It was narrow and steep; the only route in and out. Difficult to imagine 10,000 Harleys cruising up and down this road for a few days and nights. Difficult to imagine the refuse of 10,000 being handled by the half-acre leachfield. Lars' neighbors were not enthusiastic.


The Montezuma County Commissioners weren't crazy about the whole thing either, and many Mancos residents were freaked out of their rural gourds. The freaked out Mancos residents were at war with the Chamber of Commerce types, who saw a much-needed cash influx into the valley. But official permits would be needed.

Unfortunately, this was not a story for that week, as the Montezuma County Commission meeting on the whole affair was more than two weeks away, in June, and the rally was planned for Labor Day weekend in September. Previous Editor had been covering the early stuff, but there was nothing new to report until the commission meeting. Eventually the whole deal morphed into the Great Motorcycle Rally that Wasn't. Coming soon.

So, while the lesbians were placing their bets, the motorcycle rally guys were collecting registration fees, the bears were coming out of hibernation and the elk were migrating to higher pastures, I kept looking for a story.

Next: The Mud Creek Hogan Trading Post