The scent of the sage overwhelmed me as I stepped out of the truck. La Junta vanished behind us quickly, her flatness and humidity left below as we climbed, the first glimpse of the mountains came just after we left the town. Wendy and I had walked to McDonald’s for breakfast, grumbling of the sun and heat as we sweated. But now the humidity’s gone, the green of the irrigated alfalfa and cucumber fields faded to plateaus of ashen pale gold, dotted with the green wisps of mesquite, yuccas, and the burning pink bursts of cactus flowers.

Dad talks of how he likes the isolation, that the old farmboy in him looks at the empty plains and can imagine riding a horse for hours without encountering a fence.

We stopped along the side of the road to take pictures, my mom in search of cactus blooms.The possibility of silence is almost as overwhelming as the sage aroma. But with the van idling, and my mother yammering about not finding the flowers, the silence merely faint possibility and nothing more. When we get into the truck, I put Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” into my Discman, hoping to drown out the noise long enough to watch the veins grow into mountains as we get closer, to quietly marvel at the blue-black lakes that suddenly stretch below the hills we top. Does the most desolate place in the country need senseless babble best left for a place that doesn’t silently caress with still, warm sage air?

Whoever said that getting there is half the fun never travelled with my family. We begged to see The Great Sand Dunes Monument , and there was whining about falling behind schedule. We got into the park so we could buy postcards, eat lunch on the ground, and leave without setting foot in the sand. Uh, why? “We’re in a hurry!” Funny, I thought we were in a national park. No chance to touch the crumbled mountains, mounds of fluid, red rising from the scratchy green just under the shadows of clouds and mountains. The dunes will be there for another million years. The flea market we spent an hour at in Walsenburg won’t.

Well, there was finally a coup of sorts. The drive to Wolf Creek Pass led us to colder and colder terrain. I opened the back window in the truck and let my hand drift over the breeze, feeling July turn to October between my fingers. The sky changed with each hairpin curve, once azure with powderpuff clouds, then black, then pale and whispy, slowly melding with each turn of the kaleidoscope. And the truck heaved upwards.

We stopped at the top, where patches of snow quilted around the evergreens and a snowmelt creek swam though the hills. Wendy, Travis, and I started towards the trail up the hill, towards the woods and snow, leaving the adults (Oh, God, by default of the year of my birth, I’m technically one of them) loitering around the vehicles. The concensus - we weren’t happy about rushing through the sand dunes. For what? So we could sit in a cabin for the better part of a week? The elders weren’t following us up the trail. Fine - they can wait while we play. What are they going to do? Leave without us? So we crossed the footbridge onto the muddy trail that cut through the woods, smelling the evergreens as we scrambled up the snowbanks, sinking our bare legs into the drifts, tossing snowballs at each other while giggling and huffing in the thin alpine air. Wendy descended ahead of us, but Travis and I walked slowly, weaving around the skinny, gnarled trees, stopping to chat with a woman from Wisconsin who had brought her white bear of a Malamute to the drifts. The dog’s legs and belly were mud-soaked, leaving brown footprints as she bounded to the top of a bank, tail wagging as she bit the snow, eyes shining, exhilarated by the chills. “She’s so happy to see snow again,” her owner said. “It’s been a long time.”