Following in Walt Whitman’s Footsteps on the Continental Divide
The Continental Divide, Walt Whitman wrote, is “the backbone of our hemisphere.”
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I ride across a clearing offering expansive views of the Continental Divide. The high peaks rise beyond the saddles of the nearer Kenosha Mountains, still an impossible distance away. On nearer slopes, bristlecone pines grow on ridgelines, their caramel-colored bark warped like the work of a glassblower by millennia of wind and weathering. Living as long as 2,500 years, Rocky Mountain bristlecones grow like emblems of impermanence on the landscape. When the seeds of these trees first germinated and began to grow, the United States had yet to claim the soils in which their roots took hold; the ancient city of Troy had yet to be built by the Trojans and sacked by the Greeks; the religions of our time had yet to be founded, their texts yet to be written.
Strands of mountain brome bend in a gentle wind as I ride on beyond the bristlecones. I descend through thickets of timber to the apex of Kenosha Pass, where groups of tourists snap pictures and ready backpacks on either side of a highway that passes over the mountain. Sedans and SUVs loaded with mountain bikes and Thule…
