Englewood, CO
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . .
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away. — Ozymandias, Percy Bysse Shelley
Every time I get out onto a dirt road I remind myself that I wasn’t going to go on any more dirt roads. At least this time, one of the dirt roads said “Private Road” although it didn’t say “No Trespassing” and I convinced myself to give up the hunt before I got into trouble.
And so I didn’t get to see the site of the Dale Creek Bridge. The next time I’m out this way I’m getting a four wheel drive vehicle with jerry cans of gas and at least one extra spare tire and going hell for leather out into the wilderness to see these esoteric historical remnants I’ve missed this time around.
I did, however, get to see the Ames Monument along a similar dirt road. Sometime in the 1880s, the Union Pacific Railroad hired H.H. Richardson to build a magnificent monument to the Ames Brothers of Massachusetts – builders of the eastern road. It’s a wonderful, solid, red sandstone stepped pyramid with bas reliefs of both brothers on opposing sides and the inscription “In Memory of Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames” on the side facing the tracks. When the tracks ran nearby.
Now the tracks run some miles south of the monument and it sits abandoned and forgotten – like the men it memorializes – on the side of a dusty road on a blustery day in eastern Wyoming.