I spent the month of June in Denver, the farthest west on my itinerary for the year. I’ve been in the city a few times over the course of my life, but this was by far the longest single stay. Which has really been the theme of the year so far: going places I’ve been, but spending more time in them.
One of the things that stood out to me the most about Denver was just how beautiful the scenery is. It is also, somewhat ironically, something that I felt unable to capture on camera. No photo I took of the Summer sky and the play of clouds and light actually captured what I was seeing. So, sadly, while I saw some truly stunning vistas, I have none to share.
That said, I’ll try to describe one of them, and generally encourage you to spend some time in the Rockies yourself to experience this for yourself if you ever get a chance.
Anyway, my first week in the area was spent with a couple of friends who came to the city at the same time. One of the days we were all together we drove down to Colorado Springs to see another mutual friend, and we were driving back in the evening as the sun was beginning to set in some on-and-off rain. As the rain faded out, with the sun setting, there was this small hole in the clouds ahead of us on the road that the fading light could cut through. It created this stunning halo effect of stunningly light-colored light in the middle of a dark-clouded sky. (I know that “light-colored” doesn’t make sense, but I can’t really describe it better than that, and the photos I tried to take didn’t even come close to capturing it.)
I imagine that you can get similar scenery in other places in the Rockies, so it doesn’t have to be Denver, but if you get a chance, I think you owe it to yourself to spend some time in those mountains. It also makes me want to find a way to spend some time in other major mountain ranges around the world to see how similar things feel in those.
That was near the beginning of my stay in Denver, and while I didn’t see anything quite like it again, the views were consistently amazing.
Which is probably why hiking is such a popular thing to do in the Rockies. Something I also did. Hiking is one of those activities that I enjoy on occasion, but not really if I have to do it by myself. Fortunately, my sister and her husband drove up to stay with me for a week during my time in Denver, so I didn’t have to. You may remember that the US had a major heat wave going on this Summer, and Denver was super hot during June. Which meant that we decided to find a mostly-shaded set of trails to hike.
I think that about 80% or so of trails near Denver are in open areas without much shade, but there are so many places to hike that you can still find plenty of more shaded spots. So we drove out to Lair O’ the Bear Park to spend a couple of hours hiking along a forested river and a winding ridge overlooking it.
Again I was struck by just how beautiful this part of the world is. Hiking up out of the valley along the ridge, taking a seat on a large outcropping, and just looking over the mountains is such an impressive experience that even for someone like me who isn’t much of a hiker understands what draws people to it.
I did a lot more than just hike and look at the sky while I was in the area. As has been the case in a lot of cities, I did a lot of eating at interesting places, and while I had some very good meals, not many of them felt particularly stand-out. With the exception of Konjo Ethiopian Food at the Edgewater Public Market, which was just flat-out incredible, Denver felt like less of a foodie city than many of the other places I’ve been this year. (Or, perhaps more likely, I just didn’t find the right places.)
It turns out that I have quite a few friends who live near Denver, and I convinced most of them to make the trip into town to grab a meal, catch up, and go do something interesting. The first stand-out place that I ended up visiting in Denver was the Denver Museum of Contemporary art which I would have liked just given their permanent collection, but they had an exhibition of work by Gala Porras-Kim.
To be clear, I had no idea who Porras-Kim was, or anything about their work, when I arrived at the museum. I quickly discovered that Porras-Kim is my kind of artist. Her work seems largely focused on the fuzzy boundaries between art objects and just plain objects.
Some of this work took the form of intentionally impermanent art objects. This included a block of salt-impregnated concrete, which degrades rapidly (for concrete), developing interesting crack patterns as it comes apart. There was also a block of soapstone that had a device to drip water onto the stone at the rate of evaporation, resulting in a slow, but visible, erosion of the stone that would eventually make it all the way through resulting in the piece no longer functioning. Finally, there was a piece of sealed fabric that had been soaked in agar and then seeded with mold. The mold grew in okay-looking patterns, but conceptually was super-cool to me because eventually the food would run out, and the fact that the fabric was sealed in an air-tight container meant that the mold would eventually starve out, destroying the form of the work.
She also had this cool (again, to me, at least) piece that involved collecting humidity from the air, dripping it through a graphite-impregnated piece of fabric attached to the ceiling down onto a large white piece of tile. On its own, I’ll admit that this is only somewhat interesting, even to me. I mean, the unique pattern that built up on the tile was neat, but what really made the piece sing for me was that it had been set up in other museums previously, and the tiles that had been produced in those exhibitions were included in this one, giving a real sense of unique place to each of them.
Not everything in the exhibition was to my taste. The letters to curators of collections discussing the non-art histories of things in those collections (such as human remains or religious paraphernalia) were conceptually interesting, but too constructed to be displayed in public (as evidenced by their consistent one-page lengths) for me to really be into them.
Overall, I suspect that my enjoyment of the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art says a ton more about me and what fascinates me regarding art than anything else. Which means I’m not sure I can make a general recommendation for any specific person to go visit, but if this sounded interesting to you, maybe it’d be your kind of thing, too.
The second interesting thing I went to was Meow Wolf’s Denver space “Convergence Station”. If you haven’t heard of Meow Wolf, don’t worry. Neither had I. They’re apparently an art collective that works on large-scale collective immersive experiences. Given the scale of Convergence Station, I can only imagine that they have some serious investment behind them, which I think is pretty rare for this kind of artistic work. I hope that everyone in that arrangement is happy, and that they get to keep making interesting stuff, because this was a pretty cool experience.
First of all, Convergence Station is a huge aesthetic experience. It’s a 90,000 square foot building that’s full of a pretty diverse series of spaces with varying aesthetics that they’ve managed to construct a relatively coherent narrative around to justify so many different ideas coexisting next to each other. I think they do a pretty good job of it, with a decent mix of environmental and direct storytelling. I won’t claim that I enjoyed all 90,000 square feet, but I found more stuff to be at least interesting to feel worth the time to see than not. Basically, I never really felt like I was having my time wasted with stuff that was just there to fill the space, which is impressive at this scale.
You can choose to just walk around and appreciate the space, which I’d estimate would take two to three hours if you want to see everything they’ve put together. Alternatively, you can get an RFID-equipped card that allows you to participate in a miniature story experience. We spent about four hours on this, and didn’t quite finish. I’d estimate that we needed another half hour or so to complete things. I think both are worth doing, but I do think that the narrative stuff genuinely enhanced my experience by providing more context for the stuff we were looking at.
There are also some interesting hints at additional complexity that could have been done with the cards, but none of it seems to have been explored too deeply. I imagine that it really wouldn’t have been experienced by enough people to be worth the time required to do more. The same problem we see in a lot of video game development: how much of your development time do you want to spend on things that will be seen by less than 10% of your customers?
The variety of aesthetics and types of work that so much space allows for (or even necessitates) kept me interested throughout by constantly changing the types of things experienced within Convergence Station. I think I’d say that there was something for everyone, but my observation was also that kids seemed to be especially excited to wander around the space. Lots of families were there, and the kids from ages 8 to 12 or so seemed to be really into it.
If you’re in Denver, and have a full afternoon you’re willing to spend on it, I think that Meow Wolf’s “Convergence Station” is worth your time. Doubly so if you’ve got kids who need to be entertained.
One thing that I haven’t talked about is the cycling infrastructure in Denver. It probably won’t come as much of a shock, given how outdoors-focused so much of the city’s culture has, that it’s quite good. Decent cycling lanes enhanced by a couple of cycling-only paths along the river made it easy to get around the city exclusively by bike, though I think if I was there for longer than a month, especially if I wanted to do much hiking, I’d need some way to travel further distances.
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