The drive into Rocky Mountain National Park should have taken less than an hour from Denver, but an accident on the road leading into the park held up traffic until well after sundown. The downside to this was having to choose a campsite in the dark, but the upside is always the sunrise, fixing myself a cup of coffee on the burner and finally waking my eyes up to the landscape. ...

The drive into Rocky Mountain National Park should have taken less than an hour from Denver, but an accident on the road leading into the park held up traffic until well after sundown. The downside to this was having to choose a campsite in the dark, but the upside is always the sunrise, fixing myself a cup of coffee on the burner and finally waking my eyes up to the landscape.

Another interesting upside to arriving at night occurred on my way out. I drove the same route out as I did in, but again, daytime allowed me to see what I missed by arriving in darkness: the Rocky Mountain National Park Visitor Center by Taliesin Associated Architects. I'd say the visitor center is unremarkable if considered within the larger context of Frank Lloyd Wright and the legacy of the Taliesin Fellowship, but the explanation for why it's here is rather intriguing.

Between 1956-1966, the National Park Service's Mission 66 program commissioned and constructed nearly 100 visitor center and park service buildings by modernist architects, an ambitious attempt by the park service to depart from building the architecture it had become notorious for -- these goofy Victorian lodges and log cabins, a weird rustic vernacular whose hokiness has been aptly dubbed "parkitecture." The belief was that they evoked a sense of non-interference, but over time what these buildings intended to signify was lost to pastiche, and that pastiche required too many craftsmen to reproduce.

In 1956, Anshen and Allen were commissioned to design the Dinosaur National Monument Visitor center in northwestern Colorado, around the same time they were wrapping up construction on the chapel in the rocks 400 miles south in Sedona. Now, it seems possible that a visit to the chapel by park service officials confirmed the merits of modernism, streamlined construction and giant windows, because subsequent Park Service commissions during this time went to budding modernists Romaldo Giurgola, Taliesin Fellowship and, most curiously, Richard Neutra, who designed the Petrified Forest Visitor Center in Arizona, and the Gettysburg National Monument Center in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Neutra's Gettysburg building, by the way, known as the Cyclorama, currently has a lawsuit -- Neutra's estate against the federal government -- standing between it and demolition.

Similarly, Rocky Mountain National Park is unremarkable if viewed within the larger context of western Colorado. The byway routes I took between Monte Vista and Denver suggest a landscape with treasures that trump the majesty of those set aside as federal land in Rocky Mountain National Park, but again, the fact that it exists as protected land under federal jurisdiction, as part of the "Backyard of America", keeps it intriguing.

Hello, this is Marlin. Episode nine begins back in Colorado, with a visit to now the second National Park on this journey. Mesa Verde, now Rocky Mountain, later the Badlands, Tetons, but never for longer than two or three days. Growing up in California I spent many a summer in Yosemite. From the valley floor to the top of half dome, Yosemite may be one of the few places on earth I believe I know intimately. But despite the cumulative number of weeks I've spent there over my lifetime, to say I've seen everything in that park is blasphemy.

It should be a crime to spend only one or two days in a national park, but for the duration of my road trip save southern Wisconsin, I break my own law, resigned to the idea that once I've had a chance to taste the unknowns, I'll have more reason to return. I think beneath an agenda piled up with architecture is a desire to see the Midwest from the ground, in as much of its entirety as I have time for, strictly for the sake of knowing what's worth seeing again. From Denver to Chicago, if I never return, I can dream about the first time I saw it, or watch my own videos with me turned down.

Watch your head,

Marlin