I also traveled that route (the Desert Wind), the Pioneer (now also terminated), the San Francisco Zephyr (now called the California Zephyr, but back then it ran through Wyoming instead of Colorado) and just about every other Amtrack route in the Western U.S. I bought a pass my first summer at college and exploited every loophole that pass had regarding routing; for a couple of hundred dollars, I got to almost every major Western U.S. city. You can't do that anymore; the next Amtrak tarriff changed the wording to close the loopholes I exploited.