COLORADO SCENERY

I have been buried by work for about the last month.  Not only did the semester start three weeks ago, but I had a HUMONGOUS deadline with the publishing company I work for set for September 9th.  I have been sitting at this desk in front of this computer with my eyes glazed over for far too many hours.  The good news is that Friday afternoon I completed the deadline three days ahead of schedule!

I finally have a few minutes to work on a blog, something I haven't done since August 8th.  That may be the longest I've gone without blogging since I started up this little venture.  We do currently have house guests, but they are self-sufficient and I've slipped away for a few minutes to finish this off.

In early August, Bob and Andrew and I took a five-day trip to Colorado just before school started for me.  This is a trip Bob and Sam and Andrew usually take together, but since Sam couldn't go this year, I was the lucky sub.

Bob's goal on these trips is always to climb as many Fourteeners, or mountains in excess of 14,000 feet, as possible.  There are 68 in the United States, and he has now climbed 30. On this trip, he climbed Quandary Peak, La Plata, and Yale.  (He would have climbed Princeton as well had I not been along, but that's a story for another day.) Because on Bob's blog he writes extensively about his experience on each mountain, I decided my posts about our trip would focus mainly on scenery and people, so this post and the following one will be picture-heavy and text-light.  

Andrew is less interested in bagging a summit than he is in bagging some wild mushrooms, so generally he and I would follow Bob up to tree line (about 12,000 feet in elevation), and then make our way slowly back down the mountain, looking for highly desirable King Boletes, truly the king of wild mushrooms. I'll cover our mushroom harvests in the next post.  

And so, without further ado . . . 

Our first day was rather cold and punctuated by periods of rain and hail.

A. Cannon, Mushroom Hunter

Andrew called this "A James Christensen Forest"

Deer grazing in a churchyard in the middle of Buena Vista in the evening

Deer at the side of the road near a trailhead

If you haven't heard Bob's poem about beaver dams, you need to make sure and have him recite it for you.

"In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

Charles Lindbergh