Category Archives: Travel

Colorado, Family, Park County, Travel

The Rockies, near home

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Imbolc                                                                 Imbolc Moon

Looking east from the summit of Kenosha Pass
Looking east from the summit of Kenosha Pass

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Through the Platte Canyon, over Kenosha Pass, onto the highplains of South Park, past Fairplay, into the Collegiate Range and finally to the Liar’s Lodge in Buena Vista on the Arkansas River, not far from Leadville. Picked up Kate and Valerie, two Bernina’s, lots of cloth, a suitcase, cutting boards and other accessories of the sewing life. Also petted Sadie, the dog who greets all who come to Liar’s Lodge, then reversed course through a light snow that made the drive out of Buena Vista picturesque.

About ten miles out of Buena Vista, on a hill, with no traffic in either direction, a man in a black SUV pulled onto the highway into my lane and I had to swerve to miss him. Sent my heart rate up. This is steep, curvy country with so many possible sources of accidents, but this one? Would have been stupid, stupid, stupid. Other than that the drive was uneventful.

Here are a few photographs. I stopped along the way, taking time to look, to see. So much more to explore here in Colorado. And all this is within an hour and a half of home.

The Lazy Bull, South Park
The Lazy Bull, South Park
Tarryall Ranch, now public land. Good fishing.
Tarryall Ranch, now public land. Good fishing.
Tarryall
Tarryall

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Family, Travel
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Imbolc                                                                            Imbolc Moon

Buena_Vista_4676Off to Buena Vista in about an hour. To the Liar’s Lodge. Kate will be there until Monday noon, sewing. A quilting retreat. I’m taking her out and picking her up.

Once we get past Fairplay, about 45 minutes or so west of here on Hwy. 285 and the county seat of Park County, we’ll be in new territory for us. I’m excited to see more of South Park, the large high prairie that begins at the Kenosha Pass. Total trip is around 1 hour and 45 minutes according to Google.

 

Science, Travel, World History

In the Veldt

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Imbolc                                                                      Imbolc Moon

bush, South Africa
bush, South Africa

Brief continuation of the post below. Thinking about destinations and journeys some more. A thought triggered by a BF Skinner example of creativity, “A chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs.” Perhaps destinations are our way of creating journeys. Perhaps destinations exist to insure that we travel, get out of our comfort zones and investigate ourselves on the road.

I don’t know whether it’s still au courant in physical anthropology but there was a theory that travel in the African bush was responsible for our increase in brain size as a species. When we crossed large open spaces while hunting and gathering, we were vulnerable, a predatory species without the usual predatory equipment of fangs, claws, rippling muscles.

The theory was that to stay alive we had to be very good at noticing movement, noticing danger and that that increased work for the brain. The humans or pre-humans who were best at that task survived and presumably selected for large brains. As a result, some have speculated that our brain works best when we’re in motion.

Just thinking out loud here.

Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Travel

Sky. Slope. Rock. Streams. Evergreens. Being in the journey.

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Imbolc                                                                               Imbolc Moon

Wanted to mention two internal conversations. Both have occurred while in transit through the mountains.

20150512_141606The first, perhaps the simpler, has been about how to describe our environment in the most economical way possible. I know, I didn’t say it was deep, just persistent. I’ve come to these nouns: sky, evergreens, slope, rock, streams. Yes, it leaves out houses and wildlife, roads and cars. But. The context for life up here can be described using those five words.

The second has been about destinations and journeys. Whenever I leave home, on foot (rare) or in the Rav4, I have a destination in mind. I’m leaving Black Mountain Drive and going to Beth Evergreen or to Jon’s house or to King Sooper or to Dazzle. Something is attractive enough or is needed enough to make me get up, go outside, start the car and go.

Because of these motivations, whatever they are, the journey tends to focus itself on the destination. Not surprising, eh? What do I need to get at the store? Did I remember everything? My wallet. Coffee. Keys. Phone. The destination can infect the entire journey, put us in blinders so that we’re like horses headed to the barn for hay.

Yet. The journey can occupy more time than we spend at our destination. But we view it as incidental and the arrival at the destination the real act. This is not about whether the destination is more important than the journey, the two require each other, rather it’s about intention and attention.

14608842_1689729854679011_2228956598700838196_oIf the present is all we ever have, and it is, then the journeys we take, no matter how mundane, are also the present at the time we are on them. There is no future. We only imagine it. There is no past, it is a memory. There is only this moment, keys clacking, letters and words appearing on the screen, a car going by, Black Mountain and blue sky out the window.

So. What? What I’m trying to do is appreciate the journey for what it is, not as wasted time between this destination and that one, but as an experience sui generis. Our whole life is a journey between emergence and disappearance, how sad it would be if we missed our life along the way.

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Original Relation, Travel

Big Guys Do Cry

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Winter                                                                  New Imbolc Moon

Being sick, even mildly sick as I’ve been for four or five days now, takes me into strange territory. Mortality flits across the mind. All the obituaries that include the phrase, “after a brief illness.” Labile. When I saw this video about Ronnie the Donkey, I cried. And, too, when I read about this special organization, Cayleb’s Senior Dog Rescue. Kate and I donated.

Donkey And His Mom Celebrate Their Emotional Journey    This donkey was so depressed after he lost his baby boy. But the woman who adopted him knew exactly what he was going through and figured out the sweetest way to make him feel at home. Today on Party Animals, Ronnie’s mom is throwing him a very emotional 5th rescue-versary party to celebrate their amazing journey 😍

Posted by Party Animals on Saturday, January 6, 2018

Got to wondering about being labile. Why is that part of illness?

I asked Kate. Less energy to maintain your defenses, she said, in essence.

Castle Dinas Bran, Llangollen, North Wales
Castle Dinas Bran, Llangollen, North Wales

Which raises a second question. Why the defenses? Why would I need to place a barrier between my feelings and my expression of them, especially feelings of tenderness? Is it too difficult for my sanity to rock my inner world? Somehow I don’t think so. It seems more likely that big boys don’t cry. As our president might say, Sad. Why not recognize when the heart softens, when it takes in a moment of love and responds? Why not just go ahead and cry? Tear up.

Maybe one of the functions of illness is to remind us of our heart truth. When the body feels threatened, insulted, perhaps the mind takes the opportunity to reexamine our spot in this world. Perhaps it allows the cultural constructions, the moats and castle walls we put up, to crumble a bit, so we can know they exist. We do tend to forget about those fortifications, the ones built by stereotype, by social convention.

dinas bran. I visited these ruins in 1995.
dinas bran. I visited these ruins in 1995.

We northern Europeans seem to have well-built walls. Perhaps that’s why we can be gulled too easily by ideologues who have burnished their fear of the other, who take their fear and embarrassment as cues for violence rather than compassion. It is a danger we could altogether eliminate, if we let the right feelings in.

As for me, I’m going to try. The moat drained, the walls down. Good. Let them stay that way.

Commentary on the news, Feelings, Memories, Travel

“You’re not supposed to do that.”

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Samain                                                                       Bare Aspen Moon

Assistants_and_George_Frederic_Watts_-_Hope_ 1886
Assistants and George Frederic Watts                         Hope  1886

 

Yesterday the bagel table, an informal shabbat service with, yes, bagels, focused on three stories in the Torah that dealt with difficult situations involving sexuality: the stories of Dinah, Tamar and Potiphar’s wife.

The conversation included several #metoo acknowledgments, including my own. I was ten or eleven and on the train to Dallas for a couple of weeks with my Uncle Charles. I regularly took the Greyhound to visit relatives in Oklahoma, but this was my first time on the train. There was a layover in St. Louis and I decided to get out and see the downtown.

It was a Sunday so the streets had almost no people on them. I had my brownie camera with me and went looking for someplace to take pictures. I did that, finished a roll and needed to change film. The air was pulsing with heat, so I went into the alcove of a closed store to be in the shade. I had the camera open when a man approached me.

Squatting down beside me, I was also in a squat, he reached between my legs and touched my testicles. I said, “You’re not supposed to do that.” got up and left. He did not resist my leaving and my memory is that he was gentle. Though it did ruin the moment, I recall feeling relieved that he didn’t use force. He did accept my no as a no.

It’s a little hard from the distance of 60 some years to recall how I felt, but I know that for me it was scary, but not scarring. I remember it, so it obviously had an impact, but I don’t remember it as different from any other sort of scary moment in my childhood. It was the only time I had that sort of experience and that may have weighed against any larger impact. If I’d had a string of them, as some girls and women do, I sense my reaction may have been stronger.

 

Mountains, News of the Strange, Science, Shadow Mountain, The West, Travel

Painted Ladies on Shadow Mountain

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Lughnasa                                                                     Harvest (new) Moon

Belle-dame_(Vanessa_cardui)_-_Echinacea_purpurea_-_Havré_(3)Under the category of awe. In passing I noted a reference to butterflies being around in some numbers. One commenter on pinecam.com referred to them as painted ladies migrating.

This might have passed in and out of my attention, but I noticed a butterfly on Black Mountain Drive. Curious, I walked up the driveway to the road.

Sure enough, spread out sort of like the cross country runners in Ruth’s meet last night, there were butterflies going toward Evergreen, all of the ones I saw using the open space created by the road as a flight corridor.

I watched for a bit and they kept coming, isolated individuals, groups of two or three, sometimes more, flapping their apparently fragile wings, moving, just in my observation, great distances for their body size.

In Europe they migrate from Africa to Britain, as far as 9,000 miles. In our case they’re headed for New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico, just like the snowbirds who leave temperate climes for those warmer stretches of mother earth during the winter.

That such tiny creatures can travel so far, flying the whole way, then turn around and do it again, made me pause for a moment of awe. In retrospect it would have been appropriate to have crowds along Black Mountain Drive, cheering, applauding, “you can do it!”, “all the way to Mexico.”, maybe little sugar stands set out.

Those were the painted ladies on Shadow Mountain.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Mountains, The West, Travel, US History, Weather +Climate

The High Road

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Lughnasa                                                                  Eclipse Moon

summit lake park, the highest city park in North America
summit lake park, the highest city park in North America

In fact, the highest paved road in North America. Which happens to be only 46 miles from our front door, the Mt. Evans Road. It’s a joint project of the Denver Parks System and the National Park Service with the NPS controlling admission to the road leading to the summit and DPS controlling access to three fee areas: Mt. Goliath (bristlecone pines at the krummholz level), Summit Lake, which is a clear mountain lake with a small glacier poised high above it on Mt. Evans, and the summit itself.

Last year Ruth and I drove up, but were too late to get any further than Summit Lake, the road continuing on past there closed for the season. This year, today, Ruth and I went again. This time we made it all the way to the top. But. The Mt. Evans Road closes every year the day after Labor Day and the summit had a huge number of people with the same idea we had. I knew it would be that way, but it was an incremental improvement over last year.

mt. goliath natural area
mt. goliath natural area

Next year, during the week, early in the morning in June, July or August. It opens on Memorial Day, if, that is, it has no snow.

The road itself, especially the segment after Summit Lake is narrow and, as the orange sign said, Damaged. That makes crawling up and down it with others entertaining. The downhill side of the road, which shifts as it snakes its way up and down the mountain, has no barrier and for much of the road virtually no shoulder.

Since Colorado has many bikers, both bicyclists and motorcyclists, sharing the road with a car in the other lane and a bicycle or two can be challenging. Not to mention the road damage which can include, and in fact often did today, chunks of road missing, eroded away. This phenomenon almost always presented itself on the downhill side of the road. So there’s that big SUV pushing its way up, you’re on the way down, a good long drop with plenty of over and over and over and over again potential if you make the wrong move, and a bicyclist or two, bless their VO2 maxed out hearts, struggling up or down. Yowza.

In visiting it next year I plan to visit it as a mountain deity, one which took my breath away today, even sitting in my internal combustion powered chair. Mt. Evans is our weather god, altering the flow and intensity of weather patterns as they come from the west and cross the continental divide not far away. The result, in our little Evansonian microclimate, is increased precipitation both winter and summer, but more in the winter. Remember that 200 inches plus we had the second winter we were here? Mt. Evans for the assist.

Mt Evans Summit
Mt Evans Summit

There was one mountain goat visible to me today. Improbably it was standing among a bunch of hikers above the Meyer-Womble Observatory, which, until an Indian Observatory opened in 2001 was the highest operating telescope in the world. Apparently the mountain goats lick the soil on the summit to obtain needed salts.

If you ever visit during the summer, let’s go. I’m always up for a visit to the mountain top.

Aging, Judaism, Mountains, The West, Third Phase, Travel

Off the Road

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Lughnasa                                                                          Eclipse Moon

20170821_103631_001This old body doesn’t bounce back like it used to. Driving 13 hours from Idaho to Conifer means a slow return to normal. It’s still underway today, Saturday, after our late Wednesday night arrival back home. Not at all unexpected. Still.

On Thursday we had to return the RV, pick up the dogs and chose to attend mussar, so Thursday during the day was not a time for recuperating. Yesterday was easier, some unpacking, our business meeting and going to the post office for held packages.

Today and tomorrow are slow, too, since the grandkids are with Jen for a hemophilia walk. I’m driving to Fairplay for a hike with Beth Evergreen to see an alpine bee research project on Pennsylvania Mountain. Tomorrow Kate and I will take a load of stuff in to Jon’s new house. He has the kids during the week for the first time this coming week, so he has to get ready for them. The 50/50 parenting arrangement takes effect now that he has a house. A big change for all involved, including us. He will move in over the next couple of months.

Gradually replenishing the battery. Realized just now that I’m like an older lithium-ion battery. I take longer to recharge and the charge doesn’t last as long.