Category Archives: The West

Colorado, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase

A Harem

September 20, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Elk Rut Moon

Coming home from an appliance purchasing excursion we saw a herd of approximately 20 elk does with one large racked bull standing just off to their side. This was along Shadow Mountain Drive about a half a mile from our house. A couple of hundred feet away, looking at the herd from a slight rise, was another bull, also with a large rack. Probably the loser.

We stopped in Morrison, the town next to the Red Rocks Amphitheater, for dinner at the Cafe Prague. It was 70 degrees, sunny, but headed toward evening. A lone guitar player strummed and sang pop tunes. Orange roughie and Weiner schnitzel.

The move to Colorado has been a good one for us: smaller grounds, smaller house, living in the mountains close enough to the grandkids, out west. Every day has an element of vacation attached to it.

Yes, the medical issues seem to just keep on coming, but that would have happened in Minnesota, too. The health care here is excellent. We should know. We’ve met more healthcare professionals than anybody else since our move here.

Our third phase has become a Colorado event. Kate’s removed from her former work environment and I’m removed from the context of my Minnesota life. We’re developing our third phase life in a place that nurtures us both and where we can also be nurturers.

Colorado, Cooking, Health, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase, Travel, Weather +Climate

Went West as an Old Man

September 16, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Elk Rut Moon

Drove home Monday night, got in around 10 pm. Pretty whacked out from the drive and whatever is bugging my left elbow. The elbow made sleeping difficult to impossible. No sense paying for a bed I couldn’t sleep in.

On previous driving trips turning north marked the turn toward home. This time it was heading west. A different feeling. Turning north meant lakes, pine trees, wolves, a border with Canada, 40+ years of memories, cooler weather. Heading west conjures up wagon trains, First Nations people, the plains, aridity, mountains, elk, mule deer, moose, mountain lions and black bears. And less than a year’s worth of memories.

When I hit the Denver metro, an L.E.D. highway sign reminded truck drivers that they had to have chains with them from now until May 16th. The folks installing the generator wanted to get it done in early October because it’s possible to have thick snow cover soon after that.

Altitude makes a big difference. The aspen have begun to turn up here on Shadow, Black and Conifer mountains. The effect is subtle, but beautiful. Various stands of aspen, small compared to the lodgepole and ponderosa and Colorado blue spruce that dominate the mountains above 8,000 feet, turn gold, accenting the evergreens. It’s a sort of arboreal mimicking of the gold rush as the color of the precious metal shows up, fleetingly, on mountain sides.

While I was gone, Jon finished five more bookshelves and put doors on the lower unit I’ll use for coffee and tea among other things. That means today I’ll start installing shelving and books. This should be enough to get all the remaining books onto shelves and off the floor. Organizing them will be a task of the fall.

Kate goes in for thumb surgery on Friday. That means three months or so of one-handedness, a long time for a seamstress/quilter/cook. The gas stove gets hooked up tomorrow and I’ll head to the grocery store for the first time in quite a while on Saturday. I’ll be at home on the range. Looking forward to it. She’s lost a lot of weight so one of my tasks will be to help her gain weight. An ironic task if there ever was one.

In further organ recital news I have yet another visit to an audiologist tomorrow. We’ll see what the new technology can do for the deteriorating hearing in my right ear. Kate’s hopeful they can do something for my left (deaf) ear, but I’m doubtful.

Family, Mountains, Music, The West, Travel

They Say It’s Her Birthday

September 3, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Kate leaves tomorrow for Driggs, Idaho. Her sister, BJ, and her long time s.o., Schecky, have bought a house outside Driggs. BJ’s living there this summer while she plays violin at the Grand Tetons Classical Music Festival in Jackson Hole, a short drive away in Wyoming. She’s played this festival for several years. Schecky and BJ currently live in the Beacon Hotel on Broadway in NYC, not far from Juilliard and Lincoln Center where they met. They’ve lived in the Beacon their entire professional lives. Rent control.

Driggs, then, will be quite a downshift in terms of people and energy. Schecky is originally from the west and they’ve both done extensive backpacking. He plays the cello and has a solo career in Europe and Japan. In the U.S. he plays for the New York City Ballet and the New York Symphony.

BJ turns 60 on the 8th, so this is a birthday trip, but a quick one, since I’m leaving Wednesday for Indiana. With the dogs it’s difficult for Kate and me to travel together on these shorter journeys. Since we bought the Rav4, we’ve only had one car, so we rent from Enterprise and leave the Rav4 for whoever’s at home.

Kate’s taking her featherweight sewing machine and will help BJ with window treatments. She made her chili and cornbread for me yesterday, as well as a peach pie from Colorado Palisade peaches which are now in season.

Colorado, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West

Clash

August 29, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Part of the transition to fall here in the mountains is the elk rut. My dental hygienist told me about her first experience. She and her husband came home from work in late September. They heard a sound like two men clashing 2×4’s together, went to the window and saw two bull elks in the backyard, charging each other. This went on through supper, and as night fell, they both used night vision goggles that her mother had left behind after a visit. They went to bed to the sound of the elks battling for reproductive rights.

When she got up, the second elk was gone and the winner basked in the comfort of a large harem of does. Also, she said, the bugling sounds just like bugles. Looking forward to this fall.

Colorado, Family, Mountains, The West, US History

All Aboard!

August 20, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Labor Day Moon

Colorado’s mining culture, essential to the state’s history, has left imprint after imprint on mountainsides in the existence of mining towns like Idaho Springs, Leadville and Georgetown, in dirty yellow tailings runoff like flooded the Animas River a couple of weeks ago, and in now tourist oriented railroads that once carried miners, their supplies and their product, often gold and silver in the early days.

The Georgetown loop railroad, a 4.1 mile trip to a 2 mile away destination, exists because the grade between Georgetown and Silver Plume would be too steep, 7%, without it. Ruth and Gabe spent part of their 2012 ride cowering from the blasts of the train’s whistle, but not this year. This year it was “awesome.”

Kate and I are down to our last two days of grandparent immersion, the two week plunge that began last week Monday. Tomorrow I’m taking Ruth and Gabe hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls Trail, about a mile and a half from our house. Today though, as Ruth said, “Sadly, Grandpop will not be with us.” I have a two-hour marathonman dental session. What a joy.

(Gabe standing on the bridge over Clear Creek, which gives Clear Creek County its name.)

Colorado, Family, The West

The Wild West

August 12, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa Recovery Moon

The grandkids, Ruth and Gabe, are spending several overnights with us this week and next. Daughter-in-law Jen got a new job in the Aurora School District. Her move back to Aurora from the Denver School District means she had to start work earlier than planned, leaving Ruth and Gabe with two weeks until their school starts and no parents at home.

Yesterday Kate and Ruth made a messenger bag. Ruth designs things in her head, finds fabric she likes and grandma sews things together. They’re a fashion co-operative. Kate’s teaching her to use a sewing machine, too. Gabe and I talked up in the loft yesterday while I moved books.

Around 11 we all went to Chief Hosa Lodge, where Jon and Jen got married. Ruth and Gabe had been there once, some time ago. They climbed around, imagined Mom and Dad getting married, then we took off for Buffalo Bill Cody’s gravesite and museum.

An excellent small museum. Buffalo Bill wanted to be buried on Lookout Mountain “because you can see four states from here.” This did not make the folks in Cody, Wyoming happy. They offered $10,000 for his body.

A special exhibit focused on the international nature of his Wild West Show, emphasizing the range of nationalities and ethnicities working and touring together. It was an astonishing global cast. The museum’s exhibit says they worked together harmoniously.

Ruth and Gabe spent most of their time at the museum rearranging colored blocks into various bead work patterns.

After taking them back home, Kate and I watched a funnel cloud over Aurora. As long as we saw it, it stayed up in the sky, moving a white thread toward the ground twice. That was enough for me and I activated old Midwestern instincts and drove away from it at a right angle.

Great Wheel, The West

Lughnasa 2015

August 1, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Lughnasa The Blue Recovery Moon

The first of the three harvest seasons begins today. Lughnasa, the festival of first fruits, or Lammas, as the Catholic appropriation of this Celtic holy day came to be known. On Lammas peasants would bring loaves of bread made from the first of the corn (wheat) harvest and place them on the altar.

Here is an intriguing account of Lughnasa’s mythic origin from Kathleen Jenks’ website:

“Lugh dedicated this festival to his foster-mother, Tailtiu, the last queen of the Fir Bolg, who died from exhaustion after clearing a great forest so that the land could be cultivated. When the men of Ireland gathered at her death-bed, she told them to hold funeral games in her honor. As long as they were held, she prophesied Ireland would not be without song. Tailtiu’s name is from Old Celtic Talantiu, “The Great One of the Earth,” suggesting she may originally have been a personification of the land itself, like so many Irish goddesses. In fact, Lughnasadh has an older name, Brón Trogain, which refers to the painful labor of childbirth. For at this time of year, the earth gives birth to her first fruits so that her children might live….”

This year, my first Lughnasa in the west, I’m aware of the contrast between the humid and agriculturally focused Great Wheel holidays and the rocky, desert, arid region which I now call home. On Shadow Mountain we have no harvest, no fields retrieved from ancient forests. We have stony cliffs, lodgepole and ponderosa pine, aspen. At the base of Shadow Mountain in Shadow Creek Valley there is a stand of alfalfa that was cut last week and baled this week. But the rationale is more fire mitigation, reducing the fuel load, than an agricultural one, though I imagine some happy horses will get those bales.

This year Lughnasa still has that Midwest feel for me. The vegetable stands are full of produce, farmer’s markets tables groan with the increasing yield of gardens all round the region. In fact, the week-long market holiday that began at Lughnasa in the Celtic lands inspired our agriculturally focused county and state fairs. The Great Minnesota Get-Together starts later this month on August 27th. No better latter day Lughnasa festival.

Adapting the Great Wheel with a western inflection may take a couple of years. I have no clear idea, for example, how to talk about Lughnasa on Shadow Mountain. An intriguing piece of work that lies ahead.

Minnesota, Mountains, The West

The Mountain Difference

July 21, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Recovery Moon

The last few nights the clouds at sunset have been what seem to my eye a color of red peculiar to the west. They remind me of Riders of the Purple Sage or High Noon if it had been made in color. The sun goes down behind Black Mountain from our vantage point, so just beyond it the old west could still be banging saloon doors, its streets filled with dust as the cowboys ride in after payday.

I’m no geographical determinist, but to say that living on a mountain is different from living on the flat lands of the Midwest is only common sense. In Minnesota the variation in the landscape came from beautiful rivers, forests of deciduous trees sprinkled with conifers, lakes and ponds, wetlands and the changes going north wrought on all of these. It was not big sky country, but on the way home to Andover the dome of the sky was large and largely visible.

In the Front Range the variation in landscape follows an altitude gradient, different trees and different plants, wildflowers appear as we drive up from Denver the 3,600 feet that separates Shadow Mountain from the start of the high plains. The sky, once in the mountains, is visible in fragments determined by the height and shape of the mountains. The trees are mostly conifers and firs, green throughout the year, though the aspen grows well even at our 8,800 feet. Along the creeks willows and dogwood grow, deer and elk browse.

The changes are more subtle here and require some to time to absorb though the mountains, in their bulky looming make themselves known like the slow-moving, light blinking semi-trailers that crawl slowly up the highways into them. You have to move around them. In the fall there is no blaze of color, jack frost running from tree to tree calling out magenta, dark red, yellow, subtle browns. In the mountains there is green, the conifers and firs, and gold, the leaves of the aspen finished with their summer’s work.

Shadow Mountain, The West, Weather +Climate

Wildfire

June 25, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Healing Moon

External fire sprinklers are back on. Jacob Ware, deputy fire chief for the Elk Creek Fire District, came out in his red fire department pick up to talk fire mitigation. He was an interesting guy and a neighbor. He lives near Upper Maxwell Falls trailhead.

Jacob, a former hotshot who fought fires in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, says external fire sprinklers work. He described an Idaho fire where his crew took portable sprinklers out, built a fireline a half mile long, attached them to a water source, a portable generator and left them running. The fire stopped at the fireline. He’s also seen them work on individual houses. A cheap, do it yourself kit is what he recommends. He’s sending me particulars.

The thirty foot defensive zone around the house is most critical. Not only do you have to get rid of ladder fuels like high grass and shrubs, you also have to break up fuel continuity so an ember can’t spark a fire and be led to the house through mulch or dry, tall grass. After that, create a ten foot span at the crown between and among trees. That means cutting down weaker, stressed trees. This I can do. Aspens are good, they’re fire resistant, but the conifers are mostly pitch and burn like candles. We have mostly lodgepole pine in our yard.

Black Mountain Drive in front of our house will act as a fire break in case of a fire coming from the south and west. It also provides excellent access for fire departments. Combined with our long driveway, top rated roofing and, surprisingly to me, our siding, he said we were already in pretty good shape. Good to hear.

Family, Garden, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain, The West

Family Plots

June 19, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Healing Moon

A new seasonal event. Pine pollen gathers on the black surface of our driveway leaving yellow rings where water gathers in the driveway’s low spots. Sweep your hand across a piece of our Stickley furniture, palms and fingers come up yellow. We have only cross ventilation for cooling. Shake a branch of the ponderosa and a yellow cloud fills the air. All about sex of course. No wonder it’s beautiful.

Into Denver last night to check on Jon’s garden. Jon, Jen, Ruth and Gabe are in Chicago for father’s day, visiting Jen’s grandfather and grandmother, both great-grandparents. Her grandfather is 96 or so and his wife around the same age. Barb, Jen’s mom, flew out because her mom fell and broke a hip. She’s headed to a nursing home. error correction: Kate says Barb’s mother has a hair line fracture of the pelvis.

Jon grows quite a garden. He has grapes and currants, potatoes and herbs, tomatoes and carrots, peppers, strawberries and onions. Being a gardener of the arid west he has a drip irrigation system which delivers small bursts of water, around two minutes worth, to each plant via a plastic line connected to a small plastic stake with a watering head. Before they left he positioned garden furniture over his more delicate plants because hail can be a problem.

My job is to make sure the irrigation system works, then to make sure that none of the watering heads malfunction and finally to watch plants that might wilt in the heat. There are two main concerns, one is for the health of the plants, but the second is to make the sprinkler system doesn’t send them into another tier of water pricing by running too long. Colorado is not California, but water, especially municipal water, is still a precious resource and priced accordingly.