Category Archives: Mountains

Still Moving In

June 17, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Healing) Moon

Wow. What a difference having some cash makes. Generator work scheduled. Plumber, electrician co-ordinated for an early July installation and automatic transfer switch ordered. Housecleaner hired. Ikea bookshelves and wire racks for banker’s boxes delivered. Kate’s local quilter’s guild had its annual potluck. Yesterday was busy.

When we had our business meeting last week, it felt very good to see our emergency fund back up close to its longstanding amount. And, we have money to do other things like the generator, get our house cleaned by a pro, install built in bookshelves. We’ll also do some work in the kitchen and in the bathrooms.

However, just to keep things in perspective, Kate’s potluck last night was in a mountain home on or near a summit. It had a view of Pike’s Peak and surrounding mountains. “A multi-million dollar home.” By comparison we live down in the holler.

Family, GeekWorld, Mountains, Park County, The West, US History

Summertime

June 14, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Summer. A time long ago sealed in our collective memories as special. School ends and a long, delicious emptiness opens up, one filled with spontaneous play, vacations, reading in cool corners of a yard or home. Granddaughter Ruth is here for an overnight after she and Grandma spent the afternoon at the Maker Faire held at the Denver Museum of Science. She built a tool box out of sheet metal, a catapult out of sticks and rubber bands, a musical robot, and a cardboard skyscraper among other things. Just right for summer.

Summer is also the time for family reunions and I’m missing both the Ellis reunion held in Texas and the Keaton reunion held this year at the family farm just outside Morristown, Indiana. The Keatons were my primary extended family since we lived in Indiana, not Oklahoma where most of my Ellis relatives reside. I was born in Oklahoma though Mom, Dad and I moved to Indiana when I was not quite 2 years old.

My sister, who is attending the Keaton reunion this year, sent this photograph of my grandfather, Charlie Keaton (after whom I’m named) and grandma Mabel in the hat, the couple on the left. My sister commented on grandma’s hat and the fact that I look like grandpa. Guess I do.

Summer is also a time, for me, when U.S. history seems to dominate my interests. This year, once I get past the interesting literature on my prostate, I’m going to focus on reading about the West and mountains. Before July 8th, my surgery date, I also plan to do some exploring of Park County, southwest on Highway 285.

My hope for you is that you have a summer filled with ice cream, fireworks, family and travel.

Mountains, Our Land and Home

A Full Closing Moon

June 13, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Colorado, Family, Minnesota, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, The West, Third Phase

I’m An Old CowHand From the Rio Grand

June 2, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Three things of significance today. Picked up Mary for her first visit to Black Mountain Drive. I’m wired up with leads and a belt holster, ekgs available at the push of a button. This is for thirty days or until I have 3 episodes or events.

And. The Andover house closed, almost all of the money is in our bank account. We are no longer cash poor and paying two mortgages. Yippee, Yi, Ya as we say out here in the West. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, but we’ve looked up our bank balance and it’s pretty damned healthy. Great to have that uncertainty behind us.

Now the entire circus tent has been struck, all three rings, loaded on the train and the train’s left town, heading west. Our last physical and fiscal ties to Minnesota ended today around 3pm. The friendships, the cultural and political ties, those will remain.

But today we are wholly here from a business perspective. Black Mountain Drive already feels like home, as does the Front Range. How long it takes for our souls to take root in the mountains is an unknown, but a pleasant one, a process of taking the mid out of the midwesterner. It’s already begun. Gotta go now and hitch my hoss to a post.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate

For Millions of Years

May 29, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

A mile or so from our driveway is the trailhead for Upper Maxwell Falls trail. I went once in the winter and didn’t take my yak-traks with me. It was too icy to navigate the altitude gain.

Today, as the gloom began to settle in late afternoon, and as my own mood began to mimic the gray overhead, I set out for Maxwell Falls.

The trail is not long, about a mile and a third round trip, but it does climb, then decline through ponderosa forest. Piles of large boulders, weathered and jumbled together, cling to the side of Shadow Mountain above and the trail, while Maxwell Creek flows with equal parts power and grace, going white over rocks in its way, curling around them, too, in gentle embrace.

The falls themselves are modest in height, but there are several, one after another, giving more speed to the already rapid water. This is the way it’s been here for millions of years after the snow melt and when rains come. The water starts up high and finds these channels that allow it to collect and be the chisel. Later, it will grow calm after having taken a fast ride, perhaps pooling behind a beaver dam or a spillway or flowing into a lake or pond.

It is a privilege to live so close to this magic. It dispelled the gathering gloom in my Self, allowed me entrance to the Otherworld, the place where humans are still one among many and not more important than any other.

Colorado, Mountains, Weather +Climate

Monsoon Season

Aside May 29, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Clear, bright mornings with afternoon, early evening rain or thunderstorms.That’s been the pattern the last few days. A photographer I met at the Shadow Mountain Artist’s co-op in Evergreen said May was usually Monsoon season. Seems like a tropical pattern to me, but I like it whatever it is.

Right now the sun lights up a cloudy, blue sky, making the greens of the well watered ponderosas and aspens vibrant. Weather5280 says changing weather in the Pacific, especially a strengthening true El Nino, may keep us cool and wetter through the rest of the year. But, it also says, drought and dry will return, possibly in 2016.

If we stay cooler and wetter this year that should give us an opportunity to get our fire mitigation projects completed with less exposure to wildfire.

Feelings, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Lucky Guy

May 27, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

A beautiful day in the neighborhood. Clear blue skies, fluffy clouds over Black Mountain, the air cleared of dust by last night’s rain. Driving to Evergreen on Interstate 70 yesterday afternoon, there were cars pulled alongside the road taking photographs of the snow-capped mountains to the west and the buffalo herd to the north. On an Interstate. Tourist season must be getting underway.

And I was driving home, turning into the Front Range mountains that surround Evergreen. On a nearby one, Shadow Mountain, is our house. It’s a feeling I have often, feeling lucky to drive these mountain roads to get home.

Eating raw fish is an important part of my occasional diet and Sushi Win in Evergreen got good reviews. It was off Co. 74 and on my way, so I stopped there. The view from the window. Well.

Colorado, Mountains, Plants, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Colorado Natives

May 21, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Closing Moon

Colorado Native Plants. The books are out and water stained: Colorado Flora, Colorado Noxious Weeds, Native Plants of Mt. Falcon. The also water stained plant list for Mt. Falcon has check marks for the plants I need to know. Went through about half of them yesterday, the other half today.

In studying the very specific nomenclature for plant identification, I got a new appreciation for medical jargon. In writing and communication with other doctors and nurses it is necessary to name the various parts of the anatomy with specificity. Otherwise, the wrong limb gets cut-off or the wrong organ removed.

It is a comfortable feeling to take out books, arrange them in a particular way so they can be referenced easily, to create a plan for learning what I need to know and then execute it. This is an ordered world, one I know well. A safe, predictable world. Today, I need that.

This paintbrush is a beautiful flowering plant, one you may already know, Castilleja integra, the Foothills Paintbrush. It’s in bloom right now, creating impressionist dashes of color as it flowers in otherwise green fields of cheatgrass and yucca.

Permit one thought on mortality. These plants in the foothills of the Rockies have long evolutionary histories, often involving millions of years and thousands of miles, some crossing continents as continental drift shaped and reshaped earth’s land masses. They grown on soil covering rock created in the Archean eon, preceded only by the Hadean. Plants, animals and one-celled creatures have been living and dying on the thin, fertile layer below them for millions of years.

Our own lives are part of that same living and dying, drawing our sustenance from the same thin layer. Yes, each individual life is unique and precious, but each individual life is also ordinary and unremarkable, life and death being not rare, but mundane.

Colorado, Health, Mountains

The Unrhythm Method

May 18, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane New (Closing) Moon

Hard to get into a rhythm. All this health stuff. Narrows my world, makes it seem focused on what’s wrong, not what’s right. And a lot is right.

Take the mountains. Everchanging. You’d think they’d stay the same, these massive intrusions from beneath the earth’s crust. So solid. So there. But it’s not so. This month the precipitation has put fog all around us, Black Mountains lies obscured not far away. The Rockies look more like the Smokies.

As I have driven them this month, the Blue Ridge Parkway, civil war battles, the early days of the American revolution have stirred in my memory. But this is not the east. This is the arid west and its imprints are from the first nations, from the Spanish and the Mexicans. Here the early years of human habitation stretch back over 11,000 years. Here the lands had no fixed borders, but were fluid, changing as first nations grew and waned, moved.

Here the incursions came not from the east across the broad Atlantic, but from the south, up from Mexico. European contact here brought bull-fights and Spain, a colonial power, yes, but one inflected by the Mediterranean and the Romans rather than the Atlantic and the Celts, the Britons.

This is what I want to engage. But to do it, I have also have to deal with my health. The third phase.

Health, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Plants

Hiking Boots. Today.

May 15, 2015 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Beltane Moon

Day after. Feel pretty good. Some discomfort yesterday, not much this morning.

Another native plant class today, one tomorrow in Sterling, about 2.5 hours east on Hwy 76.

After, I’m headed into the Denver REI, the flagship store, for a pair of hiking boots. Gonna check out women’s. Yes, my feet are so small that sometimes I can only find what I want in women’s shoes. No high heels, or stupid shoes as Kate calls them. Just flats with goretex and high tops. Hat, my western hat, soon, too.

O2 saturation up. Looking reasonable at 93% up here. 96% in Lonetree yesterday. Guess that trazadone was the culprit. Whew.

The water torture of closing details continues. This needs to be signed. This needs to get fixed. Yes, you can sign far away. We’ll mail you the documents. Rented Kate’s car on Thursday. We only have one car so we rent cars for trips like this. Saves putting miles on the truck.