Category Archives: Shadow Mountain

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

A Harem

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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, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Weather +Climate
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Lughnasa                                                                  Elk Rut Moon

black mountain gold300Gold is in the hills and mountains. Black mountain has a streak of gold running to its peak, like punk rocker with a taste for precious metal. The temperature has dropped. It was 46 when I got up this morning and will get to 39 tonight. Fall has arrived. Our realtor said fall in the mountains is brief and doesn’t have the variation in color of a Minnesota, but “…has its own beauty.” She’s right.

(Black Mountain Gold. Taken from loft balcony.)

This is a minimalist color change. One tree, the aspen, goes from green, making it blend it with its conifer neighbors, to gold, making it complement them. The effect is stylish. You might expect those blocky black leather couches and chairs set out to view the green and gold mountainscapes.

 

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

Went West as an Old Man

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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.

 

Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

Rock and Chain

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Lughnasa                                                                            Labor Day Moon

While Kate’s at BJ’s place near Tetonia, Idaho, I’ve been working my way through a list of things to get done: installing uninterruptible power supplies to smooth out our occasional micro-outages, mowing the fuel in the front, upgrading the desktop and the laptop to windows 10 and trying to make work the bright idea I had for stabilizing our mailbox.

original plan400

This was the original plan. Chains and a rock. Problems were two. Making the chains stay in place proved harder than I imagined and the rock I chose was too damn heavy. So.

Plan #2

weight400

This is a version of the idea I had, though more poorly executed than I want. Still, it’s proof of concept. It has so much chain because I bought the chain lengths for the larger rock. Also, I wanted black chain, but the two sources I had close by, Big R and the Ace Hardware, only had silver.

It’s not terrible. We’ll see whether it can keep the mailbox at a stable height while retaining the virtue of its original design. It swings to the side if a snow plow hits it, rather than sheering off at the base.

weightfornow2400

 

Colorado, Great Work, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain

Dining Out

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Lughnasa                                                                     Labor Day Moon

Driving down to Big R for some chain I saw a small herd of elk does, maybe 10, in the meadow at the bottom of Shadow Mountain Drive. I watched one, then the others, come slowly out of the woods and begin eating the recently cut grass.

Then, coming home, there in our yard was this fellow and a companion. I pulled into the driveway, opened the garage door and they both kept eating. Just dining out in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood, theirs and ours.

muledeer600muledeer2600

 

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

Clash

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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.

 

Beyond the Boundaries, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Original Relation, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain, Third Phase
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Lughnasa                                                                 Labor Day Moon

 

Been trying to feel the mountain. Beneath our house Shadow Mountain extends at least 8,800 feet to sea level and just where a mountain begins and ends after sea level is a mystery to me. That’s a mile and 2/3rds of rock. A lot of rock.

14 years ago I came out to Colorado and camped above Georgetown in the National Forest. Right next to me was a sugarloaf mountain. As darkness fell, the mountain disappeared into the gloom. All that massiveness just disappeared. But I could feel it looming over me. Since then I’ve wondered what the mountain equivalent is to the Shedd Aquarium’s freshwater exhibition tag: The essence of a stream is to flow. What is the essence of a mountain?

Mass seems to be the answer. It is the distinctive feature that draws our eyes when we come in on Interstate 76 from the plains of Nebraska. Suddenly, the plains stop. The essence of the plains is flatness? No more flatness, verticality created by mass intervenes with sight lines. The volume of rock pressed upwards by colliding tectonic plates changes the topography.

So these last couple of mornings, before I got out of bed, I’ve been trying to feel the mass of Shadow Mountain. Trying to extend my Self into the mountain, to feel the mountain as it lies there. Not so successful so far. It occurred to me this morning that this is the opposite of conquering the mountain, of summiting, of climbing. This is diving, deepening, merging. Part of the difficulty is the claustrophobic feeling of having the mountain all round me even in my imagination.

This is not all. I noticed the other day in the east, just above the lodgepoles on our property, Orion. In Minnesota I was a late riser so I don’t know where Orion was at 5 am in August, but his presence here surprised me. I have, until now, counted Orion as a winter companion, first becoming visible in November. He may have risen much earlier even in Minnesota, but I missed him. Orion is a special friend, a constellation with which I’ve had a long relationship and one I view as a companion in the night.

Then, there are the bucks. Mule deer bucks. On Sunday as we drove to Evergreen there were four mule deer bucks with still velveted antlers quietly munching grass along the side of the road. They looked at us; we looked at them. The velvet has a prospective nature, auguring the rut when not yet released. On this morning they were friends, not competitors for breeding rights. And they were in harmony.

Then, yesterday, Kate said, “Look at that!” I turned and over my left shoulder looked down into the grassy valley that extends between Shadow Mountain and Conifer Mountain. In the field of mown alfalfa stood a huge bull elk. His rack was enormous and already cleared of its velvet. It arced out away from his head on both sides, tines extending its reach even further. This was a bull of legend. Seeing him took us into the wild, the world that goes on alongside us here on Shadow Mountain, the lives of our fellow inhabitants of this mountain.

All of this, the essence of the mountain, Orion rising, velveted mule deer, the bull elk, hiking on the Upper Maxwell Falls trail, all of this accelerates becoming native to this place. The Rockies. Our home.

Dogs, Family, Great Work, Jefferson County, Mountains, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

On the Path

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Lughnasa                                                               Labor Day Moon

gabeuppermaxwell300Two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday. Cleaning, followed by a crown prep and filling two cavities. When Kate came back from the dentist on Wednesday talking about the sticky fluoride treatment she’d received, it made me realize we’ve had no fluoride in our water for over 20 years. Living with our own well.

Took Gabe and Ruth to the Upper Maxwell Falls trail yesterday afternoon. We didn’t make it to the falls, instead wandering off on an alternate trail that climbed through jumbles of boulders and large, rocky cliffs. The regular trail is very popular in spite of its out of the way location. Over the summer there have been no fewer than six cars and often twenty parked at the trailhead.

We examined plants. Ruth found a snake (she wants one for a pet.), but it slithered away Upper Maxwell Falls Trail1350beneath the rocks. We climbed on the rocks and looked out. Nature provides something new, something noteworthy every foot or so. It was a slow hike. Here were lichen, familiar forms from Minnesota. There was a very late blooming Indian Paint Brush, its fiery bloom resting on the ground. The trees, some of them, were huge, trunks so big that Gabe, Ruth and I couldn’t get our arms around them holding hands.

Maxwell Creek exerted the magnetic attraction that water has for humans. We went down twice to be closer to it, the first time we crossed over to the alternative trail that we followed. The second time we crossed back to the Falls trail. Ruth talked about some camp counselors who followed a mountain stream to its source, an artesian spring, drinking from it, since “water is never fresher.”

Being in the Arapaho National Forest has its own version of mindfulness, one in which attention leaves the world of the day-to-day and focuses on an interesting rock, a blooming flower, the sound of water rushing over rocks, the view from a boulder. The eye scans for what is new or unfamiliar, being delighted constantly by a patch of cowslip, a bit of lichen on a lodgepole pine, a small squirrel playing peek-a-book around a thin aspen trunk.

Ruth and I are going back this morning, taking Kepler along in his harness.

Family, Jefferson County, Mountains, Our Land and Home, Shadow Mountain

A Green Rocky Mountain August

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Lughnasa                                                                  Labor Day Moon

Rain continues to come to the mountains. When Kate and I went out early this morning to Evergreen for our business meeting, there was dew on the grass, tips of the spruce needles and faint wisps of vapor rising from the valley floor. The intensity of green reminded both of us of the Midwest, of northern Minnesota. Usually, Shadow Mountain and its neighbors would be taken over by browns and dull greens. Not this year.

Our lives continue, with each small journey through the mountains, to become more and more embedded here, memories filling us up with Colorado. Not in place of Minnesota, no, but adding to those memories. And calling these new ones memories of home.

We visited IKEA and ordered the last of the bookshelves, 5 more. Cybergremlins have attacked our credit card online, not hackers, but ones making it difficult in certain instances to get websites to accept our valid account. As a result, we had to get in the car, drive down the mountain, go south on Hwy 470 along the Front Range, get off at Yosemite Street and proceed to the large blue monument to Swedish efficiency on IKEA way in Centennial. There, we made the exact same order I had to tried to make online, used the same credit card and had a successful experience.

The whole trip reminded us of the real benefits of buying online. The physical moving is left up to the product, not the purchaser. Of course, while wandering the intentionally maze-like corridors of the IKEA store, we did find that wonderful children’s storage and table combination and a probable small table for our breakfast area. That wouldn’t have happened online. On balance I would rather have stayed home and discovered both another way.