Samain                                                                               Moving Moon

The new header photograph is the King Sooper parking lot in Aspen Park, about four miles away from our house on Black Mountain Drive. This King Sooper has a Lund’s type supermarket feel to it though it’s much larger than any of the Lund’s stores I’ve shopped.

We’re moving from an Oak Savannah eco-system, one growing on the Great Anoka Sandplain, the remnant of a glacial river Warren, which cut the bed for the Mississippi, to a montane eco-system, growing on pulverized rock and dominated by lodgepole pine, moss and small alpine plants.

Here the links run east to the Big Woods, north to the Boreal Forest and west to the Great Plains. In the Rockies the eco-systems link north and south along this mountain range, a tall, stone spine which extends far into Canada.

Our lot in Andover is about 900 feet above sea level and the highest point in our immediate area. Black Mountain Drive is at 8,800 feet on Shadow Mountain, approximately 9,200 feet. So the air will be considerably thinner and the nights cooler year round.

The West is arid, being west of the line which separates the humid east, 20+ inches of rain a year, from the arid West, less than 20 inches of rain per year. That means water will be a dominant environmental and political issue in Colorado.

We’ll be in a higher, dryer and far less biologically diverse eco-system. A distinct change.