Summer with the Summer Moon Above

Saturday gratefuls: Tom. Aspen Perks. Chicken fried steak and eggs. Coffee. Good conversation. Shaggy Sheep. Kenosha Pass. South Park. No snow plowing from 7pm to 5am.  Canon City. Guffey. Fairplay. Bailey. Royal Gorge Railroad. The Arkansas River. Rafters. The Gorge. Volcanic remnants. Walls of Rock. The Bear. The Bear Butt. Rescue on the Water. Pronghorn Antelope. Big Horn Sheep. A hot blue Sky day.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Two exhausted men hugging a utility pole

One brief shining: Tom and I looked out the window of our dining car having become used to the sight of rafters six to a boat with one staff person at the rear passing down the muddy, raging Arkansas their blue or red rubber rafts following the currents around white Water covered Boulders and saw…people in the yellow helmets and life vests of the raft passengers desperately trying to stay afloat as the River swept them downstream!

A day of mystery. The first had come on a road far into our trip which had signs reading: No Snow plowing from 7pm to 5am. What? A second mystery was the biological position of the Pronghorn Antelope. Was it a Camelid? A Goat? A Cervid? The third and most disconcerting was the blue raft empty of passengers, its lone staff person guiding it by himself.

Let’s back up. Around 7 am Tom and I took off for Canon City and the Royal Gorge Railroad. We had tickets for a luxury meal on the 12:30 train. We stopped at the Shaggy Sheep near Guanella Pass for breakfast, run by a chef who got tired of the Manhattan rat race. Good food. About 20 minutes west of Bailey.

When I started to write that last paragraph, I realized something interesting. We passed through only two towns on our way to Canon City: Bailey and Fairplay. That’s along a two and a half hour drive South and a bit West. Two towns. South Park through which most of our route ran is an example of the High Plains, flat expanses at 9,000 feet. Windy and cold in the Winter and hot in the Summer. Not many folks live on it. Two towns.

You arrive at South Park after using the Kenosha Pass on Hwy 285, an 11,000 foot spot where the Mountain Peaks level out for a bit allowing a road to be run over them. After you crest the pass, South Park spreads out below looking like Midwestern farming country. Cattle grazing. Bales of hay in the fields. Farm equipment at the homesteads. Yet ringed by Mountains, snow capped this June, and elevated far above the farms of Indiana, Iowa, and Illinois.

We reached that first mystery after we passed out of Park County, which encompasses most of South Park. No Snow plowing from 7pm to 5am. I couldn’t imagine what the sign meant and why you would need one? Are there rogue snowplowers who might insist on plowing this road anyhow? Didn’t seem likely. Solved this mystery once back on my home computer. It’s a Colorado Department of Transportation regulation for the whole state that disallows Snow plowing on stretches of highway that receive fewer than 1,000 trips over night. Staff and budget shortages due to Covid.

The second mystery came as we passed the occasional Pronghorn standing in a field. I’d heard from a hunter that they were Goats. That didn’t seem right. Most likely seemed a family relation to the Cervids: Moose, Elk, Deer. Somewhere I thought I’d read they were related to Camels. None of the above as it turns out. Here’s a quick explanation from Wikipedia:

“As a member of the superfamily Giraffoidea, the pronghorn’s closest living relatives are the giraffe and okapi.^[14] The Giraffoidea are in turn members of the infraorder Pecora, making pronghorns more distant relatives of the Cervidae (deer) and Bovidae (cattle, goats, sheep, antelopes, and gazelles), among others.” Wiki

The same article points out that they are the only surviving member of their family, Antilocapra americana. They’re the fastest land animal in North America capable of up to 55 mph.

The third mystery though remains unresolved. We had finished our Osso Buco and Buffalo Shortribs as the Royal Gorge Railroad train on which we rode passed out of the Gorge and had begun to head back. We looked out the window to the Arkansas River flowing fast beside the train as it had been since we left Canon City. We saw more of the red and blue rubber rafts representing different float companies setting out on their journey down the surging River. What fun!

At some point we stopped to pick up a fatigued kayaker. We both thought, likely heart attack. Paramedics on the train tended to him on the observation car attached at what was now the front of the train and also attached to the car in which Tom and I rode. That was interesting. Nice that the train was there and able to help.

Further along, again looking out the window. Oh. My. God. Look. That’s somebody in the water! Yellow helmet and safety vest suggested a passenger from one of the rafts. Then Tom said. There’s another one! Over there. About to hit the wall. He turned a bit further to look and noticed a blue rubber raft empty of passengers, only the staff person with the rudder oar still sitting in it. The rafts all had six passengers when they set out from the landing where the train had switched directions only ten or fifteen minutes ago. We’d seen two men in the water. Where were the other four?

The train moved on and we only saw the two. Tom thought he saw one of them reach a raft and get pulled aboard. We passed two more of the blue rubber rafts bobbing at the rocky wall to the River a bit further but the train kept moving. Then it slowed. And backed up.

I asked a Native American train staff if he knew whether they’d picked up the people in the water. We’re not allowed to comment on it. Oh.

The train moved back to the site where the two rafts had stopped along the wall of the Gorge. At a utility pole there two of the men we’d seen in the water hugged the pole looking exhausted and bewildered, surrounded by others. A third man struggled up the embankment with no help from the rafting staff, also plainly one who had been in the water.

What happened to the other three passengers remains unknown to me though I’ve searched several times. A man died on the same stretch of water only four days ago. Thrown from the raft. The 14th water related death in Colorado this year.

When the train arrived back in Canon City, there were EMT’s and an ambulance and a fire truck there to receive the rafters. They were placed on gurneys and then disappeared from sight.

What of the other three? Unknown. Tom suggested that maybe they were younger and stronger swimmers who reached the shore on their own. The three we saw all appeared to be middle aged men. May it be as Tom suggests.