“The fine line ...

… between nature’s beauty and her indifference.”

It’s a phrase I read in a Time magazine description of movies featuring a single protagonist caught on this line (“Cast Away,” “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours,” “Gravity”). It’s a perfect description of our ambivalent feelings about nature: our delight in her beauty and diversity and our ultimate powerlessness over the magnificent forces that we still can’t control. (Although we do influence them … more on that in another blog, coming soon). Being a weather freak, I think about this a lot.

It’s been an amazing year in Colorado weather-wise. Of course, folks in Colorado (and in New England and Michigan and San Francisco … heck, folks everywhere) are fond of saying of the local weather, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes. It will change.” Still, it’s true that Colorado has all the makings of dramatically erratic weather. The high altitude and low humidity combine with that amazing wall of mountains bisecting the state from north to south to stir up some complex and only vaguely predictable weather patterns. But this year has been one for even Colorado’s record books. Over and over.

Only slightly belaboring the point, it went like this. A very dry winter that left the snow pack far below average was followed by record-breaking precipitation in April and May, raising the snow pack in the mountains to normal levels in a few weeks and bringing much-needed rain to lower elevations. Then the rains ended, and a parching drought set in that lasted all summer. With it came record-breaking fires, fires that reached new levels of intensity, speed of growth, and degree of devastation to wildlands and property. The early rains added long grasses to the fuel—but there was already plenty of fodder for the fires. (More on that in another blog, coming soon.) Then this summer of virtually zero rain slid toward fall, culminating in record high temperatures in early September. Ironically, news coverage of that record heat wave predicted a “welcome” cool-down and increased chance of rain a couple of days later. The cooler weather was welcome, but not (for a change in Colorado) the rain. In just 10 days of record-breaking rain, the early-summer fires receded from the weather news to be replaced by the late summer floods. The “thousand-year rain,” the “hundred-year flood,” the signs of which were still all-too evident on walk near my home earlier this week.

             

Then, remarkably, nature’s indifference gave way to her beauty, and we’re suddenly gifted with this amazing variegated fall with its spectacular morning skies—a chance for some pictures, which have been missing from my recent, more text-dense blogs. Not that I’m finished talking, of course. But before I start, an interlude:

Fabulous fall …

  

... and its spectacular morning skies

  

 

A fine line, indeed.