Retirement in the Mix: Resisting "Gone": wildflowers

Showing posts with label wildflowers. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Yucca rising

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One of my favorite local walks is in an open meadow on a mesa nearby, with views of the front range and a wonderful feeling of openness. It's often windy, but I love that, too. Early summer walks bring a special treat—the opportunity to watch yucca emerge from their scraggly, pointy bases, stretch tall, looking for all the world like huge asparagus stalks, and then blossom into these lovely waxy flowers. The flowers seem so improbable—they look more tropical than high dessert, although the base seems cactus-like, with stiff sharp blade-like leaves.

So I thought I'd share some pictures of the emergence of this year's yucca crop. The sun wasn't helping me here. Each day I tried this, it was overcast and gray, not like Colorado's storied blue sky and bright sun, which have been uncharacteristically rare this year. But not being at all the patient photographer who waits for hours or days for the perfect light, I just snapped away, eager to tell the yucca's tale.

So here it is, from stubby stalk to waxy bloom (all in meager sunlight).

See why I like this walk?

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Sunday, May 24, 2015

Spring-ish

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For those of you who don’t live in Colorado, spring may have arrived as scheduled. But here, we’ve been sloshing through weather so un-Colorado-like that folks are struggling for analogies. It’s like living in Oregon. Or Washington. Or Michigan. Or a rain forest (although without the heat). A meteorologist on NPR said something about 5 weeks straight of rain. That’s 5 weeks of one storm after another, with only the briefest of breaks, like half a day a few times. It's mostly light rain, to be sure. Not the deluges that inundated us September before last. But enough to make us wonder whether we'll reach Colorado's legendary 300 annual days of sunshine this year.

For folks (like me) who really want to get outside—make that need to get outside—and for those who live in Colorado precisely because it’s sunny and dry, this sort of weather is miserable. But it has its good sides. For one thing, we need the moisture—a common refrain whenever it rains (or even snows) in Colorado. Some areas in the northeastern part of the state have had a year's worth of moisture in the past 5 weeks. And for farmers, this much moisture is likely welcome indeed—though maybe not for those whose fields are too wet to plant. And then there’s the gift of the rain-induced impetus to get to the gym for a long-postponed exploration of aerobics classes—necessary after a winter of sloth-hood recovering from last fall’s injuries. But the best payoff of all came yesterday when, for a brief period—maybe half an hour—the sun was out at the same time that I actually had free time to take an outdoor walk, a very rare experience of late.

It was delightful. For one thing, nature has proceeded apace with flowers galore—and an occasional mushroom (uncommon in eastern Colorado's high desert climate). A few pictures ...

The birds were glad for the sun, too, and I saw and heard lots of them—a great blue heron flying over the wetlands, flocks of swallows snatching insects, red-winged blackbirds (“squeaky gate birds”) calling from the reeds, a kingfisher hovering over the pond and then rattling to a perch in a small tree, killdeer with their frightened call taking off from the shoreline. I also got to see the results of over a year’s careful restoration of wetlands that were destroyed in the floods of September 2013. The ponds themselves, now lush with growth, and the land nearby green and flowered, dotted with newly-planted trees.

At one spot, you could see Boulder Creek, which is currently very high from all this rain, spilling into the wetlands—exactly as planned.

My walk ended where the path disappeared, seriously flooded by weeks of “spring,” with my only option a muddy slope alongside.

I turned back happy with my brief outing—only to see the next round of thick, dark rain clouds rolling in. Nice (lucky) timing, nice respite, nice reminder of the beauty of spring in Colorado … even a very rainy spring.

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Monday, May 18, 2015

Monumental near-miss

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Back in the day, the arrival of spring always meant a backpacking trip in southern Utah with a stalwart group of friends—right before Memorial Day to add an extra day to the trip. Southern Utah was also the destination of countless other trips spent hiking, biking, and sometimes running. And on nearly every Utah trip, we cruised through Grand Junction, stopping only for gas, and then headed west to our beloved red rock country. In the process, we blithely passed by Colorado National Monument just outside Grand Junction. Occasionally, someone suggested that we spend some time hiking there. But we always decided (to my personal delight) to go on to Utah instead. Honestly, I wanted to move on because I wanted the “real” experience that was only possible in southern Utah, the place where I had learned to love the desert—its canyons and plateaus and flowers, and its soul-baking heat. The Monument seemed like a pale approximation of what I was looking for, so I always voted in favor of heading on down the road.

This year promised to be the same story. My partner and I planned a quick trip to Capitol Reef in Utah, where I hadn't been for years, as this year's red rock “fix.” But time and circumstances conspired against that plan. So I reluctantly set it aside, and instead we plotted a short visit to Grand Junction to spend some time with friends there and check out Colorado National Monument. Folks have told me that we'd find red rock formations reminiscent of Utah, and though I was skeptical, it seemed like a worthwhile adventure. Sure enough, it turned out to be a wonderful visit—I'm regretting never having stopped there before.

We arrived in “Junction” to a rainy evening, the Monument only occasionally barely visible through the rain and fog. But we had a great dinner and long visit with our friends and made plans to explore the Monument—and, time willing, other local sites—the next day. We started out under threatening skies, but with the view of the Monument right ahead, I was quickly transported to that warm meditative place that the cliffs and colors of the Colorado Plateau always take me.

I was really surprised by how much it reminded me of Utah. If I focused on being there, in the rocky surround, it could even feel like Utah (in the rain). I watched the cliffs rising around us through rain-splattered windows and hoped for a break in the weather so we could actually get out and walk.

Sure enough, as we reached a major overlook with a nice trail, the rain backed off, and we took a stroll in that wonderful red dirt that (if you walk in it enough) stains your shoes and socks and marks you as a desert rat. There, we were blessed with the familiar junipers and desert wildflowers, some with raindrops. Not to mention an occasional caterpillar.

After I finally relented and quit suggesting that we walk to just one more bend in the trail, we returned to the car and headed off along the rim that marks the boundary of the plateau, overlooking Grand Junction. There were too many sights, too many overlooks to count, and I think I wore out everyone’s patience with my wish to stop everywhere, see everything. But my partner and friend were wonderfully patient, and I got to soak up a lot of desert energy—sometimes while dodging rain drops.

At one point, near the "coke oven" rocks below, I nearly headed off down a trail that would take me from the rim to the bottom of the valley—and, presumably, back up to meet the others. But as I unbuckled my seat belt to jump out, my partner gently reminded me that I’m still trying to nurse various injuries back to good health. A long climb down a cliff might not be helpful in that regard. So I whimpered a minute and relented. Next time. Because by now, I’d decided I’d like to come back.

As we finished the drive, we stopped at the site of the local naturalization ceremony, familiar to my Junction friend, who's an immigration attorney. Nice spot to be welcomed to the nation.

Site of the local naturalization ceremony

It kept on raining, so we decided to forgo the adventures beyond the Monument and catch lunch in Fruita (pop. ~13,000, plus lots of mountain bikers). As we drove there, my local friend told us the story of the restaurant where we’d eat. It’s a pizza place, run by two lesbians. They had been in a different location, but their landlord refused to renew their lease because they were lesbians. So the town of Fruita, the funky premier mountain biking destination near the start of the famous Kokopelli Trail, rose up in protest and found them a new place. The restaurant, the Hot Tomato, features excellent pizza made with home-made dough and assorted typical and exotic toppings. The atmosphere was some combination of laid back and abuzz—fitting, I guess for mountain bikers at the edge of world-class trails. After lunch, we headed back to Junction and took a walk along the river, hoping to see a mother owl and her baby in a nest, but they seemed to have vacated the premises since our friends saw them a few days earlier.

Hot Tomato restaurant, Fruita

That evening, after chilling out for a while, we had dinner with our friends again, the conversation again wandering from the profound to the humorous, crashed for the night with the rain still falling on and off. The next day, we drove home, with my red rock itch scratched for a bit and memories of a really fine couple of days. A good part of that was the especially nice time we had with our friends. And it was also about how unexpectedly satisfying the trip to Colorado National Monument had been.

I realize that I missed it all those years largely because I assumed it wasn’t the real thing, wasn’t ‘good enough’ to spend time with when Utah was just down the road. I just knew that the canyons wouldn’t be big enough, the hikes not long enough, the solitude not deep enough, the desert sun not hot enough to match Utah. But there it was—a lovely day with beautiful views, sweet flowers, and hikes yet to be taken. The lesson isn’t hard to discern: how many things do I miss, I wonder, by dismissing them as ‘not enough,’ not the ‘real thing’? When in reality, they are plenty wonderful in their own right—not as faint shadows of something else, but as their own, unique experiences.

It seems like a good time to work at being more alert and less … um … dismissive. It’s true that aging brings shifting criteria for what’s reasonable. Yet I know that there are lots of wonderful experiences left in the world that fit just fine within those limits—as long as I’m not weighing everything against the criteria of my hyper-intense, hyper-athletic youth, automatically declaring anything that's different to be automatically less.

Who knows what I might avoid missing if I keep my eyes open and my judgments packed away. It could be monumental.