Bear hunting 
August 16, 2013

We’ve landed for four nights in La Veta, Colorado, amidst what surely is the most breathtaking scenery anywhere.  Aside from a bit of altitude adjustment (it’s been many months that we’ve been at elevations lower than our mile high at home), it is glorious - clear cool mountain air - it just can’t be beat.

This was chosen as a stopover after we had a brief encounter several years ago with the town as the terminus of the Alamosa scenic train ride.  After our super railroad excursion from Alamosa to La Veta and back in one day, the place earned a strong vote of “Let’s go back there!”.  At that time, we heard there were bears in town and plainly that is still the case.

In fact, there are bears right in our RV park.  This morning I saw bear tracks right along behind the trailers, but despite my best efforts, have yet to spot a bruin in the flesh.  Yesterday, a neighbor gave quite a breathless account of her encounter of the bear kind while walking her dog, and we’ve heard many more accounts from folks who spend the summer here.

We are in one of the more enjoyable RV parks we’ve stayed at - “Circle the Wagons” it's called.  We have morning sun and afternoon shade; the Cuchara River (a stream in reality) borders the park, and the facilities couldn’t be better.- lots of nice patio sitting areas and best of all, a whole small campground filled with friendly outgoing folks, many of whom summer here every year. . . and they love having Chris play the keyboard, so I know they have good taste.

Bird feeders . . .

Maybe it’s a requirement at the Circle the Wagons, but literally everyone has put up bird feeders; of course we do so everywhere we go.  Great fun to be back in the West where we have a myriad of hummingbirds, not just the ruby-throated, beautiful as they are, farther east.  Already we’ve added broad-tailed, and are having fun watching the rufous fight for dominance at the feeder.  Rowdy thinks it’s entertaining, too.  Also in the park, we've added lesser goldfinch to the bird list.  They are one of our most common birds at home, yet we've nary spotted a one in eight months on the road.

La Veta . . .

La Veta is a really charming little town with one very unusual aspect: every afternoon, deer come into town and graze through every yard without the slightest regard for people.  They literally walk right up to folks; we watched them grazing at front porches and back yards, sauntering across the main road; there’s even a doe with triplet babies who views the RV park as her private nursery domain.

Fleeting . . .

Structures abandoned to the elements in the Colorado high country are soon overgrown by vegetation and collapsed under the weight of winter snow.

Beavers . . .

There are lots of beaver dams on these high streams.  I couldn’t resist a picture of this large tree the creatures had felled that was easily 150 yards from the water up a very steep embankment.

Spanish Peaks . . .

In La Veta, we are at 7,037 feet elevation, surrounded on three sides by incredible mountains.  The majestic Spanish Peaks soar to their above-tree-line height of 13,626. 

It was that direction we headed for a bit of recon.  The length of the drive was short, but the time was not because we were continually stopping to hike off in one direction or another or going back to snap a missed photo op.

Radiating out from the Spanish Peaks are massive volcanic dikes - rough stone walls of massive proportions.  The nature of their structure leaves windows and some of the oddest crumbly formations I’ve seen.

This formation is called The Devil's Stair Steps.

Three lakes up in the direction of the Cuchara Pass are idyllic spots and each is very different from the others.  Blue Lake seems to have good fishing but appears to be fairly shallow.  Little Blue Lake, a short walk from there, had not drawn any fishermen when we were there and may not be productive at all.

Our favorite of the three was Bear Lake, quite a bit larger.  I think it would be a good one to take the kayaks on for some fishing.  We had an excellent hike around it and identified lots of birds in the process: new for the trip were Townsend's warbler, mountain chickadee and black-billed magpie.

I took approximately 1,000 photographs of rollicking clear streams cascading over rocks down the mountainside.  Unfortunately, the result is invariably so much less than the magic of the reality that I end up throwing away my efforts.

I especially love the scenes of trails leading to who knows where - therein lies the wonder and mystery of what's over the next rise.

Trying to convey the breathtaking beauty and incredible breadth of these mountains is not something I can accomplish; they need to be experienced first-hand.  That doesn’t stop me from trying, though.

 

Amanitas mushrooms - beautiful but hallucinogenic and highly poisonous.

 

 

A chipmunk gave us lots of "awwww" opportunities as he industriously ate the seeds from an apple core that had been dropped.

A boundary
August 14, 2013

An hour or so ago, we crossed a boundary.  It’s a very important one although unseen and unmarked.  You don’t know it’s coming up, but you surely do know when you’ve crossed over it.  For me, it is the line that marks the western region of the country from the eastern.

Both before and after crossing that line was plains country, mostly flat grassland, but both sides are very different from each other nevertheless.  Heading west, the sky seems higher, bluer, the earth’s surface and the air feel dryer.  Far, far in the distance is the first hint of the Rocky Mountains, so faint at first that a person can’t be absolutely positive they actually see the peaks.

Suddenly, the idea of hiking off across the landscape seems sensible, no worries about chiggers and mosquitoes.  Suddenly, this person has a sense of homecoming, most welcome after eight months away, the longest stretch I’ve ever been out of the West.

We are traveling on Colorado Highway 10 as it leads us up a gradual incline as the topography transforms from rolling prairie interrupted more and more by isolated hills and low ridges.

As we pull over to the side of the road to put up our feet and have a bite of lunch in the trailer, we spot an old buffalo wallow that was transected by the highway.  The plains are pocked by these spots: shallow depressions that collected rainwater, invitations to the buffalo herds that once ranged here to have a good roll in the water and mud.  Each time another animal enjoyed a wallow, it would extract more of the mud on its thick coat, thus continually deepening and enlarging the depression.

Only this morning? . . .

As our elevation steadily increases, the countryside is more dotted with juniper and now miles of sunflowers. 

It was only a few short hours ago we were preparing to depart from Garden City, Kansas, as a solid dark wall of rain bore down on us.  Luckily, we had not unhooked when we pulled in the night before, so had not quite as much to accomplish before heading out.  Even then, the storm caught us and we left as the park was awash in a torrent of violent rain.

We were happy to drive out from under the downpour in a fairly short while, but not without great sympathy for those folks in the regions we’ve left behind.  They are completely saturated, yet the rain continues - pools, puddles, swamps, lakes overflowing, rivers backed up far beyond their capacity, and voracious mosquitoes are out in force.  I shudder to think about how many times I’ve been bitten in the past weeks - thoroughly unpleasant!

I know next to nothing about Garden City, having spent but one night there in a relatively scuzzy semi-permanent lodgers RV park, and having been unable to leave the windows open due to the overwhelming stockyards odors, but in that short span, one very cool thing happened.  As we were unloading the truck, a Mississippi kite swooped by me and perched on a nearby pole to have his portrait made.

 Medicine Lodge, Carrie Nation . . .

Because this day was a leisurely schedule, we stopped to try our luck with another museum (slow learners) in Medicine Lodge.  This was the Stockade Museum in addition to the home of Carrie Nation, that infamous temperance fanatic.  The stockade was a fortress replica, home to yet another collection of paraphernalia from days gone by, but many steps up from our last museum experience

In addition to the artifacts on display, there was a metal jail contraption that had been removed from the basement of the county courthouse.  It was a rather horrifying look at historic imprisonment conditions: two cells each about seven feet square with four bunks apiece.  A narrow “room” in front allowed the jailer to open cell doors so that prisoners could have access to it.

The stockade also had a hewn log cabin with the history of the Smith family that resided there along with period furnishings.  It was a small tidy house with two second floor rooms accessed by a narrow corner staircase.  I thought the exterior design over the porch was interesting and unique with windows in each room facing each other.

The other highlight at this stop was Carrie Nation’s house.  Our stockade hostess closed the museum door to take us to the Nation home next door and to fill us in on Carrie’s shenanigans.  Our guide had studied the woman in question thoroughly; she knew all about Carrie’s ax-slinging ways as she busted up one saloon after another and was arrested and jailed time after time.

We were informed that Carrie’s first husband was an alcoholic who died of the effects.  Mr. Nation, her second husband, evidently took umbrage at his mate’s carryings-on and divorced her.

Medicine Lodge puts on a pageant that evidently incorporates various unrelated historical events, including a Carrie Nation impersonator and an Indian/Anglo peace treaty signing.  It sounds as if it would be great fun to attend.

Gypsum hills . . .

We enjoyed the picturesque Flint Hills of Kansas on another trip, but did not know about the Gypsum Hills.  The route that took us through Medicine Lodge is new for us; we were very happy to experience the landscape's beauty this direction.  Red dirt here is highlighted through the green grass lushness and all is punctuated with the darker cedar trees.  Buttes and valleys are atypical of what we think of for the Sunflower State.  It’s all just really, really enchanting, makes me want to take off on a dirt road explore, but that will have to be another time when we’re not hauling the trailer.

 

As we pulled away from one of our stops in the Gypsum Hills, I spotted a ring-necked pheasant, a new bird for this trip.  Our eight-month list has gotten so long that it's getting harder and harder to get new ones.  We have now traded in the eastern bird book for the western version.


Getting lost, Dodge City, Fort Dodge . . .


For our navigation, we are utilizing a nice National Geographic atlas; unfortunately, we have been using it for a number of years and it has become outdated as road numbers and interchanges change.  And that is our reason for taking a wrong turn coming into Dodge City, or so explains the driver of this rig.

He soon realized the problem and got us turned around and headed in the correct direction.  We were excited to come to Dodge City on a previous trip, that is until we discovered the powers-that-be had opted to raze their historic commercial district and to replace it with a tourist-trap false-front row of buildings that would not pass muster even in a very old western film.

We were fairly disgusted with that line of action, but we still get a good laugh when we remember the so-called scenic overlook there.  Of course we would never pass up such as that, so quickly pulled out and were startled to discover that we were overlooking the extensive stockyards!

Nearby Fort Dodge has a nice veterans' home, the grounds of which we wandered a bit.  It put me in mind of Fort Whipple in Prescott.

Fascinating that when a tree burned here, the flames seem to have consumed roots and all.