On Monday, we biked the bike path by the Yampa River for the first time. I only took a few photos that day - most of them were at the Botanical Gardens, which you can access from the bike path.  Then, on Tuesday, we went to Fish Creek Falls, which is only a few miles outside of town. It was beautiful up there. The falls themselves were lovely. They are 283 feet high, and even though the water in Fish Creek was low as it always is in the autumn, they still made a very impressive sight and sound. I understand that they are quite a sight during the spring runoff. We hiked down to the bridge and the lower viewpoint, and then hiked back up the the upper overlook. Either way, they were beautiful.

We first encountered Fish Creek while biking along the bike path where the creek joins the Yampa RIver. It is sparklingly clear.

The  pond in the Botanical Gardens. Most of the photos from here were of autumn flowers. It was a beautiful spot.

A rocky outcropping on the path to Fish Creek Falls

 Fish Creek Falls, from the bridge at the bottom. I would love to see these in the spring, with a winter’s worth of melt water crashing down the cliff face.

More of the falls. I wish the camera could show the scale of things better. The size of the trees at the top, rather than the ones farther down, shows how tall they are, though.

This rock is right by the bridge below the Falls – you can see how the churning waters have worn away at the rock.

Pat on the bridge looking up at the falls.

The water in Fish Creek was so very clear

This tree on a trail on the far side of the falls has spread out its root and is holding on to the mountainside for dear life. This trail went another five miles up to Long Lake. Unfortunately, I didn’t think my feet were quite up to five miles there and then five miles back, especially as it was mid-afternoon already.

Autumn in the aspen grove. There were also plenty of evergreens – pine, spruce, fir and cedar, the mountain ash with its bright red berries, and some species of oak tree.

This was taken from an overlook on the way to the upper view of the Falls.

Looking down the hill at the turning trees

The falls from the upper overlook. You could still hear them roaring quite clearly.

More of the falls from above

Turning aspen on the crown of this hill, and the blue sky above

Some fellow hikers pointed out this little fellow, a green snake, running for cover up a small slope. He ducked under a root shortly after this.

Looking down at the trees again

The day was warm and sunny and perfect for the trip to Fish Creek Falls.

-She Wolf (c) 2008

We had a wonderful week in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The autumn weather was still warm, and although it was rainy the first two days, we didn’t let it slow us down. The aspen were just starting to turn golden when we arrived and were in full color by the end of the week.

Steamboat Springs is a resort/ski community in the north central Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The town got its name when early explorers found the hot springs there and noticed that they sounded like a steamboat chugging when they bubbled. That certainly makes sense, as the Yampa River that flows through the town is canoe sized, not steamboat sized!

The day we arrived, we settled into the unit we would stay in for the week, and then the second day we took a ski gondola to the top of the ski area and walked a nature trail on top of the mountain. (Yes, despite my absolute terror of heights, I rode the gondola to the top. It helped that it was enclosed all the way around. I even got up the courage to enjoy the view and take some photos through the slightly blurry glass.)

These photos are from the first two days. I gave my camera quite a workout the entire time and will end up with several posts.

These rocks give Rabbit Ears Pass its name. Rabbit Ears is the pass that takes you into Steamboat Springs from the east.

American author Mark Twain keeps watch on a corner in downtown Steamboat. Around the corner were benches with Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln on them.

Here is the gondola going up the mountain. If you look carefully, you can see the gondola cars in the bottom section, near the housing.  Sunday was its last trip of the summer/fall season, carrying hikers and mountian bikers to the summit. It won’t open up again until the ski season starts in a couple of months.

Here is one of the photos I took in the ride up the mountian, once I relaxed and started to enjoy the ride. I was careful not to move a lot, though, because I got nervous when the gondola car rocked.

A view from the ski area

A view through the aspen and evergreen trees  – you can see the mountains beyond them.

Another view out over the valley

The moutain ash were turning orange and looked very festive with their bright red clusters of berries.

Moutain ash, ferns that were a beautiful gold, and an old stump made a nice picture.

Pat looking out at the view

You can see a few patches of aspen beginning to turn on the slopes here.

This boulder appears to be imprisoned by the aspen…hmm… I may smell a story here.

Layer of trees, including some lovely golden ones…

Mossy rocks and golden leaves

A colorful meadow slope

A passage way – and perhaps another story

The plant with the interestingly shaped large leaves is the Thimbleberry plant.

The path was damp from the rain showers that kept coming and going.

Cloudy skies and spots of turning aspen on the mountain side

I know there were a lot of pictures in this post, but if you knew how many I took…I really worked to get the number down this far. I’ll post more later this week.

- She Wolf (c)2008

Today my oldest son Lee and I took the dogs for a swim  and ourselves for a ride in the mountains of the Medicine Bow National Forest, Happy Jack, and the Vedauwoo recreation area. It was a gorgeous September day and I had my camera in tow. Lee, who was driving, was feeling adventurous, so with the dogs in the shell in the back of the truck, we spent a wonderful afternoon. The roads were pretty good – as Lee noted, they should be, as they are mostly crushed granite. I pointed out that in some places they were whole pieces of granite. We both noticed later on that the problems are when the road is partially crushed granite – that’s very bumpy!

This area is just east of Laramie, about 15 minutes up the interstate highway and then a longer ride up and down dirt forest service roads. It it popular with hikers, picnickers, campers, rock climbers, and in the winter, cross country skiers. The terrain is spectacular, ranging from rolling grassy hills to huge rocky outcroppings to beaver ponds and cool green glades of aspen trees. Here are a few of the photos from the afternoon.

Sign at Vedauwoo

A close up of the sign. The granite is mostly pink, but grey on the outside where it is weathered.

The plains just go rolling on forever

A rocky crown to this mountain

Rocks by the road

One view of Crow Resevoir

Massive rocks on the mountains

There are countless rocky outcroppings like this one scattered all over the meadows here. Most of them have scrubby, stunted and twisted pine trees growing them, in the meager shelter they provide from the icy winter winds and snow.

The aspen are just starting to turn gold here and there.

I love the play of light in an aspen grove.

This rock looks like it is balancing.

What you can’t see in this is the sheer scale of the rocks. This overhang, known locally as potato chip because it looks like one from the other side, is a popular rapelling spot for rock climbers. If there were any there today, they would look like dots on the face of the rock.

This is just to the right of the previous picture. There actually are climbers here – but they are too small to see in this photo.

Now can you see the climbers? This gives an idea of the size of the rocks at Vedauwoo. It is a very popular rock climbing place; both of the older boys climbed here in high school.

Here’s a big hunk of granite.

This is just plain pretty.

I didn’t get any beaver pond photos; those will have to wait for another time. I hope you enjoyed these – I sure enjoyed taking them.

-She Wolf (c)2008

I was out for a lunch time walk when I heard some crows making a fuss. I looked up into the trees, and what should I see but a falcon, enjoying a fresh pigeon lunch. (Our campus has a generous supply of pigeons.) I watched it for a while, and then rushed back to my office for my camera. When I got back, the falcon was just finishing lunch – it dropped the leftovers on the sidewalk below. I snapped few photos as the falcon fluffed up for little post-lunch rest. The falcon appears to be a peregrine – it has the dark hood of feathers on its head and the ticked chest feathers, and is about the same size as the crows. Incidentally, the crows came back to the tree after the falcon was finished eating!

The leftover pigeon is being dropped.

You can see the dark “hood” of feathers.

Another view

Just hanging around

Here you can see the sizes of the falcon and the crow, who returned to his territory after the falcon was done eating!

-She Wolf (c) 2008

I took my camera on a walk across campus today and took a few pictures of our spring snow.

When I left my building, a snow flurry was just starting.

It was adding to the load of snow on this tree.

By the time I had walked the four blocks across campus, blue skies were showing again behind this wonderful fancy frosted roofline on the geology building.

The mix of snow and sun has made icicles, like these tiny ones hanging off of this fir tree.

This dinosaur is wearing a cap of snow and has his mouth filled with it!

Back over by my building, this tree looks like it is full of giant balls of cotton instead of snow!

-She Wolf (c) 2008

Here at 7200 feet in altitude, April showers usually take a cold white form. We woke up this morning to a good eight inches of heavy wet spring snow. I went out about 6:15 and took some pictures.

The view from my front step

Down the street to the west

The neighbor’s yard and truck

The crabapple trees in my backyard

Snow scallops decorating the back fence

-She Wolf (c) 2008

Please enjoy these autumn photos.

Autumn beauty never fails to awe and amaze me.

-She Wolf (c) 2007

 A garden should have pond in it, thought Mary Ann as she dug into the rich earth in the farthest corner of her backyard. Or at least a water feature of some kind. But hers was going to be a little pond, with a tiny waterfall and some water plants and maybe even a fish or two. For years she had wanted one, but since she was blessed with the loving companionship of a pair of Labrador Retrievers, she had never quite had the courage to put one in. The labs would consider it their private swimming pool and it would be lost to all other uses. Moses, named for his penchant for lying in the shallows in the reedy part of ponds, and Gerry, short for Geranium because he loved to eat them, would do nothing but play in the water and then get it all over the house. They never understood why Mary Ann objected to wet dogs in the house or got upset about their lovely muddy footprints on the floor.

Finally, this year, she had put up new fencing and made an “adult humans only” part of the yard, where she had planted lots of flowers and set up a bench swing and a wicker table with chairs – all the things that she hadn’t quite dared to have before because the labs saw everything as a toy – preferable a chew toy. Since she loved her dogs, she had always compromised and had a shared yard with some hardy outdoor people furniture and lots of dog toys. But now, with the yard divided in half, she could have her yard and they could have theirs. Her yard would be by invitation only (and only with heavy supervision) for the labs.

Mary Ann hummed happily under her breath as she made the pit that would be lined, decorated with rocks, filled with water, and adorned with plants over the next few weeks. Finally, with blisters forming on her hands she finished digging the hole to just the right size and shape and leaned on her shovel with satisfaction. The dogs, pinned into their half of the yard, looked through the gaps in the fence and sniffed loudly. They could smell the fresh- turned earth and clearly wondered why Mary Ann wasn’t letting them help with the excavation. They loved to dig holes.

“Not this time, fellows,” she called back to them, and went to put the shovel away and drool over water plant brochures as she ate her dinner. She would appease the dogs with a long session of fetch the tennis ball after dinner.

The next day after work, Mary Ann went out with a roll of chicken wire to start reinforcing the little pool. Strangely enough, she found about two inches of muddy water in the bottom of it. Deciding it was probably run off from a badly aimed sprinkler in her neighbor’s yard, she bailed out what she could and partially covered the hole so it wouldn’t fill up again tomorrow. After it dried out, she would start lining it.

The next day she did not start lining the pond. It was quite full of water, but then so were her yard and all of the neighbors’ yards too. A water main had broken in the alley and everything for a block was wet. The labs had a great time splashing in the water that ran into the yard. Mary Ann used up most of her spare bath towels drying them off before they came into the house for the evening.

The day after that the ground was still soaked and the pond hole still had water standing in the bottom of it. The labs were apparently inspired by the soft muddy earth and dug a hole under the fence from their part of the yard to hers. They spent the afternoon playing in the muddy pool and dug it out a little bit more for her, sculpting the shape into something they seemed to think was more appropriate for a Labrador swimming pool.

Mary Ann growled at them as she scrubbed them off and toweled them dry once more. Then she shut them in the house and called a few friends over for a barbeque-and-line-the-dog-yard-with-buried-chicken-wire-under-the-fence party. Her friends laughed and came and by the end of the week, the dogs were safely jailed in their own part of the yard again.

All week long, the hole had kept water in it. Mary Ann wondered if it was a side effect of the water main break, which was still being fixed because when one break had been repaired, another one had occurred a short ways away. The second one hadn’t flooded the yard, but the alley had gotten wet and the ground was pretty saturated.

Finally, after another week and a lot of very hot sunshine, the hole was dry enough. Since Mary Ann decided that she like the redesign provided by the dogs, she had had to purchase more materials, but finally she was ready to line the pond and put the little waterfall into place. The series of water main breaks (they were on the fourth one) had moved farther down the alley, so the area should stay nice and dry while she worked.

A few days later, she was ready to fill her little pond with its rocky surround. The dogs peered at her with great interest as Mary Ann got out their friend and favorite toy, the water hose/ giant-snake-to-kill and filled the pond. Then she flipped a switch and the waterfall sprang to life. Mary Ann beamed with pleasure and made plans to pick up her new water plants at the nursery on the way home from work tomorrow.

Because she stopped at the nursery, Mary Ann was late getting home the next day. Immediately she saw that the planting of the water plants was not meant to be that day. Moses, who was the mechanical genius of Labradordom, had managed to knock the lock on the gate open. Both dogs were happily enjoying the new pond when she found them. Moses was lying in the shallow part, panting happily, and Gerry was playing bubble with his nose in the water while searching for a rock on the bottom, his tail whipping back and forth the entire time. They both started guiltily when they saw – and heard – Mary Ann come into the back yard.

She removed the culprits, fixed the rock surround, removed various toys and foreign objects donated by the labs from the pond, and then went to the hardware store for a latch that locked. Moses hadn’t figured those out yet. Finally, she took the dogs to a nearby lake so they could play in the water without destroying her pond.

As she fell asleep that night, with the gentle snores of the Labradors coming from their dog beds, Mary Ann thought, “Tomorrow. I should be able to get those plants in tomorrow. After all, what else could go wrong?”

Surprisingly, nothing else did go wrong. The plants were settled in, and a week later, Mary Ann added a few gold fish. She began sitting out beside it in the evenings after she walked the dogs and enjoying the gentle sound of the little waterfall. It was just as well that she could only be out there in the evenings, because all day the alley was filled with the sound of heavy machinery. The water main was up to eight breaks now, just in that alley. It was strange.

One day when Mary Ann came home, though, her little pond was not as it should be. About half of the water was splashed out, and a couple of plants were uprooted. The little goldfish were hiding in the rocks under the waterfall. Mary Ann was puzzled. It looked like the damage the dogs would do, but they were securely behind their own fence. They were dry and obviously innocent, for once. Finally she decided that some wild animal, like a raccoon or something, must have gotten into the yard. It didn’t really work and she knew it, but she really couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

But the same thing happened the next day, and the next. Mary Ann was getting really annoyed and wondered if the dogs weren’t escaping during the day, early enough to dry off again and a neighbor was putting them back. She asked, but all of her neighbors worked all day, and had no idea what she was talking about. The men working in the alley looked at her like she was nuts. They had enough problems with the water lines without worrying about someone’s dogs.

One day she did come home early and found the dogs in the pond. This just reinforced the idea that somehow it was the dogs, although they hadn’t uprooted any of the plants or splashed out much water at all.

It was strange, though, because the latch on the gate was open and Moses had never worked one of those latched before. Maybe he just got lucky, she decided.

The next day, Mary Ann made certain that the gate was unopenable by the dogs and put a tarp over the pond. The pond was supposed to be relaxing, but since she had made it, it had been anything but relaxing. Between the daily damage to the pond and the water main fiasco in the alley (the repaired places had begun springing new leaks), things were not relaxing but instead were interesting. Mary Ann was tired of interesting. She wanted boring and relaxing.

She put the dogs on their leashes and took them for a walk in the park several blocks away. She noticed that the little stream there which was fed by springs bubbling up from deep within the earth was larger than before and then remembered reading in the paper that several more springs had surfaced upstream and had added to the flow of the little brook. Mary Ann decided that this was nice – the stream actually looked like something larger than the flow from a garden hose now.

She walked the dogs home and had to wade through the latest break in the water lines at the mouth of the alley. It had formed a giant pool and was almost ready to start flooding nearby yards. The dogs splashed through it happily, stopping to sniff and wag at something near where the water was welling up. Mary Ann pulled them back, fearing that they would fall into a hole made by the water. The dogs whined and pulled back, but Mary Ann was firm and they continued on home.

The next day, the pool was fine, but the day after that it was vandalized again. Mary Ann was starting to notice a pattern – on days when there was a lot of water from a water main break, her pond was fine. When the water main was sound (which was less and less often) her little water feature was disturbed. The whole thing was very troubling.

And the dogs were acting strange, too. They spent a lot of time whining at the fence and seemed very tired in the afternoons these days. One day Mary Ann shut them in the garage to see what would happen. She regretted that. Gerry turned his enthusiasm for eating flowers into a new skill of eating at the door frame, trying to get loose. He had never done that before. Mary Ann invested in some chew-stopping bitter apple, but Gerry didn’t chew anything else as long as she left them in the dog yard or in the front part of the house where they couldn’t see or hear things from the back yard or alley. Things were definitely strange.

One day, things got stranger still. Mary Ann got off work early one day to run some errands and realized that she had left her purse at home. When she ran by the house to get it, she just parked in front of the house, not bothering with the driveway since she was just running in. If she didn’t pull in the dogs might not notice her and get all riled up thinking she was home for the day. When she got into the house, she thought she could hear a voice from the backyard as well as the sound of the dogs playing in her part of the yard instead of theirs. “Finally -I’m going to find out what’s going one!” she muttered to herself, creeping over to a window. There in the yard, playing in and around the pool were both of her labs and a beautiful young woman. The young woman was laughing and splashing at the dogs as they all hopped in and out of the pool. The dogs were barking merrily, tails wagging full force.

Mary Ann was enraged. She went to the back door and opened it very quietly and carefully. It opened into the doggy part of the yard and was hidden from the view of the pond. She tiptoed over to the open gate and then stepped through it.

“What do you think you are doing?” she shouted in an irate voice. “This is my yard, my pond and my dogs! You are trespassing!”

The dogs stopped. The young woman stopped. The dogs tucked their tails and slunk over to Mary Ann’s feet, where they sat down, leaning against her in apology and effectively pinning her in place. The young woman, who had been standing there open mouthed beside the pool closed her mouth and turned. Mary Ann tried to move towards her, but the dogs were in the way. The woman looked back at Mary Ann and then dove into the pond – the very shallow pond. And she was gone.

Mary Ann untangled herself from the dogs and ran over to the edge. Picking up a stick, she poked it into the now muddy waters. The only things there were the rocks and the plants. Mary Ann had taken out the remaining goldfish long ago.

Stunned, Mary Ann sat down in the chair she kept by the pool and stared at it. She had to be imagining things. She had to be. The dogs whined and sniffed at the water. Mary Ann pulled them back. She didn’t know what was going on, and she didn’t want the dogs anywhere near it. They sat there like that for an hour or more and the then something tickled at the back of Mary Ann’s brain. She grabbed the dogs by the collars and dragged them into the house. She went straight to the computer. A little while later, Mary Ann looked at the dogs, smiled and said, “Well boys, I never would have believed it, but I think we have a naiad infestation.” It was a strange thing to say, but it made a strange sort of sense. Naiads were the nymphs that lived in water. For weeks now, the water mains had been breaking like they had never broken before. And in between the breaks, her pond had been vandalized. And then Mary Ann realized with a jolt that it had all started when the underground springs had surfaced quite a distance away. They had probably gone right under this area before.

“And I think I know why she’s here, too,” Mary Ann told the dogs, who wagged and looked hopefully at her. If Mary Ann was talking to them, she might say the words treat, or ball, or walk, or dinner. They were ever hopeful.

Mary Ann walked purposefully towards the back yard. The dogs followed, thinking playtime might be in order. She grabbed her shovel and marched for her beloved pond.

Digging into the flower bed beside it, she started tossing shovel loads of dirt into the water. “I am not…having…something living…in my pond…that…I didn’t…put there!” she grunted as she filled in the pond.

As the pond filled up with the muddy topsoil, and the free standing water became less and less, something began to happen. The water that was left began swirling and moving around as if it were alive. Finally, when there was only about an inch left, Mary Ann stopped. She said, “All right, come on out. I know you’re in there, and if you don’t come out, I’m going to finish filling this in right now!”

The remaining water swirled and heaved, and then all of a sudden there was the lovely young woman standing there in the mud looking defiant and frightened all at once.

“Most folks would be glad to have a naiad living in their ponds!” Her voice was as smooth as water itself. The dogs whined and edged over to her, wagging ingratiatingly.

“Maybe if the naiad weren’t tearing up the pond and getting the dogs in trouble and causing water main breaks left and right, that might be true. As it is…” Mary Ann replied, staring at the naiad in wonder.

The naiad looked down and shrugged elegantly. “I do as I will. I am a figure of nature and I can’t be stopped.”

“I don’t care what you are, something from mythology or not. This is my pond you’ve been messing up, and my water supply you’ve been playing with!”

The naiad stared back at her. “My spring is gone, my friends have disappeared. Your pond was here, and the pipes that confine the water instead of letting it run freely, and your water dogs were happy to play with me so I won’t be so lonely. The pond was always fixed by the next day, so how was I to know you were unhappy?”

Mary Ann started to say something and stopped. The naiad made perfect sense. Her home was lost and she was lonely and here was everything she was looking for near where her home used to be.

Mary Ann looked at her carefully. “What would you say if I told you I could help you find your old spring? It doesn’t run underground anymore, but it is still nearby. I bet your friends went with it.”

The naiad looked at her suspiciously. “How are you going to accomplish this?  How do I know you won’t dry me out or confine me?”

“I guess you’ll just have to trust me, won’t you,” said Mary Ann.

In the end, the naiad agreed to let Mary Ann try and Mary Ann hauled a bucket with the naiad in it over to the park and upstream to where the springs had surfaced. She got some funny looks from people as she walked by carrying a bucket full of water – towards the stream.

The naiad formed from the water in the bucket and stepped out beside the stream. Sticking one finger into the flowing water, she shook slightly and said, “Yes, this is my stream.” A finger that looked very like hers came up out of the water and touched her back. “And my friends and family are here.”  She turned to Mary Ann. “Thank you. You have returned good for ill, and reunited me with my own kind. I will remember this.” Then she dove into the stream and disappeared.

Mary Ann went home to her dogs. That week the water mains stopped breaking, and Mary Ann dug out her little pond again and repopulated it with plants and fish. Then she went into the dog’s yard and dug them a little pond, too, which delighted them.

She noticed that her little pond stayed clear and clean and flourished, with none of the problems that little ponds are prone to,  and that the dogs’ pond showed frequently showed signs of splashy games being played while she was out.

And sometimes in the evenings, if you looked in to Mary Ann’s yard, you would see her sitting in her chair by her little pond and talking with a beautiful young woman who was half in and half out of the water.

- She Wolf (c)2007

We had several wet days – the equinox and the day after - right after we got to Dillon, but that didn’t stop us from going out and about.  We went for several nice walks in the drizzly weather. The mountain tops were covered in clouds and the sky was a slate colored autumn grey.

The clouds were kissing the mountain tops

When we left Laramie for the Rocky Mountains in  Dillon, Colorado, it was already evening. We traveled on the backroads down through the Medicine Bow and Routt National Forests, winding down two lane roads in the valleys, with mountains on either side of us. As usual, I was leaning as far out of the car window as I could with the seat belt strangling me trying to take pictures. Most of them were too close up and came out as impressionistic blurs, but I got some wonderful photos of the sun setting behind the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

A Colorado sunset

I went for a walk with my camera the first morning. The aspen are turning their incredible, glowing intense gold. I love the way they look against a blue autumn sky.

 We are just a quick jaunt from Dillon Lake (actually a reservoir). It is beautiful, with the mountains rising all around it, fir trees, pines and aspen ringing it, and the sail boats skimming on it.

I took a lot of pictures of the lake and the sailboats. I am sure I will take more before I am done, too. 

 While I was standing on the floating dock taking photos, a whole flock of sailboats came out from around the point into the part of the lake where I was. They were so peaceful and beautiful!

This is the Blue River, which runs through Dillon and Silverthorne. The golden aspen on the banks were spectacular.

-She Wolf (c)2007