Another all-by-ourselves day above timberline at Columbine Lake, restorative therapy for the soul

Some things in this modern, harried life are getting more scarce by the day. Everybody knows what happens when the demand for "something" exceeds supply, it becomes the new gold—more precious than the bullion in your IRA portfolio.  You can't  buy, beg, or borrow this scarce commodity. Yet, although its supply is shrinking faster than a dollar in the bank, it can still be found—just laying around in plain sight. You just have to know where to look...

Moose Droppings

We finally have proof that moose (mooses? meece?) have made it to Ouray County. This is not breaking news; people have been spotting moose for some time now in and around Lovely Ouray, everyone but us, that is, even though we had one in our yard according to neighbors. Evidently we were gone that day, no doubt up in the high country looking for moose where they belong.

"Freedom Dreaming" and "Sanctuary," Straddling that not necessarily mutually exclusive barbed wire fence, and Romanticize versus Intellectualize

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art." Wallace Stegner

Same Ol, Same Ol Mountain Flower Spam and Philosophical Meanderings

Ok, admittedly it's a mad dog of a road. I took it easy though, inch-worming over boulders in lowest gears, slipping through skinny spots tighter than peg-leg jeans, tipping the least degree possible toward a cartwheel into a wild-flowered abyss. It wasn't so much that Bobbie was faint-hearted when she bailed on the last mile, just that she preferred to start what was to be a "short hike" early—at least that was the story she stuck to. So it was up to men and their machine, John Q, Boonie, and Walden Steve, and good dog Coffee Girl to grind it out. Coffee Girl adjusted quickly and actually seemed to enjoy the rock and roll gyrations. Ah, there's something special about a girl who loves to go four wheeling in pickups, no offense, Bobbie.

Walden Steve, A Sea Level Floridian Leaps Into Thin Air

I wish I was as practical, philosophically, and literally, as my Pal Boonie. While I'm at it, I might as well wish that I was as smart, too. Sometimes I feel like I need Cliff's Notes and Webster's Dictionary to make sense of his posts. He has garnered quite an intellectual audience—people who actually get his metaphors, symbolisms, and references to long dead writers that I've never even heard of. 

John Q, Boonie, and Coffee Girl, Hiking the San Juans around Lovely Ouray

John Q had hit town, occupying his usual # 20 up in the Amphitheater Campground, spending a portion of his three week solo vacation vagabonding around Colorado in search of either a trail he has yet to hike, or one that bears repeating. On his heels comes Pal Boonie and Coffee Girl, rolling into Lovely Ouray in need of a "friend" with a heavy duty four wheel drive pickup truck, one that could tow his RV up a loose, steep, and rough road, and back it into about the best National Forest campsite you could possibly imagine—on the edge of a canyon with a "white noise" creek cascading through the bottom. It also overlooks our fine Crevice town, nestled like a sleeping baby in the arms of its Mountain Mama. Oh, I almost forgot, this free campsite comes with four bars of Verizon (coup de grace).

Water Wars On Main Street...Brutal Forth of July Fights Soaks Warriors and Spectators Alike

It's tradition, dating back to old mining heydays of the late 1800's, to form a circle around the intersection of Main and 6th in order to watch men (and now women) pummel each other with a hundred PSI jet streams of water. It's brutal, combat—not for the faint of heart—and I'm just talking about being a spectator. Yes, you get wet no matter where you stand, and if you prize a front row position you may just get knocked to the back row by errant streams of water.

Sacrebleu !

I'm not an ass, I just sometimes play one on the BCB...for your entertainment and my practice! Like sex, life is too funny to be taken seriously. I hereby declare today, "Lighten up day," and I'll be at O'Brian's after work in case someone wants to buy me a beer. Sheesh! 

Blue Lakes and Flowers In the Shadow of Mount Sneffels

Wildflower season isn't a bust after all. Up in Yankee Boy Basin there's enough to keep a shutterbug busy as a bee, and further up, on both sides of Blue Lakes Pass, photographing lush slopes of Columbine and Paintbrush added an hour to our hike. All this after forty days without rain. I've got news for Nietzsche, there must be a God after all; the proof is in photograph...pun intended.

Male Mentalpause on Mount Abrams

Weather, partly cloudy and dry. Flowers, scattered and few. Tundra, crunches like corn flakes. Sweat, evaporates before it breaks surface. Mindset, alone...just me and a near thirteen thousand foot Mountain, grappling with our love-hate relationship. Mountains high are my "Stairways to Heaven," and out here, Heaven has a price. On Mount Abrams it's a punishing 45 degree angle of ascent—the ultimate Thigh Master. I should know, it's one of my sanctuaries of worship.

Light, Shadow, and Revelations on a Solo Trek to the Summit of Mount Abrams

Six o'clock am Monday past: Good morning July! A bearish, bed-headed oaf shuffles for coffee, already wondering how best to occupy the first of three precious days off from work. Morning stiffness spams the brain with muscle alarms: "Body does not yet favor the upright position." He slumps into his overstuffed Lazy Boy, which, upon the bottomed-out rebound, spills coffee on a favorite Port Aransas tank top. Disgusted, he swivels 180 degrees, away from the mindless big screen black hole that only last night wasted a few more precious grains of hourglass sand, and peers out an Imax window that overlooks Lovely Ouray and its sentinel peak, Mount Abrams. It occurs to the oaf to spend a few grains of sand climbing that mountain, as soon as coffee and aspirin kicks in.