The Shining Rocky Mountain High...

...in Colorado.  Remember the old song by John Denver? One of my favorites back in 1974 when I had long, straight hair and wire-rimmed glasses and played the guitar! Last week I spent a few days in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado in my own personal Rocky Mountain High with my old Peace Corps buddy Diane and friend Alice.  (Click here and here and here to read about my travels in Montana and Wyoming with Diane and Alice last year.)

The "high" part had nothing to do with any 1970's-era drugs. It was all about the elevation! We hiked almost every day, and as soon as we passed 9,000' (2743 meters), I started gasping. I've hiked at elevation a lot over the years. Usually after an hour, I adjust and don't notice. I made it all the way to the top of Kilimanjaro at 19,340' (5894 meters) in 2006. But after five days, still gasping. The hiking was really fun anyway, and the higher you go, the more spectacular the scenery.

 Here I am at Nymph Lake--this is my nymph pose. I think the lake is named for definition 1: the larva of a grasshopper or mayfly. Whereas, I am working definition 2: minor divinities of nature in classical mythology represented as beautiful maidens dwelling in the mountains and forests.

 

 Farther up the trail on our beautiful evening hike--Diane and Alice on the approach to Dream Lake.

Dream Lake. 

A little girl sitting with her parents at lakeside said, "This lake is beautiful like a dream." She was only at Nymph Lake, but it was still sweet. 

Mornings, Dr. Alice attended a medical conference down in the town of Estes Park. While Alice studied gerontology, Diane and I took another hike, to the very popular Cub Lake. It was here that I first noticed many large groups of hikers wearing matching t-shirts. We stood to one side while 11 people of all ages marched by in green T-shirts. Then 17 in blue. Then 8 in yellow. Diane and I were under dressed in our mismatched outfits.

Cub Lake, ringed with lily pads. 

A dusky grouse along the trail. She had a baby with her. The baby hid in the grass, but the mama stood her ground as we passed by only a foot away.

I know she's a dusky grouse, because the next morning, Diane and I got up early and went on a bird-watching walk with a Park Service volunteer. We showed him the grouse picture and he identified it for us. No pictures from the bird walk because it was so early that I left the hotel without my camera, due to caffeine deficit. But, all the birds (Yellow-rumped Warbler, Violet-green Swallow, Green-tailed Towhee, Northern Flicker, Hairy Woodpecker, Broad-tailed hummingbird) moved so fast, I wouldn't have gotten any pictures, anyway.

Another spectacular hike another day, going ever higher into the mountains, and still gasping.

Alberta Falls

 Alice and Diane on the approach to Mills Lake.

 Beautiful Mills Lake, where we gulped down our lunch, so that we could finish the loop trail and get down out of the high country before the regular afternoon thunderstorm rolled in.

Oops! Too late! But nobody got hit by lightning....

Poisonous, pretty Amanita mushroom along the trail.

 Still no lightning strikes.

A distant view of Longs Peak--one of the Fourteeners in the park. Peaks over 14,000' (4270 meters) that hikers more serious than we flock to Colorado to climb. This is as close as we got!

More groups of hikers in matching T-shirts this day on this trail. They were all boys in their early- to mid-teens wearing maroon T-shirts with little white emblems. Being from Utah, a very big Boy Scout state, I asked one group if they were Boy Scouts. Yes, they were. Eighteen of them were traveling with four adult leaders for a two-week trip, in which they had driven from Michigan to Colorado, planned to hike all day, then drive to Arches National Park in Utah, and then drive on in a giant, multi-state, multi-park loop that would eventually take them back to Michigan. Yikes! Brave adult leaders!

And bonus! While I was chatting with the Boy Scouts, Diane spotted an American Three-toed Woodpecker. We didn't get a good look at his toes, but we did clearly see the yellow patch on the top of his head that our volunteer bird walk guide had told us about earlier.

I would say that Rocky Mountain National Park is mainly a hikers' park. Most of it is unroaded, and the many hiking trails access spectacular scenery. But roads ring the edges of the park and the Trail Ridge Road, a high-elevation road with its own spectacular views, cuts through the north of the park. We drove that road twice and took in the views and walked out to the overlooks and stopped for animal sightings along the road. 

 Elk...

 Elk...

 And more elk. I think Diane's getting a little too close...

 See? That one's mad! 

But just like the lightning storm, nothing bad happened. Maybe those park rangers have been exaggerating the dangers of nature all along.

 We saw a few marmots behaving really oddly--flattened out on the dirt road, licking the road surface. A ranger told us they're getting mineral salts from the dirt.

This one's acting more typically marmot-y.

 Here's a chipmunk in action!

 And this is NOT a chipmunk! It's a golden-mantled ground squirrel.

That's a chipmunk on the left--smaller, with stripes extending across his eye. And a golden-mantled ground squirrel on the right--bigger with no stripe over his eye. So now you know! Don't call that big ground squirrel a chipmunk!

 And more elk--this one a baby still in spots.

And just to break things up, here's a big bull moose.

And my favorite animal sighting of the whole trip...

 ...this beautiful little red fox trying to cross the road.

As the Trail Ridge Road climbs higher, it's all alpine tundra and high peaks and stormy weather.

There's the stormy weather...

There's some alpine tundra...

Here's the really fun Tundra Communities trail out to a high scenic overlook.

Our fellow tourists over looking the void. Two of them have matching shirts!

Tundra and stormy weather together in one photo.

And then, winding our way back down to the lower part of the park, here's Sheep Lake, where the Bighorn Sheep often come right down to water's edge to a mineral lick. But hadn't done so for eight days when we passed by.

Overall, we felt very satisfied with wildlife sightings during our visit. Except that we saw no bighorn sheep or mountain goats. Then we stopped at the lake, where another volunteer told us there are no mountain goats in Rocky Mountain National Park. So we remained dissatisfied only about the bighorn sheep.

We stayed in the town of Estes Park, just a few miles outside Rocky Mountain National Park's east boundary. Many of the town's motels seem to date from the 1960's and 1970's and are pretty basic. Of course, the newer, fancier ones are expensive! We went cheap and had an adequate, comfortable room. But all of the rooms in our building had sliding glass doors facing a playground area that hosted much noisy activity every evening. Our last two nights, a group of 50 or so staged a big barbecue in the playground. They all had matching orange T-shirts and a big tartan banner proclaiming the Douglas Family Reunion. Alice (Chinese) and Diane (Italian) tried to send me (Irish) out to steal some barbecued ribs because they thought I could pass for Scottish. But I didn't have an orange T-shirt, so I didn't try it! We were all happy when a big thunderstorm with heavy rain rolled in at 8:00 pm and the reunion broke up early enough for us to get a good night's sleep. I know that sounds crabby. What can I say? We wanted to sleep.

We did spend a bit of time in town. We carried a picnic lunch with us on a tram ride to the top of a ridge on the edge of town and had lunch with an incredible view.

Alice and Diane at the top of the tram, way above Estes Park with lunch, but non-matching T-shirts. You can see the edge of Estes Park at bottom right.

And no trip to Estes Park would be complete without a visit to the Stanley Hotel. We not only visited, we took the ghost/history tour. Ghost tour? Yes! Because Stephen King and his wife were staying here, as the only guests at the end of the summer season, when he was struck with the idea for "The Shining."

 I think it looks spooky, even in the sunshine.

Stephen King wanted the movie (you remember--Jack Nicholson--"Honey, I'm hoooome!") to be filmed here, but Stanley Kubrick instead used the Timberline Lodge at Mt. Hood, Oregon. Our tour guide told us that Stephen King was unhappy with the movie, and so filmed his own version, a TV miniseries, at the Stanley Hotel in 1997.

 All that "woodwork" around the reception desk is really white plaster, but the TV crews painted it to look like wood. The plaster was too cheerful.

 Cheerful...

 ...or spooky?

 Spooky! This is the hallway where the two twins with braids stood shoulder-to-shoulder.

As we toured this hall, a family were in the hall outside their room, getting their baby stroller and packages all situated. They had twin daughters, about nine years old, with braids!  I wanted to ask them to pose for pictures in the hallway. But I didn't, in case that would have been rude. Or in case they actually were ghosts. 

The adjoining hall is rife with contemporary ghost stories, repeated by many guests, of the sound of children running and laughing in the hall late at night. When the guests open the door, no one's there! When the guests call the front desk, and an employee goes upstairs to check, no one's there!

I guess Diane wasn't all that scared by the ghost stories. She dozed off on the hotel's gracious front verandah. 

And back at our (much cheaper) hotel in town, we repeatedly heard children running and laughing outside our room. But every time we looked outside--there were a million little kids wearing matching orange T-shirts!

(If you'd like to see more photos of this visit to Colorado, click here to jump to a Picasa web album of 169 photos.)

Tours--Assorted and Sundry

I've found myself on a few organized tours and a few de facto tours over the past few months, even though I've been roaming just around the western United States and everybody speaks English and I should be able to find my way around on my own. Sometimes, it's just easier or more interesting or more fun to join a group with a guide.

The most recent of these tours were in Sedona, Arizona with my friend Georgia two weeks ago. We covered everything from cowboys to vortexes. The Latin-style plural of this word is "vortices." However, as a native speaker of vernacular English, I find that "vortexes" sounds more natural. They are both listed in the Oxford dictionary. Georgia turns up her nose at "vortexes" and says that's only one example of why she no longer considers the Oxford dictionary to be an authoritative source on grammar. Interestingly enough, even as I am typing this sentence, the spell check in Blogger is now showing that "vortices" is misspelled and does not have a dictionary entry for it. Did I mention that I met Georgia in a writing group?

But back to the tours!  The classic tour in Sedona is a jeep ride in the red rocks. Our driver was a retired steel industry executive from Indiana who now drives jeeps while wearing a cowboy hat and spurs, with a bandolier full of bullets draped over the seat back. He never did use the spurs on the jeep--he probably didn't want to scratch the pretty red paint. But the jeep ride was fun and took us through some really pretty country.

Georgia smiling even though she had to get up too early...

We found a list of more unusual tours at Sedona Summit, the timeshare resort where we stayed. Of course, when staying at a timeshare resort, the tour to be avoided at all costs is the one that ends in a lengthy sales pitch. I refused to sign up for the sales pitch about 8 or 9 times, then snagged a list of resort activities. Patrick Houlihan, a former director of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, leads a few tours for Sedona Summit. I loved the Heard when I visited it last year, so we signed up for two local tours, figuring Patrick would give us an interesting anthropologist's perspective. And bonus, he turned out to be funny and entertaining, as well as knowledgeable.

We went out to hear about the vortexes Sedona is known for.Over the years, I"ve hiked to and stood on three of these vortexes. I myself have not felt the energy. Patrick took us to parking spots from which we could overlook the general areas of four of the vortexes. I couldn't tell for sure if he's a believer or not. At first, I thought no. Then I thought maybe. By the end of the tour, Georgia and I were thinking maybe he doesn't feel the energy himself, but he keeps an open mind. I can't help feeling a bit skeptical, mostly because these vortexes first became popular in 1981 when a psychic living in Sedona announced them to the world. She first promoted them in somewhat Buddhist-like terms. Later she switched to somewhat Native American-like terms. On the other hand, I have often felt some special energy when I've stood in a particularly beautiful, wild place. Usually that doesn't happen if there's a crowd gathered at the spot. And usually in Sedona there is a crowd gathered at a vortex. So, whatever idea or place helps someone focus on their own spiritual path is good by me.

 This photo shows the energy from the Bell Rock vortex sucking in Georgia's hat....

...and here the vortex is sucking my stomach fat sideways towards Bell Rock.

We made the short hike up towards a vortex in Boynton Canyon. On the trail, we met a man who handed us palm-sized flat pieces of sandstone carved into heart shapes and said, "I want to give you a piece of my heart." Patrick told us he's there every morning, and gives a sandstone heart to every woman he meets. He was quite sweet. And another night, I felt quite an energy surge from a Mexican waiter who kept pouring water for us. I theorized that perhaps he had been spending time at the airport vortex, which puts masculine energy into people, but Georgia scoffed and made some disparaging comments about precisely what energy surge I was feeling.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, further south in Tucson, my friend M and I joined the Tucson Hiking Meetup group for their weekly Friday night Sabino Stroll. It's a very easy two-mile walk up a section of paved road in Sabino Canyon. It's still light out when they start, but since Arizona insists on  marching to their own syncopated drummer and refuses to switch to daylight savings time, it gets dark early. The group advises participants to bring a good flashlight because rattlesnakes may be lolling about on the warm pavement after dark! And, apparently, scorpions are out and about in Sabino Canyon after dark, too. 

Phil, the young man who leads the walk, is a scorpion expert. He brought an ultraviolet light and shined it over the rocks and there were scorpions everywhere glowing in the dark! (Note to self:  never sit on a rock in the dark in Arizona!) M and I hung to the back of the group on the way down so we could walk with Phil and catch all the scorpion action. Phil had two friends, a female college student and an older gentleman with a gray ponytail, who were also really into scorpions. So we're walking down this road, in the dark with our headlamps. Phil and the girl have ultraviolet lights and are scanning the rocks along the edge of the road. A hopeful boy is following Scorpion Girl, trying to make friends. She is lecturing him, in very scholarly style and a loud voice, about scorpions. I said to M, "This is like one of those crossover TV episodes where the characters from one show visit another show. 'Big Bang Theory' meets  'Survivor Man.'"

When Phil spotted a scorpion, he'd try to catch it and put it in a vial. I was puzzled, and asked him why he'd want to catch them. He collects them, and keeps "about 40 or so" in his house. Also, his brother has a business in which he sells scorpions to people who collect them as "pets" or feed them to "pet" snakes. Phil could identify the species of scorpion and knew what regulations governed collecting for each (as well as assorted other insects, arachnids, arthropods, and reptiles we encountered that night). I asked if any ever escape inside his house, and he admitted that it happened once, but it was no big deal, because it went into his roommate's bedroom and was never seen again! I said, "It must be hard to find roommates with all those scorpions in your house." Turns out the roommate is his brother.

Most of the scorpions evaded Phil that night. He said they're quick when the weather's so hot. And they were! He did catch one-- a big one-- which he placed on the front of his shirt and let it run around--on the front of his shirt--while he told us about scorpions. He's very knowledgeable, but I was so freaked out that I don't remember much of what he told us. He was confident that this scorpion would not sting him, unless it got inside his shirt somehow and got smashed against his skin and felt threatened. He repeatedly used his fingers to herd it away from his collar and sleeves while he talked. Then he set it back on the ground and it scurried away into the dark. 

As we proceeded down the road--in the dark--Phil and the older gentleman swept their flashlights along the pavement several yards out ahead. They picked out the reflected glow from the eyes of  wolf spiders standing on the pavement. There were even more wolf spiders than scorpions! (Note to self: just stay indoors after dark in Arizona!) The older gentleman was very knowledgeable about wolf spiders and filled us in on the health and activities of the spiders we met. For example, one was probably sick and starving because its abdomen was very small. The next was thriving, because its abdomen was full and round. And a pair facing each other from a foot apart were engaged in courtship behavior.

And then...Phil made the big find of the evening. A baby gila monster right on the edge of the pavement! It was only about eight inches long and really cute, even though it was a venomous reptile. I'd seen an adult gila monster a few weeks earlier, and it was shy. It crawled off the trail and took cover under a pile of branches. But this little one was fierce. Phil was shining his flashlight on it and trying to get close enough to take a picture with his phone. It hissed at him, twice, then jumped at him! At that point, he backed off because he didn't want to harass it (I don't think he was concerned about the venomous reptile thing at all).

 M and I were both thrilled to see the baby gila monster and cringed at the scorpion on Phil's shirt and found the whole scorpion crew to be delightfully odd. When we got back to my apartment, M made me turn on all the lights and investigate every piece of leaf or paper or dust lying on the carpet. And I was a little jumpy for a few days afterwards!

M was with me on another off beat tour last fall. We found ourselves in Monument Valley watching sunset and moonrise over the huge rock formations known as the Mittens.

Monument Valley is just astonishing. It's on the Navajo Reservation and the tribe limits access by outsiders. There's one dirt road you can drive on your own, and it's not very good, so even though I'm always saying how much I love my Subaru with all-wheel-drive, I felt hesitant to tackle it. Plus, if you sign up for a tour with a Navajo guide, you get to go on other roads and see more.

Our first stop was a demonstration hogan where a grandmother demonstrated traditional weaving and a traditional hairstyle. When she asked for volunteers, I shoved M out into the middle of the circle, and said, "You have to do it. You have the flowing black hair for it." And the rest of the women in the group, me and several Germans, all had short haircuts. One of M's great grandfathers was Navajo, and our tour guide was the first to take a long look at her face and ask her nationality. The lady doing her hair saw it, too, and asked.

You can see in this photo that she took an immediate liking to M. 

 It was another jeep tour, but this time with billowing clouds of dust.

At one stop, we saw this petroglyph of Kokopelli lying on his back.

The evening before, in the jewelery shop inside the Navajo-owned The View Hotel, a young Navajo woman had told us a story about Kokopelli and a girl who refused his romantic advances. He followed her to where she was bathing in a pond, then hid underwater and used his flute to impregnate her. This petroglyph has to be about that story!

And finally, a tour that M and I decided not to take just a few weeks ago in Yellowstone National Park. When I was there last year, I talked with a man from back East who'd seen grizzlies and wolves on a tour with a wildlife biologist. We didn't see any! So I had it in mind that we could increase our chances of wildlife sightings if we found one of those tours. I did find a couple online. But they cost about $300 for a one day tour. And poking around on their websites and the Park Service websites, it didn't seem as if the tours provided access beyond the main roads open to everyone. So we decided to save our money--and then spent most of it buying jewelry and huckleberry ice cream in West Yellowstone anyway. But we put together our own "tour" of Yellowstone, which consisted mostly of driving over every one of the park's major roads and pulling over at geysers until we'd had enough and never wanted to see another geyser as long as we lived. We did go on one quasi-tour, a free guided walk with a ranger around West Thumb Geyser Basin right on Yellowstone Lake.

The ranger was a fun speaker, so people kept joining the group as we walked, until you could barely make your way through the crowd. 

But it was free! And I was really glad we didn't spend the $300 and get on the bus...

...because here's the gray wolf we saw on day 2 of our self-guided tour.