A day or two

-OK so what makes sense sitting in a hot bath thinking over the last couple of days. Well, skiing with friends and family....




Getting up early, while the groomers were still doing their grooming, and it looked like the sun would stay out over Monarch. The sense of the day opening with potential for deep powder in the trees.

But it is not simply being alone in the snow.




It is being with the snow, the inches that have fallen during the day, the woods, the sense of being in nature, as mammals, as a particular species that has learned to use tools to deal with climate, with weather, maybe even with climate change. It has changed before, but of course more slowly.

And yet ways of dealing with those elements...the warm waters that come from the earth inspected ways...through fractures in the crust of the earth, that Ted seems to sense, the center point of stillness...at Joyful Journey Hot Springs...after a day in the snow.





Of course even there we find instructions about how mammals should be behaving.


So we experience the "natural" to bring us in contact with whom we are...all in a few days. And then, as opposed to the outside, the wild, the uncontained, but then we cluster together in caves, in primitive dwellings, and then in what we call homes...


Playing games, being hyggelig...as they say in norsk, being cozy, warm, close....an ideal actually sought by all kinds of mammals. Even us people.

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Location:Salida, Co

Mountains

When miners, farmers, railroad workers came into these mountains, after crossing the great plains, they did not look kindly on these snow-covered peaks.  Mountains represented obstacles, cold, unpredictable danger.  The "purple mountains majesty" was largely a creation of English romanticism...a shift in aesthetic sensibility in the late 18th and 19th centuries...these "wild places" became part of an upper-class and, then, middle-class value system.  

"Over the course of the 18th century (whilst on the Grand Tour), 'the English' detoured specifically to visit the glaciers (whilst on their way to Italy) and spoke in hused tones of the towering cataracts and vast unpeopled reaches of the mountains." from the art in history blog.

But then there is the other side, the art of looking from the inside out.  Sawatch to the west, Mosquito Range to the east, Sangre de Cristo to the south, Las Garitas to the southwest.  and we...just sunk down in the Dry Union formation.  Makes you realize how una directional we can be. 

But for me a lot has to do with exploration.  On Wednesday, I went looking for a trail off the road to Monarch Pass.  Kept checking the map, going back and forth, and finally I realized it had to be at the same location as a Dept of Transportation (DOT) facility.   So I figured out where to park, set off on a trail, which ran into another trail and, then, just by accident, I saw out of  my left eye a sign...:"235"...the trail I was looking for...a few days before...maybe a week before...a skier had come down the trail...otherwise the trail had not been visited for some time. 

Thinking the trail was a steep climb of .5 mile (800 meters), I set off on snow shoes security linked to my high hiking boots.  Kept on going on and on.  And on.  And very steep, and then getting steeper...until I saw the banks of snow that form along a ridge line and I realized we'd come to the lake...rather we'd come 200 meters above the surface of the lake. 

The trail is just somewhat shy of 1.8 miles (120 meters)...plowing through the powder on the way down...so much fun.  

But for me it is about exploring...oh...I could get all the way to Cottonwood Pass if I leave early in the morning and pack some energy bars.  Or...just where does this lead...and "that's why the east side of the valley is so different.  It was not glaciated which wears the small stuff done and gone and only leaves the hardest of surfaces.  

So there is that process of "going into the mountains"...leaving the flat lands behind (if there ever were just flat lands this side of Russia)...and exploring the contours of Nature of the contours of one's own mind.

Signs

Signs communicate with us...in different ways.  They present themselves in unexpected and expected ways.  Riding my bike around Salida this afternoon, I found the range of signage intent to be quite astonishing.

Some signs "advertise" a product or products...a brand...a way of life...all in one image.  Some are creative and some are "just the facts, ma'm, just the facts." 

Some provide direction...or attempt to...to negotiate the chaos that otherwise would envelop our smalls towns and byways.  Helpful signs...here is the path to, if not righteousness, at least to civil participation in common use resources, such as stores, roads, parking.     

 

Other signs identify significant public institutions or resources....

and sometimes signs serve a more subtle role...to announce changes in social mores or to plead for inclusion of diversity.  .

Sometimes they invite us to take a break...

  
Which, if you've spent too much time today already on the  web, might be something you should do.  Cheers. 

Messages

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Came down from the Arkansas River Valley into the San Luis. Surprising amount of snow compared to Salida. It's been colder down here.

Sat for a while in the smoke house...messages left for me..for you.












The need of humans to communicate, like this blog, to transmit an idea, a feeling, a design, something to say, "here I am...I create therefore I am."

Location:Villa Grove, CO.

Monarch Park trail

Did the trail this morning...looked like no one had been on it the whole way for a week or so. Saw no one all day. Seemed to be shorter than before...but the downhill on the way back was challenging as much for the slope as for the fallen trees which made free styling through the forest a sketchy proposition.




From the trail, the alpine ski runs of Monarch Mountain come into view. Here in the enclosing forest, shade covers the tracks.




And then a track in the snow. A short, wide bellied mammal? We shared the trail for a while ... then the shadow of my friend turned into the woods. he to his home, me to mine.

Location:monarch pass Colorado

Outside and Inside

Looked out the window at first light...sun striking the tops of the Collegiate Range across the valley....



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set out for the Waterdog Lakes...my favorite snowshoe trail. Very difficult to find trailhead but once you are on it, follow the line of old power lines...




Which was dominated by ski tracks...I tried to avoid using them but at times I had to...I would otherwise sink into the snow...so I went until the only track was a single set made by skis which had come from over the top of the mountain. And I was generally knee deep, a few times hip deep, in snow at that point.



The land drained toward the east..that must be the direction of the lakes. But no tracks...not even deer...the snow was really soft even with the additional width, length of my snowshoes.




Did some yoga, iced my knee, put my snow gear away...generally I just hang them to dry out the sweat...then use them again when they are dry. Going to bike downtown to get a teapot.

Location:Monarch Mountain...the backside

Patterns

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so I am back in the world of black and white...no room for other colors this time of year.




Well, yeah, some brown, too. but when you get high in the back bowl behind Leadville...it is all grey, white, black.




Much of the black realized by abandoned mining structures, some quite abstract, others resembling a train tressel from which you half expect to see an old rail car filled with gnomes in bright green metallic uniforms.




It is a kind of landscape, created and then abandoned (by the Guggenheims no less...who are now in New York, Berlin, Dubai, Bilboa, with all there art. Well, it all got started here...then shelters, then Steele mills in Pueblo....




Then on the way home...a cloud formation hovering over the Central Valley...finding it hard to make up its mind.




The house I am staying in is the brown one on the right.

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Location:Salida, Colorado