Cabin Journal

Husks of Summer

As I wander through the fall landscape at the cabin, the fields and hillsides are covered with the remnants of last summer’s abundant growth: dried stalks, leaves, flowers, berries and seeds.

Everything crackles, snaps and pops as the autumn wind circles through, under and over the fields. The colors are every shade of beige: tawny, russet, sandy and tan. The only bright colors are the red berries of the wild rose bushes (right), a shiny and deep crimson. Last summer’s yellow sulfur flower has seeded into a surprisingly bright  orange and yellow arrangement, while the sage retains a  pale blue color, both in its leaves and berries, which I rub between my fingers and inhale its pungent smell that whispers of windswept plains.

I can’t identify all the plants, although I recognize the tall plant in the backyard as the green gentian that blooms in early summer, with pale white flowers flecked with purple strokes. Even though I know that, it’s not easy to correlate the soft petals of June with the tough shell of fall (top photo, in foreground).

I recognize the hull of the blue gentian, partly because it was one of the last flowers to bloom, and I remember where I saw most of them (left, in a bouquet with the sage). And I can identify the skeleton of the fireweed (below), as startling in fall, with its curly translucent seedheads, as in summer with its bright fuchsia colors.

Others I’m not sure of. Like the small plants bursting with glowing white seedheads. Or the straw flowers that still retain the shape of its petals and center disc: Are these the purple asters that grew so profusely in August?

Although I miss the color and delicacy of last summer’s flowers, I have to admire their tough skins now, their complex structure and the different ways each plant has produced a perfect basket for the seeds to mature and then disperse into new frontiers.

When I start to look closely at the evolution of each plant from flower to seed, the complexity of life is overwhelming. I could spend a whole lifetime appreciating each plant’s life cycle. I still have much to learn.

In any case, if you see someone on the path shaking a gourd of white seeds and watching the wind spin them into the sky, that’s me appreciating impermanence and the beginning of another season.

 

Aspen Whisperer

This time of year city residents flock to the mountains for the annual viewing of the aspen leaves. News and social media recommend the best places to go, so thousands jam mountain roads, cars piled two or three deep, leaf peepers eager to get photos of hillsides of golden aspen, which are then posted on Facebook or Instagram. It’s hard to resist.

Because I was gone for 11 days, I missed the aspen peak. When I came to the cabin, I was disappointed that most of the trees had already dropped their leaves. But I knew there had to be a few stands left, so I went searching. They weren’t on Coyote Hill Road nor on Big Owl Road, but I finally found a few stands near Fritz’s Pond.

 

Under the golden aspen, the grasses and flowers were dry and crumpled. I found a somewhat even place to sit down, turned off my thoughts and all other sensations (the pain in my feet) and just listened. Outside of bird songs, the soft clapping of the aspen leaves is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, like a musical hush that can enter your soul and root your mind. When the leaves stop their whispering, I wait for the wind to start up again in the tall pines and then descend into the aspen grove, so the whole musical revue starts again. If the wind is strong enough, the dried grasses will bend and add their own soft rattle to the wind-induced symphony.

 

You don’t need to drive dozens of miles, jumping out of the car to get the perfect picture before driving to the next hillside of golden colors. You don’t need to join the throngs of people photographing the hillside of yellow, orange and red colors. Just find one aspen grove, settle yourself into a comfortable spot, open your senses, and listen closely to the leaves. They’ll quiet your soul in ways you never knew possible.

As the World Turns

I was on the path where I always find flowers—especially columbines that cover the hillside in June—but today I was looking for one I hoped I wouldn’t find. Maybe I shouldn’t have looked so closely because when I put my head down there it was: the blue gentian—the last flower of the season (below).

This is the time when I can feel the earth tilt. The light is less intense; the days are shorter and nights cooler. The sun is setting behind Mount Meeker at 7; gone are the long slow summer nights that I took for granted. At night the temperatures are in the 40s. Suddenly everything feels different: we‘re going in the opposite direction, downhill toward fall.

In two weeks, the hummingbirds will leave, right on schedule, around the beginning of September. Shortly after that, the ground squirrels and chipmunks will nestle into their burrows for the winter. I’ve been enjoying their antics all summer, especially the young ones who boldly approach me when I come outside, staring at me, trying to figure out who is this huge foreign species who occasionally throws out vegetable and fruit remains.

There’s a sense of emptiness on my walks. The flowers that are still blooming look frayed and tired. We had a month of almost no precipitation, and the plants in front of my cabin–green-gray sagebrush, yellow gumweed, sulfur flowers—only grew this summer to half the size they usually do. About two weeks ago, I noticed the leaves on many starting to curl up. The heat hasn’t helped—80 degree days aren’t normal here, but then 100 degree days in the valley aren’t either.

The tiny raspberries are partly dried, although there’s enough for me to take a small bite. On the gallardia, one of the flashiest flowers here, the yellow petals are drooping over the orange seedheads, almost the last piece of color, jutting out  somewhat defiantly among the fading flowers. The purple asters are still blooming, although they’re on their last stages. And I admire the persistence of the purple harebells (right), which, despite their seeming fragility, have been flowering since July, through the heat, the rains and the cold nights.

But the pond (top and left) is still full, and, most gloriously, it’s covered with dragonflies—stick-like blue bodies with glistening bronze wings. I watch them swoop across the pond and then hover, long enough for me to try to get a photo, before they jet off again.

 What’s the reason for their flights? I know mating is going on, but it took me a while to see that they were laying eggs in the grasses around the pond. These larvae can live up to two years in the water before emerging as adults, which will then only live another few weeks to months. Then the life cycle begins again.

As with most of nature, and humanity, too I wonder why. Why bother? What urge is in these fragile insects that keeps them doing this strange life cycle? It’s the same urge that will send hummingbird 1,000 miles to their winter homes in Mexico. The same cycle that ushers in fall and then winter and back to spring. The one that keeps life rolling along. Do any of us know why?

Don’t Stop Singing

My neighbor told me the first thing he does when he wakes in the morning is throw open the door so he can hear the birds. At my home, the robins wake me at 4:30 with their insistent singing (“wake up, you sleepy head”) and then signal that I can go to bed around 8:30 at night.

Birds have always been a source of inspiration, but in this world of anxiety and distrust, more people are turning to birds as a source of pleasure, distraction and even sometimes exaltation.  I think of the New Yorkers who were captivated by a short-lived owl named Flaco who hunted for mice in Central Park. Here in Boulder County, several years ago officials built a platform near the fairgrounds for an osprey nest, and their progress has been avidly followed, making the front page news when one of their eggs hatch.

For most of our lives, birds were in the background. We may have noticed a flashy goldfinch or sparrows building a nest in the corner of the garage. But now people crave something that’s outside of our world. You only need to listen to a meadowlark (above), with its full-throated warbling, to start believing in beauty and purity again.

To us poor humans who can’t fly, the birds exist in a space where gravity doesn’t pull us down. I watch the violet-green swallows (above) make their dizzying swoops in the sky or the ravens slowly flap their wings above me, as if surveying their kingdom. The hummingbirds make me laugh with their frenzied chasing of each other (get out of my space!) and then in awe at their launch straight up and steep dives down, pulling up again before they hit the ground. Suddenly, my spirits lift.  

The house wren (right) fools you with its drab colors and boring name, but its song is one of the most beautiful around. And my Merlin app identified the ruby-crowned sparrow, a bird that hides in the upper reaches of the pine trees, letting its beautiful song float down to us humble humans. Once I heard it around the cabin, I heard it everywhere on my walks around Meeker Park.

It's not just robins that remind me to be more alert. Before the pasqueflowers disappeared, I went for a walk to savor their delicate beauty. But, as usual, my thoughts drifted off somewhere. Luckily, a jay arrived in the pine tree above me and loudly cawed: Wake up!

Birds seem to appear just when we need them. When my mother was dying, a hawk appeared in a tree across the alley from her apartment. After my father died, three sandhill cranes flew in circles above my two siblings and I after the funeral. Everyone I know has similar stories. What are these birds telling us? Especially, now in spring, when I’m at the cabin and surrounded by birds flying and singing, I feel like I’m being woven into a world I had forgotten that I belong to.

The downside of observing birds is that you notice when they’re gone. For two years in a row, I haven’t seen the mountain bluebirds (left), which previously hung out on fence posts around the open field. Nor have I seen the rare western bluebird, which once nested in the front yard, for many years. In the Wisconsin woods where I spent summers as a child, the whip-poor-wills’ lonesome cries can no longer be heard. We’ve lost so many birds over the past few decades that it makes you want to cry. Since 1970, three billion birds have disappeared across Canada and the U.S.—to habitat loss, climate change, cats and loss of insects, among other threats.

And yet, at night, before I go to bed, I listen one more time for the screech owl, its haunting call bouncing across the valley and through the pine trees. And then listen for the returning call. It’s still there. It hasn’t disappeared yet.  

 

Give Us Light

It’s been a dark, wet spring. The earth is a soggy mess, water running everywhere, and last year’s leaves are matted on the hillsides. Among the brown grasses flattened by winter’s snow, only a smattering of new green grasses can be seen. So the pasqueflowers are almost the only color in this drab landscape.

But they are not showy, like the columbine and purple penstemon that will appear in June. You have to search for them, let your eyes rake the ground because they like to keep low, out of the strong winds and cold nights. Already they’ve taken their first slam after a foot of snow fell since they first bloomed about two weeks ago. But these first flowers of the year  rose up again, somewhat bruised. One in my yard had its stem broken by the heavy snow, yet it’s still blooming.

Last week, wind gusts of 60-70 mph raked the land with snow blowing horizontally. Anything that could hide from the winds, like chipmunks and birds, did so. Strong pine trees tossed and turned, and many couldn’t withstand the force. A reported microburst a mile away laid down dozens of trees, shut down the power and phone service for more than 16 hours. One nearby neighbor lost at least 24 trees on their property.

I stayed inside the cabin, waiting for the roof to blow off, and the next morning I nervously checked on the pasqueflowers in my yard. I found them bowed but not beaten. Some were encased in frost, but they hadn’t given up, and when the sun came out, they lifted their heads back up. Even on a partly sunny day, their cups held the light I longed for.  

Their yearly visit is coming to an end, and soon they will go back to their lives underground. But their small survival and radiance always fortifies me

Six Signs of Spring

1. At Wild Basin, the snow is melting and exposing the boulders and dark water in St. Vrain Creek. The thawing leaves behind strange, beautiful forms. This one reminds me of something from the sea, maybe several dolphins momentarily halted by this still partly frozen world .

2. Kinnikinick (right) stays green all winter, but when the sun starts to get higher in the sky and the air temperature goes up a few degrees, this ground plant turns a deeper green, spreading itself across the pale rocks and providing a little color to the still mostly brown landscape. In a few weeks, its flowers will appear--small, pink and bell-shaped.

 

 

 

3. The chipmunks and ground squirrels have emerged from their dens. Last week, I was greeted by a ground squirrel that had taken up its customary position on my deck, sprawling across the wood, as if the first thing it wanted to do after emerging from underground, where it had been sleeping for six months, was relax in the sun. I felt the same way. 

Every summer I sit with my feet up on the bench, entertained and fascinated by these thoughtful and playful animals, even when they are trying to drink my wine or water, as one did a few years ago (left).

 

4. As the ice melts in St. Vrain Creek, these round holes appear, giving a glimpse of what lies below: an assortment of varied-color rocks. I've never understood why the melting creates round holes. This must be a rule of nature that I would understand if I were a scientist. Since I'm not, I can only peek into its depths.

5. Objects start emerging from the snow, standing out in this white landscape, like this old water pump (left) and a very young ponderosa tree  (below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6. Hammocks (below) start to appear. Sure, there's still two feet of snow on the ground and the creek is partly frozen. But hammockers have been waiting all winter and can't wait a minute longer. Just string the ends between two trees, listen to the creek murmuring and the wind—and relax. Ahh. Summer must be just around the corner.

 

The Amazing Pack Rat

A few weeks ago, I went into the garage/shed at the cabin and was startled to see a huge mass of pink insulation on top of an old chair that a previous owner had hung from the wall. It could have been a modern sculpture hanging from a museum wall. But I knew exactly what it was. My pack rat, which has delighted me for years with its creative collections of items spread around the garage, had built a nest from the insulation in the empty space under the cabin.

Since I hired a handyman several years ago to stop the cold air from creeping up from the ground in winter, I’ve been finding the pink insulation all over the yard and in the mouths of enterprising ground squirrels, carrying it to their underground nests (bottom).  I imagine this winter all the squirrels and chipmunks staying cozy and warm wrapped in the pink insulation.

I use this old garage, built for smaller cars of the 1940s, as a place to store paints, picnic benches and chairs, and logs for the wood-burning stove. The pack rat (or rats over the years) has found it an ideal place to take shelter from the cold and from predators, as well as raise its young.

This is the same pack rat, I assume, that a few years ago hung aspen branches, still with green leaves, on the hooks above the work bench (left). I also found the branches in the upstairs attic spread out on the floor in a perfect line. Because pack rats eat leaves, it probably brought these into the shed before winter winds destroyed them. But why did the animal spread them out so nicely instead of just throwing them in a heap?

Almost every time I open the garage door, I find some new handiwork from the pack rat, also known as a wood rat, which are about 5 inches long, bigger than most mice, including the deer mouse that inhabits the inside of the cabin.  Most often, I find that empty metal cans, paint brushes and stirrers have been moved from the shelf and assembled into a pile elsewhere in the garage.  

Before the rat built the pink nest on the wall, I found a smaller one on the floor in the garage corner, so perfectly rounded that it looked machine made. Leading up to it were small pieces of wood that I use for kindling. I took this to be a barricade, a preventive measure to keep me away from its nest.  This must haves been the same reason it laid down a row of sticks and pine cones on a board that’s on the floor (above). They were almost perfectly spaced and lined up vertically. I’m forced to imagine this animal going around the garage and selecting pieces just the right size and then carefully lining them up on the board, perhaps sitting back to see if the sculpture works, then arranging and rearranging. But for what purpose?

When I went online to find why these animals want to create such structures, the first pages that came up were from pest-control businesses, which gave tips on how to get rid of them. Inside your house they can be destructive. A neighbor told me about coming back from vacation and finding her cabin rearranged by a pack rat, at which point she called the animal-control business.  If the pack rat got into my cabin, I would feel the same way, but so far the wood rat has stayed inside the garage.

At the cabin I’ve had a lot of amazing wildlife encounters: moose strolling down the road, hummingbirds chasing each other, a river otter sledding down a snowy embankment, goshawks flying through the trees. But I think nothing amazes me more than this very plain, almost ugly animal that creates something imaginative out of simple items in the garage. No moose, no otter, no bird could do anything like that. Not many humans are that creative. And it lives in my shed, so I can be delighted by its achievements every time I open the garage door.

How Nature Endures

The persistence of nature—to keep going no matter what—has always amazed and inspired me. Many times I’ve spotted a young ponderosa pine emerge from a group of boulders, finding the only dirt among them to sink its roots and grow toward the sun as well as gather what little water it can find in inhospitable of conditions. I’ve seen aspen trees hanging precariously over streams where it looks like one push could send them into the water. Yet they hang on.

On rocky hillsides, the yellow and white daisy spreads out among the gravelly soil, adding brilliant color to what seems a barren site. In spring, pasqueflowers (below) are knocked out by snowstorms but emerge bedraggled, coated with their own anti-freeze that allows them to recover and flower once the sun melts the ice off their petals. On the tundra above 10,000 feet, alpine wildflowers survive cold, snow and harsh winds, improbably spreading dazzling color across the windswept and rocky terrain, as if showing the world that beauty can surface anywhere.

In the canyons bighorn sheep find ways to surmount cliffs, finding small cracks in the rock to heave themselves up and down vertical cliffs. Near the cabin I once saw a moose limping and most likely in pain, but instead of laying down and giving up, it kept walking, intent on finding willow bushes for sustenance.

On a mountain stream, I’ve seen trout leap up a waterfall, throwing themselves over and over with all their strength in this uphill struggle to migrate. On their own migration journeys, hoofed animals like deer and elk will find a way around barbed wire fences. Pronghorn will scoot under them, lowering themselves as much as possible to avoid getting snagged on the barbs or caught in the wire. Nothing seems to deter them.

At the cabin, every spring the hummingbirds arrive during snowstorms and hunker down as best they can, waiting for the sun to come back out and warm them. This is what life hands them and so they endure the cold and wind, even while they dive bomb each other and keep up their incessant squabbling. Other birds, like songbirds, work to build nests in spring, lay their eggs and wait for them to hatch. But if a strong wind or hungry bear knocks down the nest, the parents, without hesitation or lamentation, will build a second nest if the conditions are right.

Even our pets persevere when in pain or near death. A friend didn’t realize how sick her dog was until she took him for a walk and he collapsed on the trail. We were able to coax him back to the car, but a visit to the vet showed that he had serious health issues and had been in pain. Yet he didn’t complain, kept pushing and following his human companion until he couldn’t anymore.

I once had a cat whose body was falling apart and could barely walk, but when she wanted to be on the bed with me, she would claw up the blanket. If only we humans were so persevering and uncomplaining.   

On Lily Lake, on a late winter day, when only a patch of water is open, Canada geese huddle around its edges. Where does this push to survive and thrive come from? Do humans have it, or has it been knocked out of us because life has become too easy: food from the supermarket, medical interventions for most any physical problem and buildings that provide shelter from cold, wind and rain. I don’t know the answers. But when I see a small pine tree emerging from between  boulders, my heart breaks a little: I know it likely won’t survive but the fact that it keeps trying gives me hope and makes me want to try harder.

The Giant Among Us

I’ve worshipped this magnificent tree since I’ve been at the cabin. It’s a huge ponderosa, tall and wide enough that it would take two people to encircle it with their arms. This giant pine grows by the creek, partly obscured by a thicket of other ponderosas that are dwarfed by the big one.

A few years ago a young couple bought the cabin and property that holds this tree and celebrated their marriage by carving a huge heart into the bark and tying a massive white ribbon around it. At the time I worried that they had done damage to this elder of the forest but also upset that they had treated this ancient being with such disrespect.

But the tree has survived, just like it has endured hundreds of years of storms, strong winds, droughts and fires. My neighbor who now owns the property recently found that the tree is likely 450 years old. Ponderosas can live for 600 years, but most are much younger—around 200, so this one is ancient.

This venerable ponderosa humbles me because I realize that this tree has more claim to this land than me. I’ve only “owned” this third of an acre for 15 years. In the tree’s more than four centuries of life, rivers have changed course in this valley and uncountable numbers of wildlife have passed through—herds of buffalo, elk and deer plus smaller animals like coyotes, wolves and foxes.

It may have stood alone for decades before its seeds birthed other pines, which helped create this forest. Hundreds of generations of birds would have built nests in its branches. An occasional group of native people may have passed through—also finding a haven under its arms and by the creek, under the imposing presence of Mount Meeker.

It was only 100 years ago when white humans started establishing themselves in this valley: cutting down trees to build houses and barns, establishing roads, digging ditches and raising farm animals, including cattle and horses. Somehow this tree was left alone while humans busied themselves with civilizing what was once wilderness.

While this tree was just sinking its roots into the earth in the mid-1500s, across the ocean, civilization was progressing in fits and starts: Leonardo da Vinci was impressing kings and queens with his inventions and creations; Shakespeare was drawing audiences to his plays; Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded; and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was riling up people with the radical suggestion that the earth moves around the sun.

Yet even though this tree has endured a lot, it will likely be the last of its kind. Due to warming temperatures, logging, wildfires and insect infestation, the tall ones are becoming rarer. At a watershed workshop last summer held not far from my cabin, a forester said that when these old trees die, they are not being replaced because it’s becoming too hot and dry for younger ones to thrive. To escape these hostile conditions, the ponderosa species is moving higher up the mountains or farther north where it’s cooler and wetter. As the trees disappear, we’ll start seeing more grasslands.

By tree standards, the ponderosas’ lifetimes don’t necessarily measure up to other species. The California redwoods can live to over 2,000 years, and higher up in the mountains here in Colorado the bristlecone pines can be 1,000 years old, growing at a rate of 1 inch a year while clinging low to the mountainside to avoid strong winds.

But having this ponderosa pine so close is a visible sign that the human presence is short compared to not just this tree but others around me. It forces me to imagine what this place looked like before humans—before me. It reminds me that my place in the world, and other humans, is small and that this tree will likely outlive me and will oversee a world that I can’t even envision.

The world has changed a lot in its 450 years, and yet this ancient tree goes on, still providing shelter for all the creatures—birds, squirrels and humans like me. In a world that’s becoming constantly faster, I’m in awe of something that measures time in decades not minutes, a gentle reminder to slow myself down, to be patient and to endure anything and everything. I bow to its wisdom and perseverance.

Great Expectations

When we had a late start to spring, including the aspen trees leafing out one or two weeks later than usual, I expected that the aspen would last later into fall, maybe through mid-October. Plus, the summer was so bountiful, how could my good fortune not continue into fall?

But something went wrong, because the colors are fading away and turning pale instead of their usual brilliant gold. Maybe we got too much rain, and all that moisture caused a blight, because the aspen leaves have brown splotches on them. Instead of the colors lasting until mid-October or even later, the trees have taken a quick death, going before their time—or at least before the time I expected. Now the flashiest color is the red of the rosehip (below), which was bountiful this year.

Most autumns, I have a schedule for seeing the fall colors. I start out hiking in areas that will be first hit by frost—up in the high country, close to tree line. I then move lower down the mountain to trails where the aspen bloom later, and finish the fall celebration in the foothills above Boulder. I know where the best pockets of changing aspen are, and it’s still a mystery why two stands of aspen, 100 feet apart, are on different schedules.

Although most of the aspen around the cabin have shed their leaves, this week I found a tall stand near Fritz’s Pond (below). I sat in this light-filled grove and listened to the leaves in the wind— the closest thing to silence yet a soft and tender reminder that the world was alive. It sounded like yearning—for fall to never end, for winter to never start or for life to continue.

The next morning I sat outside in the cold chill, letting the sun warm me. When the aspen leaves started chattering, what I heard was “hurry, hurry, hurry,” as in get ready for winter, like the frantic gray squirrels running up and down the fence carrying pine cones to their winter dens. Don’t waste life on useless thoughts; get moving.

But when I listened deeper, I heard “accept” and a reminder that life continued. Even though the aspen trees and willow bushes were shedding their leaves, and the grasses have all turned brown, life was still here, although it had retreated underground, where it would renew itself all winter. I could hear the hum.

The Big Flood

Ten years ago, I was witness to the power of nature when it’s out of control. It had been raining for two days when I came up to the cabin to see if it had floated away yet. When I got there, a quarter of the living room had water leaking from the ceiling: falling on the carpet, dripping down from around the fireplace, and soaking the antique side table and wooden floor. I called the man who had installed my roof a few years before, and he drove out from Estes Park, threw a tarp over the chimney, and miraculously the leaks stopped.

But that was the last time anyone would be able to get in and out of Meeker Park for four days because that night the storm unleashed its full fury, enough rain falling on top of Mount Meeker to cause the landslide that is still visible. My neighbor who lives on the creek told me that he heard chaos all night: trees and boulders crashing down from above.

The next morning, the rain had slowed, and we went to observe the damage: the valley flooded by what used to be a creek small enough to jump across, and the gaping hole over Cabin Creek where there had been a bridge the day before (left). In the other direction, north, the rains had carved a deep enough hole in the dirt road to make it impassable. We were trapped but we didn’t know for how long, and we didn’t know if we were the only ones affected by this devastating storm, because our phone lines and Internet were down.

It's a strange feeling to be stranded, to have no communication with the outside world. It leaves you in a state of unknowing, unsure what to do, what will happen next. The few neighbors that were here that week started to share as much information as we could. One group from Louisiana, who had unfortunately picked a bad time to take a vacation in Colorado, got partial TV reception, and so we found out that the flood had affected other parts of the state.

Only later would we find out that at least three of the canyons that lead to Allenspark and Estes Park were partially destroyed and impassable; and that the town of Lyons, north of Boulder, was cut off from the rest of the world by the flooding of two streams on either side of town, which had engulfed the town in mud and destroyed a trailer court near one of the creeks. Only later would we learn that 18 inches of rain had fallen—more than our yearly average precipitation. Four people died in the floods, 11,000 people were evacuated, some by helicopter; 18,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. The destruction was later calculated at about $2 billion. Weather analysts, searching for words to describe the torrential rains, deemed it “biblical.”

On the edge of Estes Park, raging Fish Creek had knocked out parts of the road (above). When I saw the damage several weeks later, I was stunned to see up close what water can do when there's no stopping it: leaving whole chunks of asphalt in disarray, with mud and sand thrown to the sides. Upriver the flood had washed away a beaver lodge, and I still wonder what happened to the animals.

It took years to rebuild the South St. Vrain Canyon, my main route from the valley to the cabin. Driving through the canyon today, I can still see the places where the wall of water careened across the canyon and carved out one hillside at a depth of at least 50 feet. I try to imagine this flood filling up the canyon where the river now is not more than a foot deep in most places. Luckily, the damage was done at night, so no cars were tossed by the flood; no lives lost here.  

After the rains stopped, the sun came out. I wanted everything to be normal again, and all the right signs were there: a brilliant fall day with the aspens changing color. But it wasn’t normal, because these floods occurred in September, one of the driest months of the year; the amount of rain that fell was unprecedented; and several days after the rains stopped water was still pooled everywhere. I badly wanted to hike among the golden aspen, like I do every fall, but I couldn’t get up in the hills, because the flooded creeks made it impossible.

But nothing is normal anymore. I’ve come to realize that the 2013 flood was just the first of disasters caused by climate change that I’ve witnessed. I know it won’t be the last.