Flatirons and Natural Bridges

Sweet peas in Chautauqua Meadow, Boulder, Colorado

The last leg of Kali's and my exploration of Colorado in June took us to Boulder, about 30 miles northwest of Denver, for four days.  While we were there, we hiked to Royal Arch in the Chautauqua Meadow Park at the base of the famous Flatirons rock formation. 

Walkers amid the sweet peas in Chautauqua Meadow

The well-used Chautauqua Trail, heading toward the Flatirons

We tackled the 3.2-mile (round trip) hike after lunch because we had been busy with other things in the morning.  Unfortunately, the day was sunny and hot, which added to the already challenging climb to Royal Arch.

Approaching the Flatirons, and blessed relief from the sun in Ponderosa pine forest

As it turned out, Kali just wasn't up for the climb - and a climb it was.  The trail ascended 1,320 feet in 1.6 miles.  Kali managed to get two-thirds of the way to the arch before she became so hot and tired she just couldn't climb any higher; I finished the ascent, but the steepest and most challenging part of the trail was the portion above and beyond the point at which Kali abandoned the climb.  It's a good thing she stopped whee she did.

Royal Arch; note the man in the lower left for perspective

View through Royal Arch

Hikers resting near the base of Royal Arch, enjoying the view eastward onto the plains

View northward over the city of Boulder from Royal Arch, with one of the Flatiron fins in the foreground

The view from the arch was impressive, but partially obscured by typical summer afternoon haze combined with smoke from the huge forest fire burning to the north near Fort Collins.

My completing the hike to the arch took about 30 minutes each way, so Kali decided not to wait for me and began to descend slowly down the trail.  I finally caught up with her, and we enjoyed a leisurely stroll back to our parked car, botanizing and birding along the way.

A prickly pear cactus (Opuntia spp.) sprouting a new pad

Western Salsify (or Goat's-beard) seed head (Tragopogon dubius), non-native but intriguing

"Life lister" and Prairie "Snowstorm"

Along CO 14,  en route to Pawnee National Grassland

I've always been intrigued by the big green splotch shown on maps of northeast Colorado labeled Pawnee National Grassland.  The name conjures up the prairie primeval, with endless expanses of short grass meadows dotted with wildflowers grazed by American bison.  The air would be alive with grassland birds.

The reality is far different.  Sure, the land is flat and the horizon incredibly expansive, but the prairie has been gridded-up with dirt roads, the pastures are all fenced, and the cattle (not bison) have overgrazed the grasses down to nubs in most places.

The national grassland is administered by the national forest service, an agency not known for enlightened grazing practices on its own forested land, so why should I have expected anything different out on the plains.

Kali and I drove about 40 miles east of Ft. Collins on Saturday morning, June 9 to the Owl Creek Recreation Area, a birding hotspot in the grassland.  Before setting out, I assumed it would be a place where grassland species gathered.  Owl Creek turned out to be a large grove of cottonwood trees that had become established along the bone-dry Owl Creek streambed.  And, true to its reputation, the place was alive with birds (where the heck else would birds find any habitat in this barren, overgrazed grassland?), though species diversity was limited.

Kali and I wandered along the short, casual trail that threaded through the cottonwood grove.  Temperatures - even before noon - were near 100 degrees F.  We did managed to add one bird to our life lists there, a Lark Sparrow (Chondestes grammacus).  We also enjoyed a fine view of a Prairie Falcon (Falco mexicanus) scouting the grasslands for prey, but we'd seen these raptors before.

We had planned to drive further east to hike to the Pawnee Buttes, two rocky mesas that stick up out of the plains in another part of the grassland, but the drive would have been slow going on dirt roads, and the weather was so sweltering that we wouldn't have been able to make the trek across open ground to the buttes even if we had driven to the spot, so we retreated to the shade of the cottonwoods for lunch, and then drove back to Ft. Collins.

The cottonwood trees at Owl Creek were shedding their fluffy seeds in profusion.  There was so much cottonwood fluff in the hot breeze that it looked like a snowstorm in the summer prairie.  I tried to capture some of the magic in an image, the best of which I have included here.  Enlarge the picture to better appreciate the scene.

Poor Poudre Canyon

Fly fishing the Cache la Poudre River

The day following our visit to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River near Grand Junction, Colorado, Kali and I drove east for six hours, crossing the Continental Divide, and continuing on to Ft. Collins, about 1-1/2 hours north of Denver.

On the second day after our arrival, we drove Colorado Highway 14 west from Ft. Collins, up into the foothills of the Rockies through the canyon of the Cache la Poudre River.

First, pronunciation.  The name of the river (at least in northern Colorado) is pronounced "cash la POOH-der."  Most folks we spoke with just called it "the Poudre."  The name means "hide the powder," which I surmise refers to "gunpowder," though that's only my guess.  (Hide the baking powder?)  The Poudre is the only federally designated Wild and Scenic River in Colorado but, of course, it's hardly the only wild and scenic river in the state.  The river rises as the very modest spillover from tiny Poudre Lake, a glacial tarn that sits snug up against the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park at 10,758 feet (3279 m) in elevation.

At the beginning, the river flows as a slough through alpine wet meadows, and then begins its descent from the mountains, crossing onto national forest land north of Rocky Mountain National Park.  Then it turns east and cascades alongside Highway 14 through the Poudre Canyon.  After a few dozen miles, it spills onto the plains at Ft. Collins, and then continues to flow eastward - ever diminished by agricultural irrigation diversions - until what's left of it joins the South Platte River and thence, the Missouri and Mississippi.

The river's flow is over-allocated which, in Colorado water rights parlance, means that the various entities that have the legal authority to withdraw water from the river in sum could withdraw more water from the river than the river actually carries.  In some ways, it's amazing that there's any water in the river at all; I understand that in the winter, when most runoff is solidly frozen, the river level gets extremely low.

Cache la Poudre River in its canyon

In addition to being beatuiful, the canyon is a regional playground.  Numerous hiking trails lead off into the adjacent national forest, and plenty of folks use the river for kayaking, rafting, and fishing.

Rafting the Poudre

Kali and I stopped for lunch at a roadside turnout that is used by the rafting companies as a takeout point for their rafting trips.  We sat alongside the river downstream of the rafters' takeout, and had a beautiful, quiet lunch on the bank.

Lunch along the Poudre

Across the river, an American Robin was feeding ripe cherries to nestlings in the riparian conifers.

Kayaking the Poudre

Further along, as the canyon penetrates deeper into the mountains, the river becomes increasingly rocky and wild.  It was along this stretch that we began to see kayakers challenging the current.

About halfway up the canyon, we turned north and drove up a long, steep gravel road out of the canyon.  This road brought us to a set of small lakes called Red Feather Lakes that stud the national forest uplands away from the river.  We stopped at Bellaire Lake, but found that its shoreline had been beaten down by fishermen, many of whom seemed to be there that afternoon.  Nevertheless, I took a photograph, and I include it here because you can see several brown, dead conifers.  Much of the coniferous forest in Colorado is brown because pine bark beetles have killed a significant proportion of the the trees in the West, providing plenty of dry wood to carry fires.

Bellaire Lake

In fact, the day after Kali and I visited, lightning struck the forest in the Poudre Canyon and ignited a forest fire.  What started as a 2-acre blaze exploded into a 6,000-acre fire within six hours and eventually became the High Park Fire, which grew into the largest forest fire in Colorado history (since eclipsed by the fire that consumed parts of Colorado Springs late last month).  A combination of very high air temperatures, very low humidity, and the presence of many, many dead trees created a perfect firestorm - all of it centered in and around the Poudre Canyon.

I think nearly every day about that robin carrying cherries for its young.  Forest fires don't always burn clear through an area; they can be spotty and leave some trees unharmed.  Perhaps this robin family was among the lucky ones since they were against the river, but I doubt it, because the nest was right in the center of the fire.

Unnatural Alert

Warning:  This post is not a recording of events in the natural world; in fact, it's a bit of a comment on the unnatural (unless you count enjoying yourself to be a natural human inclination).  As such I'll keep it short and beg your indulgence.

I went to the Scissor Sisters performance at the Electric Factory concert venue in Philadelphia last night.   Kali likes their music, too, but declined to join me for fear of having to stay up way past her bedtime and hurting her ears--both of which the concert did.  Ultimately, I don't think that they generated the same tribal energy that they did two years ago in Philly, but I did my fair share of dancing, and the Sisters certainly gave it their all for the crowd even though they're nearing the end of their current American tour.

The two leads: Anna Matronic and Jake Shears

Pilgrimage to Black Canyon

The Dragon

My mother had one sibling, a reprobate and ne'er-do-well named Bob.  I never met the man.   There was always a bit of tension in my family about Bob's situation.  I can't ever recall my parents fighting with one another, but I do remember a tense scene for a few summer days when I was young when my mother proposed allowing Bob to move in with our family until he got his life straightened out.  Our tiny suburban house was already tight with my parents and three siblings, and I foresaw a catastrophe if we stuffed in another person--and a stranger as well.  My father must have felt the same way, because Bob never showed up at the door, and after a while the whole affair receded into history.

My parents, despite both working, were of very modest means.  We took two family vacations during the entire time I was growing up, one to see Niagara Falls, and the other to swim in the ocean at Virginia Beach, Virginia.  Because they couldn't afford it, my parents never allowed themselves to be bitten by the travel bug.

I was out of the house and in college when my uncle Bob died.  At the time, he had been living in Pueblo, Colorado.  So, it came as a bit of a surprise to me when my mother called to inform me that she and my dad were going to drive from Cleveland, Ohio to Pueblo to take care of Bob's funeral and affairs.  A few days following the funeral, I received a postcard from my parents; after they had taken care of Bob's affairs, they had driven further west to Delta, Colorado to visit the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument (since re-designated a national park).  I was left with two questions upon receiving their card:  (1) Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Monument (huh?) and (2) of all the places to visit in the West, why there?

I never really talked to my parents in detail about their trip, and my mother has since died, but I've always had this little feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to visit the one spectacular natural feature in the West that had piqued my mother's interest enough to give her the incentive to drive a half-day further west to see.  Since Kali and I were in Grand Junction in June (a two-hour drive from the Black Canyon), I definitely wasn't going to pass up the opportunity.

A typical view of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison.  The Gunnison River is visible in the lower left of the image.

Kali at the Gunnison Point Overlook.  The day we visited was hot, humid and hazy.

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Pink and grey

The Gunnison River has been carving the canyon for about two million years.  The canyon walls are formed of metamorphic granite and gneiss.  But the area has had a tortured geologic history, and magma has flowed into and filled cracks in the base rock, cooling to form a harder rock called pegmatite.  The pegmatite is lighter-colored than the rocks in the cliffs, is more dense, and is less easily eroded.  As a result, many of the numerous overlooks in the park are located on pegmatite dikes, sills and fins that extend out and into the canyon and stand apart from the general canyon walls.

Sinuous

The Gunnison River has been dammed and diverted upstream of the canyon for agricultural irrigation, which has significantly diminished its flow through the gorge.  Imagine the sight when the river ran at 12,000 cubic feet per second during heavy spring runoff...

The Painted Wall

At its deepest, the canyon is 2,772 feet (856 m) from rim to floor.  The Painted Cliff in the image above, at 2,300 feet (702 m), is the highest cliff in the state of Colorado. If the Empire State Building stood on the canyon floor here, it would reach slightly more than half way to the top of the cliff.

A pink pegmatite alvar, with the partially snowy Mummy Mountains in the far distance across the canyon.

An iridescent green, pollen dusted native bee in a rose-pink cactus flower.

A woodpecker fancied this dead juniper

Broad and dark-leaved Arrowleaf Balsamroot plants (Balsamorhiza saggitata) were abundant in the park, but few retained their flowers this late in the season.

A rock garden; the lupines were especially numerous and beautiful.

A lichen-encrusted pinyon pine limb.

Juniper on a pink pegmatite alvar

My favorite image from the visit

An Excuse to Walk in the Woods

Scarlet Tanager (Piranga olivacea)

(Note: The images illustrating this post are not mine; they are borrowed from the Web.)

Last Saturday morning, (June 30) I completed my 2012 series of censuses of the birds that are breeding in the largest forest in our natural area.  This is the 21st straight year that I have been marching through the woods, starting at the crack of dawn and finishing up about 9 a.m.

This project began in 1991 when the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology asked birders nationwide to conduct a census of the birds breeding in deep woods in order to assess the population status of forest interior breeders like Wood Thrushes, Veerys, and Scarlet Tanagers.  Cornell's protocol required participants to establish a transect through their chosen woodland, and to locate stopping points spaced 50 meters apart along the transect.  Then, the birders were asked to walk the transect at least eight times during each breeding season, stand quietly for 10 minutes at each designated stopping point, and record the birds heard singing or observed within 50 meters of each stopping point.  After completing eight walks, the birders were instructed to review their observations and to try (to the best of their abilities) to map territories of individual breeding pairs.

I dutifully reported my results to Cornell for the first nine years, but after the 2009 census Cornell terminated the project.  By this point, I had invested a lot of time in the woods and had also come to realize that information about birds breeding in our forest could be a valuable, independent measure of the ecological integrity of our woods and a bellwether of our success in actively restoring forest in old-fields adjacent to the existing forest.  After all, birds can "vote with their wings," and if the habitat is not to their liking, they'll move on.  So, I have continued the censuses, even though there's no platform on which to share the data.  (I did hear from the researchers at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains a few years ago; they, too, had continued their census after Cornell terminated the project, and they were seeking information from others who had continued to collect data.)

Red-eyed Vireo (Vireo olivaceous)

I haven't carefully analyzed all of the information I've gathered over the years, but I do have some impressions.  First, a few species that had been fairly common when I began the censuses have declined, including Red-eyed Vireos (not so worrisome, at least in this context, because they aren't really forest interior breeders) and Veerys (Catharus fuscescens) (much more of a concern, because they do need large blocks of woodland to breed). 

Brown-headed Cowbird (Molothrus ater)

On a far more positive note, Brown-headed Cowbirds, which are nest parasites, have all but disappeared from the woods, though initially they had been numerous.  Also on the very positive side, Wood Thrushes remain among the most common breeders in the forest; many of my suburban ornithologist colleagues would be green with envy over the number of breeding Wood Thrushes in my woodland.

Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina)

Another observation:  the forest topography is gently rolling, with two rills flowing through shallow valleys draining from the east to the west.  More birds select the south-facing slopes of these valleys than the north-facing slopes--I'm guessing because the south-facing slopes are a bit warmer.  I have two other observations that will ring true with every experienced birder.  First, the birds sing less frequently as the time after dawn lengthens, so I have to alternate the direction of my walks in the woods, starting one time at the north end of the transect to catch the north-end early morning singers, and then at the south end on the next walk to catch the south-end early birds.  Second, the woods become increasingly quiet as the breeding season progresses; the birds have established their territories, breeding, brooding and raising young are underway, and there's less and less need to defend boundaries.  So, for the human observer, the last few walks in the series of eight, especially the sections containing the "late morning" stopping points observed from 8-9 a.m., can become pretty tedious affairs because there's so little "action" to document.

And, as for last Saturday's final census.  Well, I was only in the woods for one hour from 7-8 a.m. observing six stopping points (instead of the usual 18) because this was a special "ninth" walk to make-up for the six stopping points I was unable to observe on May 25 when a ferocious early morning thunderstorm drove me out of the woods to seek cover under a neighbor's shed.         

Colorado National Monument - Part 2, The Rest

The view north into Columbus Canyon from Cold Shivers Point.  The Grand Valley and the Book Cliffs are visible in the distant haze.

After we hiked the Devil's Kitchen Trail at the eastern end of Colorado National Monument (see my blog post on June 28), we drove the 23-mile Rim Rock Road from east to west along the tops of the spectacular cliffs in the park.  The park has an east-west orientation, and all of the cliffs face northward toward the Colorado River, the Grand Valley, and the Book Cliffs ten miles away to the north.  The monument's cliffs have been dissected by streams that have cut deep, dramatic canyons.  There are at least two dozen overlooks along the Rim Rock Road, and we stopped (and took photographs) at each and every one.  I'll share some of the best.

Red Canyon almost looks as if it had been carved by a glacier, but wasn't.

View northward into Ute Canyon.  There's a trail the entire length, but climbing 1,000 feet up a series of switchbacks at the southern end would be a challenge--especially in the summer.

Fallen Rock in Ute Canyon.  More properly, it ought to be named Slumped Rock.

A natural arch in the process of forming.

I'd like to see this pour-off after a summer thunderstorm!

The Coke Ovens in Monument Canyon

Formation in Monument Canyon

Independence Monument.  A group of climbers scales this rock every July 4 and places an American flag on the summit.

Guess the name of this formation; I'll bet you'll get it correct!

When Kali and I arrived back at our bed-and-breakfast after dinner, we were treated to a spectacular Western sunset that lasted for well over 20 minutes.