Catching up

"I had a whole conversation with him in the office before he turned around and went away and I finally realized he was wearing rollerblades. I thought he'd seemed taller."

It's 94 degrees in the apartment, so I'm here in the coffee shop (where I just overheard the above) to write. I have had many adventures this spring, and haven't posted about any of them. So here's a start.

 

A shot of Boulder from a hike I did while the trails were all still ice.

  

A strange cloud over North Table Mountain, outside work, one morning.

  

Abby consenting to pose for a picture with the familiar restroom-quiz in New Mexico, where we did in fact go to Santa Fe, stay in a hotel and eat at restaurants, none of which made for very interesting photos.

  

A woman practices slacklining at Cheesman Park, which is my new favorite place. I was lying in my hammock reading a book at the time.

  

Relaxing at Cheesman Park with Kris, and hammocks.

  

One night Kris and I went up to White Ranch Open Space Park to camp. We had our hammocks and ended up setting them up in the horse corral, so that we could see the stars at night. Or possibly just to be silly.

 I went for a couple days up to Fort Collins, where I did two long day hikes in the new open space areas north of the town. Red Mountain Open Space is colorful and dramatic and I recommend it for hiking... it's too bad they don't let you do backcountry camping. I did a 12-mile loop to be back to my car by dark.

 

  

  

  

Pronghorn running away, above.

  

Soapstone Prairie Natural Area, to the east, is another new open space that is probably better suited for mountain biking. It's a bit tedious for hiking, as the trails snaked across the open prairie, taking the longest route to go from one place to another and making detours to go over mounds of dirt. As a hiker I did not want to walk 20 feet out of the way so I could plod over a 1-foot-high mound of dirt. It was a bit silly. However, some photos:

 

  

  

  

  

  

 I had hiked 20 miles on the second day. Above, my feet at the end of the day. They didn't hurt, but they'd been rubbing in my boots and I didn't want any blisters to develop. Unfortunately, after the first few miles, the sticky moleskin pads I put on my heels were coming unstuck, so I resorted to holding them on with tape. I look like an invalid. Mostly I was very hungry and proceeded to eat a can of chili and can of spinach in about 5 minutes once I got back to Jess's apartment.

 I returned to White Ranch to camp on another night, and did some night photography. You can see the lights of Denver.

 

  

 And a cool bug on my hat.

Next, the backpacking trip that Jess and I took to Dominguez Canyons.

Golden intermission

I have some free time at the moment, and I have these photos that were taken when I went tubing on Clear Creek in Golden a month ago. They were taken with a waterproof disposable camera. I won't include all of the pictures... I am assuming that pictures of, say, Jess's feet mostly of interest only to Jess, and she already knows what her own feet look like... but I will put up the ones of me, for my adoring family.


I was wearing my "swim shirt" (or "rash guard" if I want to sound like a surfer), which I put on so that I wouldn't have to use so much sunscreen, but perhaps it also has some insulating value as I was able to tolerate the cold water of the river much better than my companions, who are my Denver friend Jess (leg on right) and her friend Jeremy (leg on left).


Jess is not so much smiling in this picture as grimacing through the icy cold. I suppose it was not much colder than the ocean off Connecticut in the summer, but we were mostly sitting, not swimming, and the clouds were over the sun more often than not.


A shot of the many people enjoying the river on this weekend day at the end of August. And my white legs.


Jeremy and Jess rescue a flip flop. Also, my thumb, which I managed to insert into the picture after warning the other two that it was easy to get their thumbs in the picture. The camera came with a sort of recessed lens that just invited you to put your thumb over it.


Me with one of Golden's 10,000 bronze statues. Someone had put a polo shirt on this statue of a little boy playing baseball, both of his arms through one arm of the shirt, and it looked bizarre. And we needed to use up photos on the camera.

Tubing was a tremendous amount of fun... the river was quite low, so that I ended up with a couple of huge purple bruises on my butt from hitting rocks. But most of it was still tubable... what a great word... and there were several rapids to go over. You would dip down over a smooth slide of water, and then gasp with cold as the wave at the bottom splashed up over the tube and onto your previously dry torso. We went down one and a half times until certain people in the group got too cold. They exhorted me to go down again by myself if I liked it so gosh darned much, but I refused. Half the fun was trying to keep hold of their feet and elbows as we went down.

Well, today Katie and I went antique shopping in Denver. Tomorrow we leave. I am exhausted and have nothing else left to say.

Taking the air

Many small excursions in the past couple weeks... I will start with a couple sights from downtown Golden.


Where else can you get ski wear and wedding dresses in one place?


I had talked about devoting a blog entry to the statues of Golden, but at the time I took this it seemed much more interesting to me... just pictures of the placards, and let my audience imagine the statues. But that might be a bit too perverse. So I leave you with just the above. (Imagine the cowboy!)

I had to go into downtown Denver last week to pick up my new computer monitor, which will allow me to use my desktop computer. I had bought the new LCD monitor from an ebay seller in Denver so that I wouldn't have to pay the $25 shipping fee, but I did have to go into town to pick it up. So I took some pictures too.


The Denver public transportation agency has bikes for rental. I did actually see a few people riding these bikes around town, but I can't imagine them being terribly useful. Surely any errands that could be accomplished with that tiny basket would be better accomplished with a canvas tote and a bus pass.

Speaking of public transportation...


Union Station, which exhorts you in neon to Ride the Train!


Also, a guy walking a goat. This is not strictly transportation, but is interesting.

Because of the thin air up here, not only is it harder for me to climb a mountain, it is harder for carbureted vehicles to climb mountains. My car has a carburetor and predictably lacks power at this altitude. (Well, some might say it lacks power at any altitude, but those people probably own cars made after the 1980s.) After being informed by the shop that getting the air/fuel mixture adjusted would probably not be worth the cost, I took it for a test drive just to see if I could get over the high mountain passes at all, so as to plan my future excursions.


This is Loveland Pass, on the continental divide, at about 12,000 feet. After my car made it up to the pass it turned off without permission, but it was otherwise okay. The continental divide is the line that separates the part of North America that drains to the Atlantic (and Gulf of Mexico) from the part that drains to the Pacific (and Gulf of California). The divide runs along mountain ridges from north to south, vaguely, and in theory, if I were to spit on the east side, my spit would seep into the ground, travel as groundwater to a stream that would eventually empty into a tributary of the Mississippi and end up in the Gulf of Mexico. If I were to spit on the west side here, my spit would find its way to the Colorado River and into the Gulf of California. In reality, though, it's so dry here that my spit would probably evaporate before it got very far into the ground. But it's a nice thought experiment.

Some views from Loveland Pass:


It had been a hot day in Golden, but boy, it must have been in the 50s up there. All I had was a t-shirt and shorts so I didn't stay too long.

My car is not the only carbureted vehicle in my life. Thing 1 and Thing 2, our government ATVs, are also carbureted and, as you will recall, were not performing well on their first outing at the landslide. So we had the shop change the jets... I gather that these are the things that squirt the right amount of gas into the carburetor... and took them to Jones Pass, which is also on the continental divide. We couldn't go all the way to the pass because it was still so snowy.


Alas, the ATVs still weren't doing that well. My fellow intern and I hiked up to a ridgeline for lunch and he took one of the now-obligatory pictures of me at the top:


It was very steep climbing up here, so steep that while standing on the side of the mountain you could reach your arm out horizontal and nearly touch the grass as it sloped up in front of you. I felt like I was climbing Watership Down. For some reason I had it in my head that going down would be easier, but of course, it was not. I slid down a significant portion of it, some on purpose, some not. I walked like a crab down some of it. At one point, exhausted, I paused to record my thoughts:



At one point I made it over to a steep patch of snow and decided it would be a good idea to slide down it on my butt. This turned out to be very wet and dirty. However, it did work:


Here we are looking up at my slide marks from the stand of trees into which I crashed.

The area at the foot of the trail is owned by a mining company; I admired their sign, so here you are (click for detail):


On Sunday I ventured into downtown Denver once more, this time by bus. It is about a 25 minute car ride to downtown but almost an hour by bus, and it is $2, but I wasn't sure how parking was going to be. This weekend was the Denver PrideFest, and here I would like to entertain you with dozens of photos of people in fantastic costumes and make-up doing crazy things. However, I managed to miss the parade, and the rest of the day was mostly a sort of normal-looking party:


albeit with lots of rainbow items. I do have a shot of young men dancing on pedestals in their underwear, which I will dutifully share...


...however, and I say this with some incredulity, I was there for hours and there was really not very much worth taking a picture of. I also say with some incredulity that I had a great time, despite not knowing anyone or talking to hardly anyone, just sort of wandering around for hours not taking pictures. Well, everyone else was having fun, but this made me cheerful rather than lonely. Plus, there were an extraordinary number of good-looking people there (despite the sentiment of this classic from the Cheezburger network), many of whom were not wearing very much, and, well. It was free.

Oh, I do have this video of people square dancing...



I'm not sure which is the oddest part of this video: the wigs, the use of the word "lady" by the caller, or the guy passed out in front of the camera:

So that was that, and that would be the end of the story were it not for the adventure that evening, which did not involve a camera, but did involve a bar, two dance clubs and a bicycle rickshaw ride from a man named Benny Mailman, who said that the bicycle rickshaw could fit four people but this is a Lie, it really only fits two. Comfortably. I'm not sure what else I can say about this that will make sense, except that Benny Mailman also works as a comedian in L.A. and comes to Denver when he needs to make money (ride in bicycle rickshaw = $2 a block), and that there are no seat belts in a bicycle rickshaw. Also that I sort of made friends, though I don't know whether I'll see any of these women again.

Then the other night I took a hike up Green Mountain for Sunset... this is a low rounded mountain between me and Denver, it has no trees on top and looks like an attractive green bowl turned upside-down. Well, this time of year it's green... I gather the general area is brownish for most of the year.


And finally, one more adventure today, in which we took Thing 1 and Thing 2 back to Jones pass after they had their jets (and something called "needles") changed yet again.


Here our are scallawags, ready for some action at last. They may finally be suitable to haul a hundred pounds of concrete up a mountain. Tomorrow I am going back into the field where we will work an 80-hour week, then I am planning to visit Katie for my birthday (she is working in southern CO), and when I finally recover from all that I will have more stories and pictures.

Four and a half feet of plastic action

Many photos today, as I explored downtown Golden, which looks like this:


The sign says, "Howdy Folks! Welcome to Golden - Where the West Lives!" This is incredibly cheesy. The town, however, is not cheesy. It is touristy but turned out to be very cool. For lack of anything better to compare it to, I suppose I will compare it to Mystic, CT. It is a tourist place and of a similar size, at least in terms of number of stores, though more spread out and less clogged with traffic (Golden is not divided in half by a drawbridge that opens every hour). One thing it has that Mystic is lacking is a large number of metal statues.


There was no reason to take a picture of these two statues except as a point of entry onto my tangent. For some reason, towns in the West seem to love metal statues. I don't know if I pointed this out last year when I was in Wyoming. I believe any town in the west of any size is sure to have several representations of elk, bears, horses, Indians, cowboys, pioneers, children, or possibly two or more of the above together, in juxtaposition or riding on each other in various combinations. (Above, we see a bear in foreground and a pioneer with child in background.) I soon lost count of and interest in the statues, though there are probably at least a hundred and several are downright creepy, and no doubt warrant a post of their own.

Eventually I came to the river... Clear Creek, that is, with the M for the Colorado School of Mines above:

As soon as I saw this river, my first thought was that I wanted to go tubing in it. As if on cue,


Some tubers appeared, along with a lone empty tube that got stuck in an eddy next to the rapids. I went down and discovered that there is a paved path along the river, which very quickly became wonderful.


The sign warns of flooding danger. This is especially apropos right now, as Colorado is in a heat wave and snow is melting quickly from the mountains you saw in the last post. I do not know how warm it was today, but it was quite warm, possibly in the 90s.


In a bit of genius that absolutely astounded me, the designers of the walkway had built in sections where the concrete disappears under the river in terraces and ramps at several points, allowing strollers to interact with the flow, however high or low it may be. Here, a young man body-boards on a standing wave formed where the water sweeps over a ramp. The swirl of the water, about a foot and a half deep here, held him in position. There was also a slide at this spot, from which people were being launched out onto the ground at high speed. I imagine it is more fun when the water is a bit higher. Action Shot!


A bit further up, I discovered that there is a beach:


...though these women found a rock in the middle of the river more to their liking.


There were not too many people tubing... a couple came by every once in a while... but then, the water was very cold. I could only stand to stick my feet in it for a minute at a time. These guys probably had the right idea:


I would not have wanted to be in without a wet suit. The snow this river is coming from must be something like 20 miles away... too close to have time to warm up significantly, certainly not in this volume.

Eventually I found some kayakers and some people with a strange type of plastic bodyboard who were taking turns practicing on a set of rapids.


So I began to take Action Shots! of the kayakers:



The blue kayak is doing a trick... in other words, that upside down flip is on purpose. The guy above lost (or put away) his paddle at some point but could still do tricks. Almost all of the kayakers had very short boats... 4.5 feet being the shortest I saw (generally the length is printed on the boat), and that is very short. My kayak, which you may see in a post a couple months ago, was 16 feet long, which is the length where it gets easy to take a stroke on one side and have the boat go forward rather than spin around. Longer means straighter paddling and harder turning. Shorter means very inefficient at going in a straight line, but easy to turn. I do not know how some of these guys fit their legs into their boats, they were so short. It is said that you sit in a canoe but wear a kayak, and the tight fit of these particular boats made the kayakers look like an alien species possessed of a single large foot where most people have legs.

If you have never seen whitewater kayakers do tricks, you simply must watch the videos I shot below:





Although things could not possibly get any cooler, many of the rapids sections had rocks or landscaping placed allowing people to sit and watch the kayakers, as if at a theater:


So with all this I must say that Golden receives high marks. There is room for you here too. On a hot summer weekend day, the crowds still did not reach a particularly great density. There were enough people on the river walk to make it annoying for bikers, but on foot it was easy to get around or find a spot to oneself.


The kayakers pause for a pair of tubers to come through. I imagine that this irritates them, much as I imagine the hardcore mountain bikers were irritated whenever they had to stop because I was in front of them on the mountain yesterday. Except for the unicycle guy, he wouldn't be irritated. He was too cool.

I didn't explore many of the town's retail offerings... I went into the antique store, which is very large (though with its carefully laid-out offerings it made me miss the fantastic clutter of the Phoenix in Wakefield), and I had a sandwich in one shop and a very good $2 raspberry cheesecake ice cream cone at a place called D'Deli, whose raspberry cheesecake ice cream cones I will recommend. Then I went back to the river.


Tubers paddle past some kind of park that is popular with dogs. These guys had a small inner tube tied inside a very large inner tube and were doing the Huck Finn thing. I saw them come by several times during the day, and the hilarious thing is that each time I saw them they had more women on the tube with them. Different women. One of the guys waved happily to me as they went by. Of course he was happy.


Here they disappear (ferrying but a single woman) under the second-to-last bridge before the Coors plant, where a chain hangs across the river with a sign warning floaters to keep out. I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if you couldn't get to the side of the river in time and floated into the Coors plant. Made into beer, probably. And with all the tubes and other equipment I saw lost on the river in just the time I was there, I really wonder if there is an eddy somewhere with 1,000 tubes and paddles in it. A lot of the junk I saw had people's phone numbers written on. I must find out what happens to these things.

Here, a gratiutous shot of my office building, which I passed on the way home:


This is probably the thing least worth seeing in Golden, lower down even than that creepy statue of a woman and child reading a book on a bench, but now you know what it looks like. So, I am inviting... rather, demanding... everyone come visit me, because I hate having these things here and not be able to share them except through pictures. People who volunteer to go tubing with me, or go to Woody's wood-fired pizza place, get first priority. I appreciate that the latter may sound more appealing than the former to some of my readers, but you cannot keep saying you admire my sense of adventure and then sit around watching TV. Perhaps we can get those two boys with the giant tube-raft to take us.