It's taken more than two years in this locale before I found a place to walk beside free-flowing, relatively untrammeled water. Still, it's about eight miles from my house. I've written often about Big Dry Creek in its passage behind the library and community college in Westminster, Colorado, and the increasing encroachment of development on its out-laying open fields. Big Dry Creek, though, is a creek tamed into an irrigation canal that was allowed to keep about half of its meanders. Its associated two ponds are man-made.
I discovered the path beside Coal Creek during frequent trips to the small church in Louisville where I sing in the choir. It wasn't until last month, though, that I followed the path eastward from the parking area and discovered the meandering creek well-shaded with cottonwoods. Last Sunday, while the American world was prepping for the Superbowl, I walked along the creek with camera and binoculars.
I'm sure that I saw a sign that said keep to the bikepath, but…diverging from the graveled path are many footpaths leading to the creek itself, which tread along the bank for a ways until heading back for the maintained path.
The bikepath skirts a row of townhouse type residences and then some single-family houses, and I envy them their immediate access to this lovely vignette of a wild place. The path wanders enough that I don't feel that I and the local residents are in each others' space. And there are no gargantuan, overwrought mansions to overpower the natural habitat, as they do at McKay Lake.
A resident kingfisher patrols the creek, its bright blue feathers and throaty rattle alerting me to its presence. Chickadees frequent a sunflower seed feeder in a townhome's backyard and flit across the path to a nicely shrubby tree beside the creek. Families of mallards are here and there along the shining water, with an occasional visitor joining them. Today there was an American widgeon with its white head stripe and dun-colored feathers.
A love of bright water draws me back to this place. A love of trees along bright water. A love of birds…I've seen eagles and hawks here, also.
This creek comes from the first line of foothills, the hogback that pushes up from the plains in front of the high peaks of the Continental Divide. It runs down Coal Creek Canyon and finds its way through the rippling, rolling shortgrass prairie that covers the huge seams of coal that were mined here at the turn of the century. Here, where I find it, it is running through hayfields where three small farms lie along an old tar road not far from the center of the old town part of Louisville.
From this little sojourn in Louisville and Lafayette, it feeds into Boulder Creek, which feeds into St. Vrain Creek, and then the South Platte River, and then the Missouri, and eventually the Mississippi.
Walking along the little paths that meet the water's edge helps assuage a strong need within me. Because I have felt so contained in the madhouse that is north metro Denver (and south, west, and east metro Denver), I have longed to find a place to walk that is relatively nearby and provides an experience of wild nature that seems less than precarious. That doesn't have earth-movers working nearby. Where the only sound of traffic is an occasional homeowner traveling a nearby quiet street. Where the mountains can be seen over a foreground of fields. Where natural flowing water is not stopped by dams and penstocks. Where beauty simply is.
