One of the best ways to celebrate the 4th of July is to walk a trail in the Colorado Rockies. At least, that's what I am doing, choosing a little piece of the Colorado Trail (that stretches from Denver nearly to Durango) just north of Kenosha Pass which is on Route 285. I and a couple of friends amble through aspen and spruce, the forest floor carpeted with yellow lupine-like flowers, and gently climb over a ridge.
When we step out of the woods onto an open, steeply sloping meadow, the peaks that rise along Route 9 from Fairplay to Hoosier Pass sculpt the western horizon. Still scarved with bands of snow, their grey-blue tints are background to the wonderful greens of the aspen and the tall grasses and the myriad flowers that dot this opening. Between this ridge and their peaks, and flowing ever southward, is that wonder of flat plains and low mounded hills called South Park. I look out on it and everything in me rests with the shadows and lights of clouds passing over, and the view of greens stretching far and away.
Can I count the colors?
Orangy Indian paintbrush, white strawberry blossoms, green stems and slight orchid of wild chives, magenta shooting stars, blue flag, white, pale blue, deep blue, pale pink clusters of short-stemmed, wild lupine-type flowers, deep rose cranesbill, and always the yellow tall lupiny flowers. It isn't the mass of flowers that John Fielder photographs up in the very high country, but the scene is beautiful, and we are about 10,000 feet in elevation. And the grass is still green.
That has been the miracle of the late April and May snowstorms that dumped much-needed moisture in the mountains. And the weather passed right into thunderstorms in June and occasional days of just plain rain, with the heat holding off until now.
Last winter I was chastising myself for not seeing Colorado's columbines in the wild, for not getting out to those wildflower meadows in the mountains. Not once, all summer. This summer I vowed I would. Today, at least, I am experiencing, observing, recording in words and photographs the wonders of the mountain wildflowers.
The columbines are shy, though: a few near the campground at the beginning of the trail seem almost like they were planted there, and then one in the woods along the path. It is not until we trek further down the trail and turn into what seems to be an old clear-cut swath (which has not re-treed itself at all), that I find more lilac-blue and white flowers dancing in the breezes that fly through the trees. The one that stays in my mind's eye is the only one open in a small cluster growing between a triangle of severely-elk-scarred aspen. The sun lightly touches its trumpets of white and spurs of blue that tread the edge of lilac, as it swings in that dancing breeze.
I am fortunate and I am grateful to be in this place, this time.
Truly,
Cherie Staples
Editor
Heed the winds and the waters,
the lights of sun and moon,
the birds that fly your path,
be here now.