Sliding Towards Fall

Pre-departure swim on Bear Lake

It is past peak summer here at near nine thousand feet in the Rockies.  The quaking aspen leaves have lost their glossiness and yellow is encroaching on the green in trees at the higher elevations.  Earlier season blooms like loco-weed and columbines have disappeared, while later season flowers such as mountain gentian and strawberry blight are in their prime.  The pair of Canadian geese, so recently putting their grown goslings through their paces, doing touch-and-goes on Bear Lake, all seem to have departed.  The hummingbirds are less frantic now that the nesting period is over and have reduced their intake of sugar water by half.  Squirrels are feasting on the ripe seeds in pine and fir cones, leaving the detritus on their dining tables of stumps and rocks.  The days are shortening, over two minutes less daylight with each rotation, and while days are still warm we find ourselves reaching for flannel or fleece a little more often and a fire in the morning or evening is a cosy indulgence.  Our neighbors remind us that they’ve spent Labor Day weekends here with over a foot of snow on the ground.

There's a change in the air

Wild rose rose hip

Since I love it here more with each passing day, the march of time through the seasons (late spring through early fall) is as poignant to me as it is fascinating.  Never mind that when we do leave in just over five weeks we will be returning to another place we love where our lives are also full with activities and friends we cherish -- I am afraid I won’t have had enough of this mountain life this year (always the glutton), and I’m anticipating a wrenching departure.  Of course, the antidote, should I find I miss the cabin too much, is to simply get in the car and make the two day drive back, so there is no tragedy in this amazingly wonderful bimodal life (like Maria in The Sound of Music...I must have done something good).

Hammock time is mandatory for all cabin guests

New trail with an old friend

My husband recently had to return to Tucson for some follow-up work related tasks, and the week he was gone corresponded with a five day visit from a dear friend of mine.  Marion and I had been two single mom’s, following each other from clinical trials related job to job in the Chapel Hill/Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina for many of the 11 years I lived there.  We’ve managed to keep in touch over the decade since I’ve moved to Tucson, seeing each other get our girls through elementary and high schools and college, supporting each other as best we could with our busy lives.  Marion’s visited a couple times in Tucson and I’ve returned a few times to Chapel Hill; the best time included the long 4th of July weekend near Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks with long floats in the rolling swells and 16-layer cake (no kidding!).  It was a real joy to have her experience our mountain cabin and the life we live up here.  There was lots of catching up and reminiscing, most all of it in the sublime out-of-doors.  Despite the 8,000+ foot elevation change for Marion, we managed some lovely hikes,  one on a section of the new loop trail that starts almost outside my front door, and one on a trail a few miles from home that I’ve had my eye on for several years.  We made no fancy excursions -- I wanted her to simply experience life as we know it up here.  She met most of our neighbors and shared in the casual and generous hospitality that is common up here...and played some wicked games of dominoes!  It was hard to see her go, but I am lobbying for her to consider Colorado as a retirement destination as she is a natural at wildlife sightings (a banded kingfisher and several hawks) and has a soft spot in her heart for the Colorado mountains.  In the meantime, I’m hoping her visit here will be an annual treat.

Mountain Gentian, new to me and so beautiful

Blue Penstemon in late summer glory

The day I picked Bob up from the airport, a grateful guy to be gone from the 110 degree heat of Tucson, we were driving back to the cabin in the cool mountain twilight, about 10 miles into our 16 miles of twisting dirt roads.  It was the time of the day that our wildlife-tuned eyes were most likely to be gratified...that half-dark time of the day when the bigger critters come out to graze.  We’d already seen lots of deer, including a very Bambi-like spotted fawn, when we rounded a corner and an abandoned barn came into view.  In the decreasing light I spotted several dark forms, then several more.  There was a huge herd of elk -- Bob counted 44 -- grazing and frolicking (no other word for it) in the old overgrown meadow.  About a third were true youngsters, calves, with lots of moms (cows as they’re called), and several juvenile bulls who were mock-protecting and challenging each other.  Alas, I was without my camera, but here’s a picture of the barn, so use your imagination.  The image of them will be forever fixed in my mind.

Just add 44 elk of assorted sizes...

Bob is busy inoculating fresh aspen logs with the mycelium for Shiitaki and Pearl Oyster mushrooms, something he’s been planning all summer and now needs to get done so that they have a few weeks to “take” before our first hard freeze.  The logs will winter in the moist shade near the spring, and when we arrive next spring Bob will soak them in the spring’s water, hoping to start the fruiting process.  If that is successful and we can beat the deer to them, we should have some amazing meals of fresh mushrooms next year. 

Wild oyster mushrooms found along the new trail

It is helpful to plan and prepare for next year’s long stay here.  We’ll probably come earlier, partly for my Bare Aware training and partly because we’ll want to.  With most of the “must do’s” of settling into a new cabin completed this inaugural year and many of the questions regarding “what will it be like?” answered next year will be much more a case of showing up with groceries and books and our hiking boots and just getting about the pure pleasure of mountain life.  Bob’s report of the family of cactus wrens busy in the barrio garden in our Tucson home, the pleasure of seeing some of our good friends, however briefly, and his time spend working at and visiting our beloved Desert Museum reminded me that our lives are beyond good wherever we go, wherever we are together, and that no matter the direction we travel on the dirt road near our mountain cabin, we are always headed home. 

The road home, no matter the direction...

Mid-Summer

This juvenile Great Blue Heron posed for me at Deer Lake, below the cabin

Life at the cabin just keeps rolling along in the most pleasant of ways.  With the major essential projects behind us we are settling into what I’m thinking passes for normal up here -- days filled with reading, nature watching, hiking, cooking and eating, cabin and forest maintenance, gardening, visiting with neighbors, and stargazing.  We know the world will keep spinning on its axis without our following the debt-ceiling crisis and the early throes of the next election cycle, and we’re happier for shrugging that off for now.

Deer's breakfast just off the front deck

Instead we wake up to deer munching baby aspens in our front yard, and are often still sipping coffee at 10 AM while reading the novel of the moment until our tummies insist on breakfast.  The next order of business is often a hike before it gets too warm (low 80’s) or the afternoon thunderstorms start up.  We had over three inches of much needed rain in July (on top of about an inch in June), one inch of it in about 20 minutes, complete with BB-sized hail!  Usually it falls much slower, soaking into the forest floor instead of washing out our driveway.

Our hikes are filled with change and new discoveries each and every time.  As the seasons roll on some wildflowers finish while others are just reaching maturity.  It seems to be the start of the harvest season for the critters -- the raspberries are ripening (and make a refreshing snack along the trail), some flowers going to seed while others are brim full with nectar.  Most of our hikes are along creeks and our dog Bump does her best to take advantage of them to keep cool and hydrated.

HUGE bumblebee having its way with a thistle

We put in a border garden on the entry side of the cabin.  I bought a few perennials grown here in Colorado, blue penstemons, cone flowers, and hyssop.  But mostly I’ve collected wildflowers from the forest (careful to harvest them only where they exist in great numbers) -- scarlet gillia, wild rose, mountain laurel, wild geranium, black-eyed Susans, pussy toes, harebells, and lavender asters to name a few.  

Installing a perennial border garden 

We'll keep collecting specimens of wildflowers

Tonya Sharp, Colorado Division of Wildlife Officer,
educating us on how to re-educate the bears

We keep fine-tuning the way we live up here, from wildlife management to where to get our hair cut.  We haven’t seen evidence of any more bear visits, but we have made some changes in our behavior that probably has helped.  We invited Tonya Sharp, our local wildlife officer (Bob stopped referring to her as the Bear Lady after seeing the huge gun strapped to her hip), to come by and give us some advice.  We no longer seed feed, though we do continue to feed the hummingbirds.  Seed feeding is messy with the birds sorting through the mixed seeds, tossing the ones they don’t like over the side -- not this, not this, not this...THIS! -- so even if you bring in the feeder at night there’s still a mess on the ground, despite the best intentions of the ground squirrels.  And I’d seen enough of the regulars at the seed feeder -- Cassin’s finches, brown-headed cow birds, and pine siskins -- to last me a while.  If you sit for a few minutes and pay attention there are lots of interesting birds in the trees -- nuthatches, Stellar’s jays, juncos, woodpeckers, flickers, and sapsuckers, and even the occasional red-tailed hawk stops by a snag out front to scream at us before flying off.  We have the hummingbird feeder about twelve feet up a tree hooked to a pulley system and we fill it once in the morning and bring it in empty by mid to late-afternoon.  Sometimes I take a “rest” on the front steps with the full feeder and I’m never alone for long.  Good trick for a warm day as those little hummers’ wings whip up quite the breeze, and it’s wonderful to see them so close you can see the varying colors of their individual feathers.  And it’s too precious when they perch on your fingers.

Up close and personal with hungry lady hummers

Along with missing our Tucson friends, we’re missing our volunteer work and are thinking of what would work for us up here.  Bob is volunteering some chainsaw time to help folks clean-up their lots and will help with the semi-annual ranch clean-up when they bring in a HUGE chipper and feed in what’s been cleared, blowing the chips back into the forest.  He’s also volunteered to teach a little science to some neighboring kids who are home schooled...leeches will be the first segment.  I’ve filled out my application with the Colorado Division of Wildlife’s Bear Aware program and will come up next spring for training so that I can go out and coach folks on how to live in bear country.

Make a big wish on this tennis ball-sized salsify seed head...and BLOW

We’ve reached the halfway mark in our first summer at the cabin, and loving it more all the time.  It’ll be odd to start counting down to our departure in early October, though we have much to go back to in Tucson.  I wouldn’t be surprised to be back up here during the holiday season for a couple of weeks.  May will just be too far away.  Pack up the car, Honey -- I’m needing a cabin fix!  So very nice to have options, and the time to exercise them.  

Squirrel psych-out -- it fooled our dog the first time she saw it!

The Unexpected...Great Eateries

Every time we go to town our biggest problem is deciding which one of our favorite restaurants to visit.  It was the last “problem” we expected up along this fairly remote stretch of communities in the southern Rockies.  Collectively my husband and I have lived in Tucson for over 20 years and we still don’t have “our place”.  We favor kind of funky, often ethnic, and always reasonable restaurants where the service is good enough and we feel comfortable.  In Tucson we like them close to home, which is the main problem for us on the west side.  Here in the mountains we’d never make the 40 minute trip in to the nearest restaurant, but we always make sure to include it on our provisioning trips.  Here are two of our favorites.

The Hungry Bear, Woodland Park, CO

Three signs are better than one

The Hungry Bear in Woodland Park has been a favorite of ours since we started coming up here together six years ago.  It’s a one-off, family owned, quirky down-home place which specializes in breakfast and lunch, but is also opened some nights for dinner.  For us it’s our breakfast spot.

I’ve often speculated that its origins were someone’s teddy bear collection -- high shelves hold hundreds of plush toy bears and the walls are covered with bear photos and plaques with kitschy sayings.  The waitresses are country-friendly and efficient.  The tables are all different, and you can sit at one of two counters if you like, one with a view into the kitchen.  

I suppose you could eat healthy at The Hungry Bear, but I’ve never seen anyone do so.  Even the trophy wives just passing through on their way to the ski resorts are tucking into huge plates of fruit and sour cream filled crepes with a massive side of bacon.

After all these years we’ve settled, for better or worse, into our favorites.  My husband orders The Dream -- a split, toasted and buttered biscuit smothered in sausage gravy served along two over easy eggs and an order of bacon.  I get what’s referred to as 2x2x2 -- two eggs over easy, two strips of bacon, and two huge, plate-sized blueberry buckwheat pancakes.  Oh, and lots of hot coffee.  I hope our doctor is reading this.

Plateful of Buckin' Blues

It’s a ridiculous amount of food.  In fact their menu has a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer...Warning: Our food may become habit forming.  Mass consumption may cause weight gain.  Since we only hit The Hungry Bear about once a month, we’re holding our own.  If you want to eat some great comfort food, do some interesting people watching, and feel like you’re among friends it would be hard to do better than The Hungry Bear.  It’s on the south side of the main drag, Hwy. 24, in Woodland Park, Colorado.  Check out their website:  www.hungybearcolorado.com

Go hungry!

McGinty’s Wood Oven Pub

Best (only) pizza in Divide, Colorado

McGinty’s, and Irish themed restaurant, is in Divide, a two light town along Hwy. 24 eight miles west of Woodland Park.  It is the last thing I’d have expected to find at the main Divide crossroads.  In fact, we probably wouldn’t have given it a try except for a strong recommendation from our neighbors who have a cabin across the lake from our cabin; they often stop for dinner on their way to their cabin from their home in Colorado Springs.  Margaret said the bleu cheese pizza was to die for...blue cheese pizza???

We stopped in starving for a very late lunch and were surprised by the attractive and comfortable interior.  Shown to a deep booth with a view of the wood oven we perused the menu for the raved about bleu cheese pizza.  Even after reading the description of the Frenchy McGillicuddy Patty Cake (pizza pie) -- charred bits of prime rib and chunks of bleu cheese, garlic and olive oil, sweet onions, arugula and roasted tomatoes -- I was a bit skeptical.  Still, it was what we’d been planning on ordering, and since the price was just under $11 I was sure, with those ingredients, we were talking about an individual size pizza and we’d need a second one or a substantial salad to suffice.  I asked the waitress if she’d recommend ordering a second pizza and she said probably not since the pizzas were 16 inchers.  What?!  A pizza like that in Tucson would be over $20!  

It was fun to watch the chef and his helpers move around the work station in front of the wood stove.  No fancy flipping of pizza dough, but careful overhead stretching.  About ten minutes after ordering, while we were enjoying some lovely draft Guinness, the waitress brought over a thick section of tree trunk, peeled and sanded and sealed.  A few minutes later our pizza arrived, still bubbling, on a dark green stone slab.  Any reservations I had about the odd ingredients disappeared when I saw the gorgeous glutenous crust, a perfect brown with sheer crispy bubbles, the bright green of the chopped arugula, the crisped bits of prime rib, caramalized onions, large chunks of tomato, all melded together in a thin pool of melted bleu cheese.  The crust was on the thin side, crisp without being brittle, with plenty of corn meal still adhering to the bottom.  It was utterly fantastic, and as hungry as we were, we still had two large pieces to carry home and they warmed up to almost the same perfection the next day for lunch.  Eleven bucks.  Unbelievable!

One of the best pizzas I have ever eaten!

Our second trip in we ordered the Bernadette Devline pizza, created in honor of Ireland’s first female politician, sauced with half red, half green pesto topped with fire-roasted peppers, onion, baby spinach, mushrooms, roasted tomatoes, fried leeks, artichokes and mozarella cheese.  It was just as good as the first one, a buck cheaper, and we must have hit happy hour as our pizza and two draft pints totalled under $17.  

They have a very extensive menu with imaginative salads and sandwiches and dinner entrees that all sound amazing.  I’m not sure we’ll ever get past the pizzas!  The wait staff is attentive and enthusiastic, and when I had a question about one of the beers that stumped the waitress, she quickly went to get the answer.  There are several good beers on tap, including Guinness.

If you’re hankering for some REALLY good food at prices that make me worry this wonderful eatery won’t be sustainable, and appreciate a bit o’ the Irish, do go out of your way to visit McGinty’s in Divide.