August Travels

 August flew.

On the second of the month I flew out to Denver.  A research question had arisen about how people respond to the idea of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

I had wanted to go back to Colorado in any case, and there were some good reasons to select it as a field site.  So my videographer and I met there and spent a few days button-holing people in Denver and out in the blasted parts of Aurora - getting folks to talk about the good things and the bad things of raising the minimum wage.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.  We'd start early so we could wrap up our interviewing before the day would finish its relentless climb into the upper 90's.  Then we'd deal with the data we had and figure out where to get ourselves some dinner and some beer.

We had about 50 interviews done, which what we'd promised, by the time I settled him at his hotel on Wednesday afternoon.


From there it was off to pick up the travel-weary Monica and the boys at the airport.

After day or so's interlude in Colorado Springs - where I did some more interviewing, and Porter visited a college - we tooled on up through Boulder - (another college) - and onto the lap of the Rocky Mountains.

And joined Mark, Sarah and their kids in Estes Park, 

where the meadows are still in bloom, even in arid August.

My sister, Christine, flew in to join us and by Sunday morning we'd strapped on our backpacks.

We all hiked up from Bear Lake to Lake Helene,

And down into Odessa Gorge,

To a ranger cabin on Fern Lake.

Mark is a park ranger.  He and the kids fished for trout.  As did an osprey.

Pine martens hunted the lakeside and the cabin's stone foundation, 

and I saw one make off with a ground squirrel.

On Monday we hiked to Spruce Lake and further up to Loomis Lake, in its snow-streaked cirque.  

Where we ate lunch.

But only Chris and I were lunatic enough to swim with the trout in the green, frigid water.

Pikas mocked us from the talus.

On Tuesday it was time to hike back out - our packs lightened by a couple days of eating.

On Wednesday - by now we're to the 12th - we said our fond farewells,

 headed up the Fall River road, and over the pass.

Saying so long to the marmots and the ptarmigan.

And we drove out along the creekish headwaters of the Colorado river 

and all the way to Utah, 

to pitch out tents along the Green River at Dinosaur National Monument.

Where we looked at petroglyphs and dinosaur bones.

and hiked

for a day.

And then drove north through Wyoming

Looking for bighorn sheep, but they eluded us.

We camped in the sagebrush under vast and star-gritted skies,

and watched the Perseid meteors streak along the Milky Way.

On Friday we stopped in Jackson to buy supplies 

and skirted the Grand Tetons which were dark purple and flickering with lightning.

To visit the geyser basins

and the wildlife

of Yellowstone National Park.

We camped at Lewis Lake for Friday and Saturday nights,

and spent the days around the park.

On Sunday afternoon (by now the 16th) we drove northwards to Coeur d'Alene.

Porter, at 17, has a learners permit and we gave him the wheel.

And then on to Seattle across the smokey plains of Eastern Washington, 

where we visited with an old friend just out of surgery.

Into the Cascades, weaving a bit to avoid the fires that filled the skies sometimes with acrid haze.

Out and down along the Columbia river gorge to Portland, 

where it was a withering hundred degrees, buying books and seeing friends.

And back again into the Cascades.

To chill morning hot springs along the Umpqua river

and famous volcanic lakes

until we got to old friends in Sacramento and Davis.

And delivered Porter to his school in Carpinteria,

and his view down mesa to the Pacific ocean.

By the time we flew home I'd been gone three and a half weeks and August had flown.

The Flight of the Timberdoodles

Last night at dusk I join a friend at Coogan Farm for the mating flights of the woodcocks.

It's a howling, still-winter night and there are only patches of open ground amid the snow.  Still, as the orange sky above Mystic turns magenta and then blackly purple, the woodcocks begin to make their rapid flights.  Wing feathers whistle in a high-pitched twitter.  They rocket back to their staging areas, and invisible on the ground, nasal 'peeeeeeent's buzz out above the rushing wind - calling to any females nearby on this cold night - to come and admire, to watch them strut and to take a mate.

Old-school snow shoeing

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I'd been tromping some paths down in the snow, but they've all been drifted into oblivion. 

And more snow is coming.

Compared to friends farther north, two feet of snow on the ground isn't so much.  But it's more than we're used to - especially week after week.

I have some old beavertail-style snowshoes my Dad got from L.L. Bean many, many years ago.  

I took them off his hands this winter figuring they were decorative enough to keep on hand somewhere in case I ever needed a pair to get around on.  

Today was the day to try them out - if only to walk down to the beehives to make sure they hadn't been drifted over.

They're more cumbersome then the new-style snowshoes, but they work perfectly fine.  Much better to walk on top of snow than plow through it.  

And now if I ever have to make myself a pair of snowshoes - I know I have a model to work from - the same basic design as the Algonquin, Huron and French trappers used in the northern forests.

Tomorrow  is supposed to be sunny with a wind chill to -20° F  (-29° C), but now I can take a walk if I want to. 

Rocky Mountain National Park in December

Rocky Mountain National Park

I met Sarah when I lived in Kazakhstan in the mid-1990s.  She was fresh out of college with a degree in Russian studies and had taken some job down in Almaty.  Like every one of our good friends there – local or expat – she was in love with the mountains.  Almaty sits in the foothills of the Tien Shan range, which rises above the steppe to heights of 12,000 feet.  The range marks the southern border, the boundary with Kirghizstan.

Mills Lake

Almarasan, Medeu, Chimbulak, Talgar, Aksu – we did our best to explore.

Now, a couple of decades later, she's in different mountains.  Her husband is a park ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park, and for her children, elk are are more common than pigeons.  

A research trip brought me to Colorado and I took the opportunity to pay them a visit in Estes Park.  

On Tuesday, while the kids were in school we snowshoed up from Bear Lake – to Nymph Lake, Dream Lake, and finally to Emerald Lake, which nestles in its little, snowy cirque 10,000 feet above sea level. 

Short cut across Dream Lake

The next day Sarah and I hiked to Mills Lake up in Glacier Gorge.  The snow was marked with tracks of rabbits and hares and squirrels.

No one was at the frozen lake but the two of us, and the valley was silent.  You could almost hear the snow gently falling.  We drank hot cider from a thermos and were happy.

Glacier Gorge

Hiking Ninigret NWR

bittersweet berries

Yesterday in the yard a woodcock flew up from the leaves at my feet.  Switching from invisible to visible in a sudden whirring of wings.

It reminded me that I need to go hiking in the woods.

Auntie Beak, a prolific local hike-blogger posted recently on the nearby Wahaneeta Preserve and Woody Hill Wildlife Management Area, and I thought about going up there.

But it's late November and my instinct is that even decked out in orange blaze it's the wrong time of year to walk the gamelands of the WMA's.

Instead I opted for a National Wildlife Refuge down on the coast, where I was unlikely to run across any hunters.  The central parcel of Ninigret NWR is a complex of old WWII airstrips.  Most of these were stripped of their paving decades ago and are slowly being overgrown with laurel, grasses and birch.

birch catkins

Along, around and between the scars of the airstrips, several miles of trail roam through salt marsh, woodland, kettle ponds and by the shores of Foster Cove and Ninigret Pond.

I walked the western half of the Foster Cove loop, the fishing access trail, the cross refuge trail, and returned along the runway trail that marks the northeastern border of the refuge.  Some of the paths are grassy and mossy, some paved and some gravel.

rose hips

Much of the landscape is enough to break a botanist's heart - overrun by a rouge's gallery of invasive plants:  great swaths of trees decked with Oriental bittersweet, beneath which sprawl tangles of honeysuckle, autumn olive, and mulitflora rose.  Phragmites abound, but haven't driven all the cattails from the lilypad pools.

But it's a wonderful place for birdwatching even in the winter.  (There's a reason many of those plants are so successfully invasive - they create seeds and berries that birds and other wildlife eat and disperse.)

White throated sparrows scratched noisily in the dry leaves below the brambles.  Jays and gulls called. A pair of hairy woodpeckers pounded on a resonant maple and yellow shafted flickers swooped by high overhead.

a chickadee in the brambles

Gold finches flitted in their demure winter plumage.  Yellow-rumped warblers were rising up like flycatchers, though I never saw any insects active down at ground level.

a northern harrier

A cottontail rabbit disappeared into the rose thickets.  And plenty of deer tracks marked the trail.

in flight

 On Ninigret Pond out past the resting gulls, a raft of restless hooded mergansers paddled and dived.

I spied a moth's cocoon, birch leaves wrapping silk and dangling from a twig.  Is it next spring's Luna moth?  or a Polyphemus - oak silk moth?

Whatever it is, I wish it luck evading the squirrels and the birds through the long winter.

cocoon

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Autumn days like this one call

The back field at Pine Point school

After we drop Nico off at school, Monica has been walking to get some exercise.  I'll either go to the gym or join her.

Behind the school, the trails for the cross-country runs go along fields and down into the woods.

On the morning of the first real frost the hedgerows were alive with sparrows, towhees, thrushes and jays all in an uproar about the sudden freeze.

Icy grass hunkered in every tree-shadow, but turned to dew in minutes as the sun would strike.

Phoebes fluttered - a migrating flock - picking off any cold-sluggish insects that might take flight or climb a blade of grass.

There'll be enough days to go to the gym as the weather turns foul.  Autumn days like this one call.