12 posts tagged “outdoors”
Here's some pics I took on a solo hike on Lion Gulch Trail a few months ago. I was trying to get to a ghost town which is on the trail. It turned out that it wasn't so much a ghost town as a widely dispersed set of old homesteads known as Homestead Meadows. No, I didn't see any of the mountain lions that the trail was named for.
Three miles to Homestead Meadows, it said. Actually, it was three miles to the first homestead in the meadows. Many more miles in different directions would be needed to see the rest of the homesteads, but unfortunately I only had time for one.
Some pictures of the stream and other things I wanted to take shots of along the trail. The men in the homesteads walked this route at the beginning of every week and spent the week-nights in town working while the wives stayed back at the homesteads with the goats and the kids. The men would walk back on the weekends, then start it all over again.
Several points along the trail you have to cross the stream. You have to have good balance to get across these. My balance wasn't good enough at one point and I ended up with a very cold, wet foot and ankle.
They make their ant hills really big here.
Some more random shots.
I always love me a good, dead tree for photographic purposes.
The remains of an old horseless carriage near the homestead and - it should be pointed out - nowhere near the road. How did it get out here?
And, finally, the homestead. I walked three miles for this? Hmm...
This was my favorite part of the trail. Yes, there is a point where hikers are to go one way and horses the other, mainly because of the steepness of the trail. What was the first thing I thought when I saw this, though? "Horses can't read!!!!"
Here's some more random shots I've taken while driving around the state in the last few months.
Various shots taken along a route through the Seven Falls in Colorado Springs.
Actual shots of the falls. The second one is a shot down the mountain from one of the lookout points, and as you can tell it was very cloudy that day, and I was basically standing in one of the clouds. The third shot is a picture of a solid bank of cloud from the lookout point. Not a great day for sight-seeing, perhaps, but I like the feeling of walking through cloud on a mountaintop!
More shots at the Falls.
These are shots I took earlier along Shelf Road, which runs from Cañon City to La Junta, CO. It's basically a two-way, single lane dirt road that runs along the inside of a canyon wall, with the wall on one side and a sheer drop-off on the other. What fun! Unfortunately, because I was concentrating on the driving and there was no where to get out, I didn't get very many pictures. The fourth shot is a picture of a trail map - whenever I go hiking, I try to take a picture of the map in case I want to go back and do more of it later.
More shots taken along the Shelf Road, which is also part of the Gold Belt Tour, a scenic driving tour through land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management - your tax dollars at work.
More Gold Belt Tour and Shelf Road shots.
And, yet, more!
I was in Alamosa, Colorado for a meeting last week, and afterward I went for a walk in the national wildlife refuge nearby. My camera was dead, so all I had to take pictures with was my phone.
I think they came out nice, given what I had to work with!
The final installment of photos I took at Mesa Verde last fall.
Some of the ruins.
Most of the park is very desert-like, dry, and hot most of the summer. Just down into the canyons, however, you can find a totally different environment, green, wet (near the stream), and well-shaded.
Views of some of the ruins across the canyon. The second to last photo shows some surface ruins on top of the far cliff top. I had seen ruins like it several times before at various locations throughout the Four Corners, but they seemed out of place here, just up on top when all the other ruins were built into the cliff sides.
We went across to the other side and visited the ruins. Here's a picture into the structure.
And, finally, Mesa Verde is done. Thanks for reading.
I just like using the word "penultimate".
Just a landscape shot I liked.
This cliff face is very unhappy. He had aspirations of becoming a mountain, but instead, he's just the side of a canyon. His mother is very disappointed in him.
Yucca 'n take the plant out of the desert, but yucca n't take the desert out of the plant.
A sad, burnt tree, trying to peer down under the overhang into the cliff dwelling below.
A paved path from the bottom of the stairs at this site to the ruins. The Ancient Puebloans climbed down the rock face without equipment, and we have to have stairs and a blacktop path. What a bunch of weenies we are. On top, you can see a forest of dead trees, these killed by a fire. Nothing but charcoal.
Another shot of the largest dwelling, The Cliff Palace, this time taken from across the canyon.
Taking a walking trail down into one of the canyons, you can see a lot more verdant version of the terrain here. It's a lot cooler, a lot wetter, and a lot greener. You can really start to get a feel for what it must have been like throughout the ruins before the climate changed and the stream dried into arroyos.
At the bottom of the train was another of the hundreds (thousands?) of ruins sites in the region.
And you know what comes after the penultimate post? That's right! The ultimate post!
A cloud's shadow over the cliff face.
Stacked stones are common in the Southwest. Sometimes they occur naturally, with the rest of the rock eroding away around the stones. In other cases, they have obviously been stacked by a person. I don't really know what the significance is, though I know that sometimes the little piles of stone mark an otherwise unmarked trail.
Once, a tree. Now, charcoal.
More dramatically dead trees. Can you tell I like these?
A view down into the canyon. It's hard to tell a sense of scale from this picture, I think. It's huge, but it all blends together at a distance.
It's easy to see how the Ancient Puebloans got the idea of building their home here. With the natural overhangs everywhere along the canyon wall, it must have seemed like the place was made for them.
It's broken. We should send it back.
More ruins.
"You think we could hold this wall up if it decides to fall down the rest of the way, Hank?" "Not really, Fred."
Some pottery shards and corn cobs. Yes, it's an ancient trash pit.
Another kiva. You can see where the fire pit is, bottom center, though it's full of dirt.
Who needs Stairmaster?
I have about two more posts of these, so I hope you're not bored of them, yet!
A continuation of my pictures from Mesa Verde National Park, taken last fall.
Some pictures of some of the structures in the cliff dwellings, including some interior shots. These were taken at The Cliff Palace, the largest cliff dwelling ruin in North America.
Stone steps on the left and a wooden ladder on the right, used to get back up from The Cliff Palace to the top of the cliff. The steps were built by the WPA during the Depression, and the ladder is recent. The Ancient Puebloans used neither. Archaeologists found no evidence of ladders here, so they either had none, and just climbed without assistance up the bare cliff face, or they took the ladders with them when they abandoned the ruins. The latter (no pun intended) seems more likely. From items found in other ruins, they used rope ladders made of yucca plant matter and/or turkey feathers.
Some views of the cliff overhang where the ruins are from back atop the cliff. You can't see much of the ruins in the left pictures, so I climbed over a fence and out onto a dangerous rock outcropping to get the second shot. Yes, I know, I'm bad.
From atop the cliff at various points you can see other cliff dwellings carved into the canyon wall, some of them hundreds of feet above the ground yet hundreds of feet below the top of the cliff. It's hard to imagine how the occupants got in and out of them without a good number of injuries.
Just a couple of shots down the canyon itself.
Okay, enough for now. More later. Thanks for reading!
These are some shots I took in Mesa Verde National Park late last fall. Yes, I know, I'm really behind! If you're not familiar with Mesa Verde, it's the site of a large number of pre-Columbian cliff dwellings.
Wherever I go, I have to get pictures of "dramatically dead trees." What other living thing on earth is so cool to look at after it's dead?
Landscapes.
Strixaluco, surveying her domain.
This wall is a natural formation, but if I didn't know better, I'd said it had been built.
Another.
Another shot of the broken wall.
We'z way up there.
There were large swaths of trees in the park that were dead, due to an invasive species of insect.
Landscapes. The second from the left shows a picture of Shiprock in the distance. Shiprock is a rock formation in New Mexico, but it was visible from this altitude.
One of a number of lookout points.
A sign explaining how, despite how beautiful the views are now, they are nothing like what previous generations saw before air pollution reduced the visibility.
Stuffed mountain lion in the visitor center. I think when I die, I'll have myself stuffed and displayed somewhere. Some sort of geek museum.
Some views of the distance. The one on the right is another shot of the Shiprock.
Visitor Center
Here are some of the cliff dwellings. One of the mysteries is how the occupants of these structures got down to their homes, especially the ones like the third from the left, which are positioned halfway up the cliff face. Presumably, they climbed down on rope ladders, but you had to be in pretty good shape to do that. Once you became too old or infirm to climb the rope ladders, you were pretty much stuck.
Shots of a canyon.
Rock formations.
Some surface ruins.
A tour group surrounding a kiva as a guide tells them all about it. Kivas are common ruin structures in the Southwest. They're basically big round rooms, with other structural similarities between them on the inside. They would have been difficult to build without modern tools, but clearly the engineers of the Ancient Puebloans had a lot of practice. The current theory is that they were used for ceremonial purposes.
Other pictures of "The Cliff Palace," the largest cliff dwelling in the park.
Pictures of the inside of one of the kivas. The pit on the floor is a fire pit. In ancient days, the kiva would be covered with a wood roof with a small hold for smoke to escape. The rectangular hole in the wall adjacent to the fire pit is a ventilation shaft, which would have been necessary to keep oxygen coming into the kiva, both for the sake of the fire and for the people inside. The rectangular block on the floor between the fire pit and the ventilation shaft is a fire wall. With the fire going, fresh air would get sucked into the kiva through the ventilation shaft, which would further feed the fire but do little else. With the fire wall in place, the air got distributed through the kiva.
That's way more than enough for one post! There are more pictures in the photo section, and I'll put them into a post later.
Here are some shots recently taken at Rocky Mountain National Park.
One of the cool things about going to a national park is the wildlife that isn't scared of people at all. It's illegal to feed them, but it's obvious some people do, anyway.
These are the Never Summer Mountains. I love that name. It sounds like something right out of Tolkien.
And this is a marmot, which I learned is basically a very big squirrel, adapted to living in high-altitude tundras like this.
The highest point on the road through the park is over 12,000 feet. There were actually a couple of points we got winded just walking around, and despite being late May when we went, we actually drove through some pretty heavy snowfall at one point. It was definitely worth it, though!
Here are some photos I've been holding onto since last year. These were taken at the Carson National Forest in New New Mexico.
And this sums up what I have to say about it:
