LE'CHAYIM!
A toast...To Life! This week has been all about life and death, remembering and being grateful for friends, family, and living. Last Saturday morning, our friend Lyn told us to go to the Visitor's Center in town and look for the nest of new barn swallows. What a treat. The little ones look like the Marx brothers putting up a constant racket demanding food and attention. The overworked parents are beautiful and an amazement to watch. While we were there, a shuttle bus driver told us that a bald eagle was hanging out on Fish Creek Road by the lake. As we turned onto Fish Creek, the eagle soared low over the lake and right in front of our car to land in a nearby tree. We spent a good deal of time with this splendid fellow also. You can check out the birds and other images from this blog on the link below.
August 11 was the one year anniversary of the death of our dear friend, Rich Tracy. At the invitation of his family, we set out to do something to honor and remember him. With friends Teri Rodgers and Lee Kennicke, Pam and I decided to climb Twin Sisters and be on or near the summit at sunrise. That night as I drifted off to sleep I heard a pack of coyotes yipping and crying under the blue-black night sky. Hours later, just before getting up at 2:30, I thought I heard them once again.
The four of us left the Twin Sisters trail head at 3:30 under a crescent moon. We hiked steadily until we came out above tree line. We looked across to Long's Peak where in the dark, to our amazement, we saw a line of flashlights held by hikers going for the summit. A bit later, the sun began to push orange, yellow, and red ahead of itself, along the horizon. We walked on over the now granite trail until we could see the top of the sun as it rose. We stopped to remember Rich, revel in the spectrum of sun colors, and take pictures. In 30 minutes we reached the summit. The jagged granite rock was bathed in glorious light. We rested in the quiet and then each of us wrote something for Rich on a small piece of paper which individually, we pushed into different cracks in rocks where we sheltered. Teri brought a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace is Every Step, one of Rich's favorite books. As we sat thinking of Rich, Pam read: "...We know that if our heart stops beating our life will stop...but consider the other things outside of our own body...Look at the immense light we call the sun. If it were to stop shining the flow of our life would also stop...so the sun is our second heart...there is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us..." We drank chai, rested and then, as the sun turned from gold to white, we began our descent as the world below woke to the morning and went about its business.
About two weeks ago, Lucy woke us with fierce barking. Downstairs, we looked out our windows to find a tiny bear cub (about Lucy-sized) up in the tree that holds our bird feeder. The mom was crouched on the ground below as she had already ripped the feeder from its fastener. Unconcerned, the baby stayed put. Once we heard the mom growl softly. We thought the cub to be very little for this time of year, and that the mom was unusually quiet about her little one. Perhaps a late cub to a new mom, we thought. We went back to bed. Lucy barked again, the bears wandered off. Now, bring yourselves back the THIS Sunday, late afternoon. We got an email from friend Lyn. She had stopped along Fish Creek Road to see what people were looking at. An animal sighting for sure, she thought. What she found was a mother bear, graaring and whoofling from the bank of the creek while two men pulled a small cub from the water. The cub died very shortly thereafter and was taken off to "the Bear Lady" in town where a necropsy could be performed. Lyn went to speak to "Bear Lady" who thought, on initial inspection, the cub had died of wounds received from a coyote attack. We think the little cub was the same one who was in our tree, and perhaps the coyotes I heard the night/morning before were the same ones who attacked the little one.
Several days later we went to visit Teri and Nora Lee (who is 3 now) where they were camped in Rocky. Afterward, we drove up Bear Lake Rd to show Mare all of the construction work going on. As we drove, we came upon a beautiful bull elk...fresh out of velvet with blood still on his antlers. He was having a fine evening, munching on green grass which he was kind enough to open wide his mouth and show us as we drove by. Further on, we met a flock of wild turkeys...all in an evenings ride!
The next day we gathered at Cody and Cad's home for our annual Lebanese feast. Cad is half Irish, half Lebanese and she and Cody have been kind enough each year to put together a delicious dinner straight out of Cad's childhood. It is always a treat and sooo delicious. We ate at tables on their deck and stopped eating, drinking, talking, and laughing only long enough to photograph a magnificent sunset. For two weeks we've had a good deal of smoke in Estes Park...carried to us on the wind from fires in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and Northern California...a painful reminder of how we started the summer. The only good thing about this smoke is the beautiful sunsets and sun- rises it creates.
Friday we went off to work in the Park. It was a quiet morning after what had been a hectic week for rangers and rescue staff. On Tuesday alone, we learned, there were six rescues performed: two requiring lift-outs by helicopters, one that required rescuers to climb to Broadway on Long's Peak to lower two hikers who, in the dark, inadvertently (?) followed the flashlights of two technical climbers who were going to climb the face of Long's. By the time the hikers got to Broadway (a narrow ledge part of the way up the face), they realized they had made a very bad mistake they couldn't correct. One other rescue involved sending a Hasty Team (rescuers with a stretcher) up to Lake Haiyaha to bring down a hiker with a broken leg. We're happy to say, our shift remained quiet throughout. There was one very funny story, however that I'd like to share with you. For the past several years a form of rock climbing called bouldering has become very popular. This involves climbing rock without ropes. As a safety measure, boulderers carry large crash pads on their backs to wherever they are climbing. Visitors are always curious about what these large "mattresses" are. Last year I was near a fellow carrying one of these pads when a visitor said, "Say, what IS that thing on your back?" The fellow, without pausing or hesitating said, "M'am, this is an elk saddle." The visitor turned to me and said, "Whaaa? Really?" I said, "Yes, we give five permits a week," then we looked at one another and laughed and I explained what they were. This week, a visitor who was out hiking ran into one of the crash pad-carrying boulderers and asked the usual question..."What IS that?" The climber stopped and said, "M'am, this is a moose grooming station. We open the pad and moose come to us. They lie down on the pad and then we comb them, pick ticks off, brush their teeth and then smack them on the butt. They hop up and run off." The visitor was overcome with joy that Rocky was treating these animals so well and that we actually had young people out in the field caring for the animals. When she got back to the trail head, she went to the ranger kiosk and asked for a report form. "What would you like to report, m'am?" the ranger asked. The woman explained what she had seen and was eager for the Park Superintendent to know what a great service she thought this was. Trying to keep a straight face, the ranger gave her a form and watched her fill it out. As the lady walked out into the parking lot, the ranger and volunteers succumbed to a fit of the giggles and carefully filed the report in the circular file.
We finished our week by having dinner at Lee and Mare's. Lee's sister Elvon and brother-in-law Don are visiting, so Brandy (D & E's oldest son), Liz (his partner), Becca (Brandy's middle daughter) and Tommy Caldwell (her husband--who is a world famous big wall climber [he has set many "firsts" on El Capitan in Yosemite]) all came to enjoy good food and a lot of laughs.
And that was our week. Le'chayim! Treasure each moment in the day...it is all we really have, for yesterday is done and tomorrow will bring what it will...And so it goes in the mountains as summer begins to turn its face to fall.
Here are some pictures from this past week:
