Author: Steve

We fished the Frying Pan.

For those of us who want less length, we just saw something interesting: a
34 foot Bounder Pusher. Imagine the power of a smaller motorhome with the big engine. Course, you’d
have to give up six feet of cabinets.

The motorhome got a little messy dry camping for a week. We have hookups
here. We’ve got two out of three, anyway. We have water and electric. No
sewer. It’s too close to the river. We won’t have to move to dump, though.
They bring a truck by whenever you need and pump out your gray tank. We’ve
never run into that before. I’m interested in seeing how that works.
Anyway, we’re hooked up to power, so Judy got out the vacuum. Turn the
vacuum on, and out comes the cat. You can’t get past him until he gets his
belly vacuumed. Now the fishing prospects don’t look good at all. Afternoon thunderstorms
have blown the Crystal. It’s running the color of hot chocolate. That will
take a few days to clear up. Did I mention the rare bird? We’re on the Audubon Societies rare bird
alert. For several days before we left Louisville, we had an unusual
visitor to our yard. We get mourning doves every day, but after ten years
of feeding birds, a white winged dove showed up. White winged doves have no
business being in Colorado. They live in the Sonoran Desert. A birder who
doesn’t travel much would not get many chances to see a white winged dove.
So we have visitors to our yard hoping to catch the daily afternoon dove
visit. Then this last week: the magpies. There are always magpies hanging around
the Physics Center. We enjoy them. They make a nice chatter. There was
one that looked different. Magpies are iridescent black and white. This
one had a gray brown head and a yellow bill. Magpies have black bills. I
took it to be a juvenile, and didn’t think much of it. Juveniles often look
different from their parents; often, remarkably different. Judy and I got
to talking about it and looked it up in the book. Magpies don’t go through
a change in bill color. There is one kind of magpie, that has a yellow
bill, but it only lives in the central valley of California; a long way from
the Colorado High Country; and even then, they don’t have gray brown heads. Judy put another call into the rare bird hotline. They’re sending someone
up from Glenwood Springs to take a look at it. A yellow billed magpie in
Aspen doesn’t make sense. A magpie with a gray head doesn’t make any sense
at all.

We’re camped at the foot of Mount Sopris.

Purple Martins in the Mist. We’ve never seen them before. We knew just
where to go to see them. Specific directions. Glenwood Springs, drive
another ten miles to Sunlight Ski area. Locate lift number two. Follow it
up to tower number eight. Look for purple martin nests in the aspen forest
to the left. We got there early, before the afternoon thunderstorms.
First, we found the client’s office in Carbondale where we’ll go to work on
Monday. How hard could that be in a little mountain town like Carbondale?
Harder than we expected. Then we drove on to Sunlight Ski Area. We found
lift number two. First, though, we found the hummingbird feeder, complete
with broad tail, black-chinned, and Rufous hummingbirds. By the time we
headed up the slope to find the purple martins, the mountain was shrouded in
mist. We walked up in a light rain. There was no trail, we just made our
way up the hill through the grass and wildflowers. The rain started. We
weren’t turning back. Not while we were this close to purple martins. The
rain got heavier. We looped around the aspen grove and climbed up to the
path of the chairlift. We were too high. We tracked the chairlift back to
tower eight. There we were: standing in the pouring rain, now with thunder
and lightning. We should be surrounded by purple martins. Guess they had
sense enough not to go out in the pouring rain. We did see one, perched on the back of a chair on a distant lift. We got to
see a purple martin, but it wasn’t exactly the experience we were expecting.