Steve and Judy's Travels!

Judy’s favorite, the scissortail flycatcher.

Sometimes Judy doesn’t cover much ground when she takes the pets out for a
walk.

This week’s commute: one hundred feet from our front door to the front door
of the office. We’re doing a land trust on a forested hillside overlooking
the north end of the San Luis Valley, with hot springs, a campground, and an
office. That’s where we’re working, at the office. We parked the motorhome
on a flat spot on their driveway. No hookups, but we can deal with that.
Black and white and orange grosbeaks with a touch of yellow clog the feeder.
Chittering pine siskin by the dozen. Squadrons of hummingbirds. Deer
wander the grounds. The land trust protects the hot springs, an old mine that houses two hundred
fifty thousand bats each summer, the natural landscape, and some ranchland
that is included in the watershed. If you’re looking on a map, the closest town is Villa Grove, way north of
Alamosa and thirty miles south of Poncha Springs.

We’ve moved on. On from Santa Fe, north into the middle of Colorado. We’re
in the San Luis valley, a valley surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It
doesn’t rain much here, but water flows in from all directions with the
snowmelt. It’s an odd thing, a sagebrush desert, with streams and
groundwater available for ranching and agriculture. We’re at the Great Sand Dunes for the weekend, the tallest sand dunes in
North America. The prevailing wind blows from the west, across this wide
flat dry valley at 7,500 feet and picks up grains of sand as it goes along.
When it’s time to lift up over the 14,000 foot mountains on the east side of
the valley, the wind loses steam and drops the grains of sand. We get 750
foot tall shifting dunes adjacent to a mountain stream, juniper pinion
forests, and ponderosa pine/aspen hills leading up to the high peaks. The
sand dunes are closed to motor vehicles, but open to every kind of
self-propelled recreation you can think up. You can hike them, climb to the
top, slide to the bottom, backpack and camp in them. You can’t ride
bicycles in them; that would be too tough, but you can take sand boards up
on them and slide down. There is a four-wheel drive road around the
perimeter of them, and that has some sand on it to play in with the jeep.
There is a campground, but it is designed for tent campers and smaller
motorhomes, so we stayed a couple miles away at a private park. Lots of birds. We saw pygmy nuthatches crawling all through the tufts of
ponderosa pine needles. Wouldn’t want to be a pygmy nuthatch with hay
fever, covered with yellow pine pollen.

We’ve finished the job in Santa Fe. This was a tough one. It’s not that
the financial statements were difficult. This was a difficult job on a
different level. This is the job we were supposed to do a couple weeks ago. It’s a small
nonprofit. I was coming to work with one person, the Treasurer. The job
got delayed because he died. They still wanted the job done, so here we
are, working with the wife of the Treasurer. He was so proud of how he’d
gotten everything together, and he was so excited about getting the first
audit ever for the organization, his wife was anxious to complete what he
had started, what was so important to him. What a delightful woman. What strength at such a time. And how many
parallels could we draw between their lives and ours? They were our age.
They started dating in high school. They had been married the same length
of time. Kids. Grandkids. This stage in their lives they end up working
with nonprofit organizations… He was in great shape. He paid attention to his health. He exercised. But
he was sixty. Right in the middle of their plans he died of a heart attack. So this one was difficult.