A walk in the neighborhood

I know I promised some scenic shots from Mesa and Arches, but since I'm home nursing a traveler's cold, and it's going to take some doing to sift through the pictures I took there, I'm going to cop out a bit and do a short post today on my sister's neighborhood. Which I'd planned to do anyway, before being blown away by Arches scenery on Saturday.

At any rate, to place the neighborhood on a map of the U.S., you have the handy street numbering convention shown on the sign here: 26½ refers to the distance from the Utah border. Those nice, straight, state borders make nomenclature like this easy and descriptive.

What impressed me most about the neighborhood flora, not too surprisingly, was the trees—so many are species rarely seen around here, such as the impressive willow down the street, shown here on the right.

Joan has a lovely trio of aspen trees in her front yard, that I remember as much smaller and thinner once upon a time than they are now, as you can see here with a Texas tourist in the frame for scale.

Flowers are abundant in the area, too, with the cool evenings and plentiful irrigation water. Sensibly, the sprinkler systems here use non-potable water, from the canal that runs from the river through the neighborhood. You can see the canal here, along with a plane landing at the cute Grand Junction airport [I love small airports that are easily reached and easily navigated!]
Here's an example of some good use to which this irrigation has been put—a lovely bed of columbines of more than just the traditional purple and white color combination. How sad that the first few sites to come up on a Google search for Colorado Columbines refer to the 1999 shooting at the school of that name. But the reason the school was given that name was that it's the state flower and it's a beauty—maybe someday pictures of the flowers will come up first in a search again.