Wordless Wednesday: starting to cool off for the evening

At least some folks have water...

...Although there are some advantages to a long drought.

For example, if your back yard has to be dug up (almost completely) to repair ancient gas lines that were leaking, it's not as traumatic if you have no grass to worry about:

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However, for the most part, I'd just as soon the rivers around here were as full of the wet stuff as the Arkansas near Salida.

They had a lot of late snow in the watershed, and the mountains have seen a lot of rain this summer. So the river was running very, very nicely when we were finally able to take time off from our chores and float a raft on a short stretch of this lovely stream.

Our last full day in Colorado. Finally, some recreation!

the river level was high enough that we felt safer in dorky helmets...

We even had special guests to accompany us. Sally and her friend were able to escape triple-digit Austin for a few days and their visit overlapped with us just long enough for the float.


The excursion began in downtown Salida, at their nifty boat ramp, where some crazy folks were surfing and play-boating in the water features there. Then we headed downstream for a few miles, on a stretch of the river that I had never ridden. (Henry had used it cataraft-rowing lessons before prior to our first Rio Chama trip.)


There aren't any major rapids along the stretch but we did have some excitement when our steersman lost concentration at just the wrong moment and we ended up in a veritable rock garden. However, said steersman was able to guide us off the rocks and through passages I would have sworn were too narrow for our behemoth raft (nickname: Battlestar).

Here he is resting from this labor:

Despite the full-ish flow of the river, we still had to do lots of paddling and were happy to see the Rincon takeout ramp. This is one of several fantastic little park/campgrounds in the Arkansas Headwaters Recreation Area, provided by the State of Colorado. Besides the launch ramp and camping spots, there are restrooms and a nice roomy changing area.

Very welcome for getting out of wet river clothes and becoming presentable enough to hit Amica's in Salida for one of their yummy and beautiful salads (see mine on the right). Very well-deserved and much needed, to replenish nutrients spent paddling. And enjoying views like this:

Yep, the views and the water levels are features that our poor little rivers in Texas, practically running completely dry by now, would kill for.

We're just lucky to have had a least a little time to enjoy the water, the views, and the cool air before heading back to 100+ and bone-dry yards.

Wordless Wednesday: Greenest green *I've* ever seen

Learning more Colorado history

We've been coming up to the Monarch area for so many years, we've picked up a lot of local history. But the great thing about history is that you can always learn some more!

The picture above shows our little town of Garfield (whose population, as of the 2010 Census, was all of 15) back in its boom days. (The picture was taken in 1886.) When, we've heard, there were as many as 250 buildings in the town!*

You might notice something curious in the old photo: the rather striking lack of trees. For comparison, check out this 1940 picture that I found in the Denver Public Library's digital collection (the red lines in both photos point to the Schoolhouse):

Back in the boom times, a lot of wood was needed for building cabins and for heating them. Thus, the denuded slopes. Sadly, it's possible that the area's glory days are somewhat to blame for the devastation currently being visited upon the region's lovely pines by the pine beetles.

Our Colorado friends assert that, when the slopes were harvested bare, the lodgepole pines were the first to recolonize, and they are particularly susceptible to the little beasties. Now, whole swaths of mountainsides in some areas are all dead trees. They've even had to start closing trails because of the danger of falling limbs and trunks.

The reason for the big boom, of course, was all the mining in the area, and in between all our domestic work, we were able to take a short break and get intimate with this history by taking a short drive up the mountain to the old Garfield Mine.

We had rather hoped that our little valley might be spared the pine beetle scourge, being high enough and, we hoped, cold enough to keep the beetles at bay. But we've started seeing some of the spectacularly dead trees here, too. Here's a cluster seen from the mine:

But, sad as some of the consequences of the history might be, it's still pretty fascinating to learn about.

And what's left behind has its own kind of beauty. Take a look at the wonderfully-weathered wood making up part of this old mine building, beautiful even if you have to think of the bare slopes when you admire its patina:


The Garfield mine was worked more recently than the 1880's, too, as evidenced by some of the structures at the site. On the left is a picture of Henry in one of the more recent-looking tunnels.

The beams are rusty, true, but they're metal, not wood, and the walls don't look nearly as antique as those in some of the other tunnels and buildings we [very carefully] examined. For example, here I am in the doorway of a small hut we speculated might have been a smokehouse:

Evidence of even more recent activity is obvious just up the road, where you can see the piles of marble that I commented on during our trip two years ago. On the right you can see the way the marble pile looks from down the road at the Garfield Mine.

You can also see, in the further distance, a hint of what currently makes for annual little booms in the Colorado economy...skiing! The Monarch Ski Area, which I've written about often, is just up the road, and is indicated by the red line in this photo. I was rather taken by this juxtaposition of the marks on the landscape from both old and new Colorado wealth:

We were thankful to learn more about this beautiful and interesting area from the Colorado friends that visited us there, as well as a knowledgeable neighbor who loaned me some great books detailing the county's history.

For example, I never knew that there used to be another large-ish town up the highway, where the Madonna Mine is still somewhat operational today. It was called "Monarch," in fact, but it's just completely vanished. All that's left are a couple of mine buildings now, but in the late 1800's there used to be a hotel, a school, all kinds of marks of civilization.

On the left is a photo of this mine (which is just downhill from the ski area) from the 1940's. (Thanks again to the Denver Public Library's digital collection.) It looks pretty much the same today, except for even more of the side of the mountain is gone—no trace of the town. According to this useful website, most of the buildings were covered in a snow slide in 1904, and since the area's silver economy had already gone bust, they didn't rebuild.

I plan to scour the internet to find copies of the books our neighbor had to buy for myself (to supplement google ). When I've studied them more closely, I'll probably have some interesting follow-up tidbits to share with you about this wonderful area.

Because, no matter how much you learn about the history of a place, you can always learn more!

I'll close with another example of this maxim and a shot of a conscious memorial—as opposed to a left-behind artifact—to Colorado's mining past. I took the photo below in Trinidad, a scenic little town just over the CO-NM border on IH-25, where we stopped for some ice cream. It has a rich mining history, too, which I didn't realize. And probably many more interesting stories, just waiting to be re-discovered.

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*Being a government information librarian by trade, I'm a little steamed that I can't seem to find an official population figure for Garfield during this boom period. But I'm still working on it! I will edit the post when I can give a definite number here.

Wordless Wednesday: Trucks for you

Working vacation

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately, but I really have been busy here in the mountains, where we usually just go to relax. Moving mattresses and furniture around, hauling truckloads of discards to the local resale shop and dump, etc. That kind of busy. [Not to mention that, when you have to climb a steep hill (at 9600' elevation!) or drive 30 minutes into town, to get the internet, you find you don't have to be connected that often!]

You see, we’ve recently become owners and co-owners of some property in the most beautiful valley in the Rockies (that of the south fork of the South Arkansas River, which I have written about before). Unfortunately, although we’re very attached to said property and very fond of it and the area, there’s a lot of deferred maintenance needing to be made up for up here (sorry for grammatically horrible ending to that sentence...maybe it's the altitude?)

Top priority was the large place that we are part owners of, the Schoolhouse Chalet. (It was built in 1879, back when our sleepy little mountainside town was booming (more about the history of this area in my next post, I promise) and served as an actual school into the middle of the last century. Now it’s a nifty vacation rental that sleeps up to 20!).

So, our trip started with a stop in Fort Worth (where I took my last Wordless Wednesday photo) to pick up some furniture from our co-owners, Henry's sister and brother-in-law. Blessedly, they have a very shady front yard, as you can see on the left, where we loaded the trailer, since it's just as hot there as in San Antonio (a fact that’s going to make it very hard to head south in a few days).

The boats on the trailer came from San Antonio, but we’ve been so busy we haven't had a chance to use them yet! The large item under the blue tarp (since, unlike Texas, Colorado occasionally does get some rain) is an almost new sofa and some chairs and other items for our joint property.

The living room of said property had a lot of old, saggy, stained furniture, stuff that generally didn't project the kind of first impression that you would like to project in a rental unit.

Unfortunately, I didn't think to take very many "before" pictures so you can't really appreciate the magnitude of what we've done. But below is some of the stuff hauled off by the wonderful furniture delivery guys (and that doesn’t include the stuff we personally discarded).

And here is the newly furnished living room, with indications of the furniture hauled and the furniture bought as part of our "support the Salida economy" drive.

We're not done with the living room yet, as we plan to put up some new curtains. But we're pretty happy with what we've accomplished so far.

[The reason we haven’t put up the curtains yet is a good example of the dis-advantages of living far away from urban areas: we couldn’t find long enough curtain rods without driving a few hours. So Sally is bringing them up with her on Saturday from Austin!]

But you can’t really complain when along your trip into town (where you can get almost everything you need) you get views like this:

Shabby as the living room looked, many of its beds were in really bad shape. And not being able to get a good night sleep is a good way not to get repeat rental business.

One of the few "before" pictures I took is on the right, showing one of the bedrooms. If you click to enlarge you can see where the bunk beds impinged on the door to the bathroom.

What you can't see is that the larger bed was partially supported by some big rocks (as was one of the beds in another room). That's right—rocks!

Looking below, though, you can see this room as it now looks. A brand new bed, no bunks (which were disassembled and moved—through incredibly narrow doorways—into another room, replacing a more rickety bunk set).

And the new bed is supported by its own sturdy frame, with no rocks! [I wonder what Don Draper would say about this advertising line for the rentals: No beds supported by rocks! We also replaced the rock-supported bed in the other room with an almost-new frame. So this would be truth in advertising!]

Looks a little better, wouldn't you say?!

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Since the Schoolhouse had renters coming at the end of our first week, we were somewhat pressed to get all this re-furnishing done. But once it was, we could turn to the less seriously needed, but more satisfying, work on our own little piece of heaven, what we call the Mountain Deck, just behind the Schoolhouse.

We had our own share of bounty from the furniture store, getting a new mattress that has been really nice to sleep on, as well as a new refrigerator (one that doesn’t freeze the strawberries!). But Henry’s main project was to make the deck that gives the place its name at least somewhat more childproof.

This deck is the greatest feature of the place and runs all along the back of the house, affording wonderful views of Monarch Ridge, like this:

As well as great exposure to the wonderful sound of the south fork cascading its way down to the Arkansas in the valley below. (And the rushing water sound is particularly loud this year—loud enough to make conversation on the deck a little difficult!—because of the area’s late heavy snows.)

But you might notice in the above picture that the deck’s railings are spaced rather far apart. For some time we’ve worried about a kid (or a ball or a rolling pin) falling through them and down the cliff.

So Henry, with help from some very knowledgeable and helpful friends, devised a great method of closing up the gaps a little without spoiling the view. It involved cutting & grinding smooth 120 feet of “cattle panel” wire fencing (luckily our area is rural enough to have very well-stocked farm-and-ranch retail establishments) then securely attaching the sections. Whew! What a job! (You can see a section of the finished product on the left.)

(I wasn’t exactly idle while he was doing all this. In addition to getting the curtains ironed and ready to hang when the rods arrive, I completely reorganized our stock of supplies, discovered a wonderful new locavore produce/bakery/gift shop, replaced a gazillion shabby mattress pads, and worked several challenging jigsaw puzzles!)

Now that Henry’s finished with the biggest job, he’s turning his fertile mind toward more substantial improvements to the place. You can see the need for several of these in the picture on the left below.

The stairway leading to the tiny bedrooms on the upper floor bears too close a resemblance, we think, to one in a not-too-capacious sailboat (note even the rope handrail, to accentuate the nautical theme!). We’d love to figure out a way to make this stair easier for old people (like us and our friends ) to ascend and descend.

And you might also notice the somewhat unattractive paneling and the really unattractive carpeting. Replacing these two items (which extend throughout the place) is high on the wish list of us and our kids.

So we’ve done a lot, but have lots more to do. However, spending all this time up here doing mundane tasks, instead of just doing fun vacation stuff like hiking and boating, has made the place feel more like home and less like a once-a-year destination. And since I could see retiring up here in a few years very, very easily, that’s a feeling I’m really savoring.

Wordless Wednesday: Fort Worth chauvinism