Black Forest section 16

I woke up late, sleeping through my alarm.  I am trying to catch the moments before the sun rises over the small barn at my moms house, but I've missed it.  My other goal for the day was to head over to the Air Force Academy and try to find a few of the mule deer that are always hanging out near the trio of small kettle lakes near the south entrance.  The kettle lakes also hold at least great horned owl and several harriers, great ravens, and countless small passerines.  The  sun is too high for that as well. 
     Deer are crepuscular, meaning that they are active at dawn and dusk, they melt into the woodland shadows to digest their breakfasts in the late mornings, take a nap and then wake a few hours before sunset to eat again.  Their rod filled eyes work extremely well in the dark, but they sleep through the coldest part of the nights.  Deer are cyclical and predictable in their habits.  They head down into lower elevation deciduous forests in the spring and summer and move higher up into the mountains in the winter where the plants are more hardy.  They are home bodies, they rarely stray more than about ten miles from their homes. 
      The rut is over but the bucks haven't dropped their antlers yet.  This makes them a little bit more approachable and still magnificent.  Antlered bucks will sleep in the open, unantlered bucks will not, preferring to shy away in the undergrowth.  But I'd missed my opportunity to find them on the move, now they'd be bedding down.  Which makes for some really plain, boring shots of deer laying down and chewing their cud.  But I was up and I had planned on shooting today, a return to form.  So I set my sights on a small Section 16 that has always proved to be less tame than Colorado Springs' own.

The sun peaking through a stand of lodgepole.

Section 16's are areas of land that have been set aside as a public trust.  They cannot be built on unless the structure is grandfathered in; as Black Forests School in the Woods is.  They are mini refuges for wildlife and people alike.  Each Section 16 is set in the 16th mile marker on the areas map.  Each side is one mile long making an undistrubed area of about four square miles.  Not too shabby. 

Pikes Peak, America's Mountain, the second most photographed in the world.

Black Forest is the place that associate with home.  While I grew up on the extreme west end of the forest, on the edge between prairie and forest, it is the place that I feel at ease.  This summer will be the second anniversary of the Black Forest fire.  I remember watching it from the roof of my house, hearing my friends tell me either the terrifying news that their homes had burned to the charred ground or that they had been spared natures wrath.  I celebrated my birthday that year by digging fire trenches around the house before a steak dinner on the porch, the quietest dinner I've ever had.  The fire shifted the ranges of the resident animals.  Aberts's squirrel, an animal often spoken of but rarely seen became common in Walden, Fox Run and Sylvan Meadows.  The forest deer and even the few elk that remained were pushed west ward onto the plains in between Monument and Elbert.  Yes, there are elk out here, I have seen them and there is no confusion between a bull elk and a deer buck in late September. 

A lodgepole pine revels in the suns embrace.

I pulled my car into the Volmer/Burgess trailhead.  I place that I'd unloaded my bike many times from.  The temperature had dropped about five degrees from Falcon to here and the tall clusters of lodgepole pine blotted created deep shadows.  Ponderosa tower as single trees, the calls of chickadee and finch calling raucously from these high hides.  The snow is unbroken off the trail and there has not been much human traffic through the park in the last few days judging from the tracks.  The forest is full of birds, pigeon, tiny grey gnat catchers, magpies, stellars jays, and ravens dodge away from me and my camera.  It's a tough time to search for animals, the crunching snow and my steaming breathe give my position away.

Williamsons Sapsucker in a Ponderosa, eating insects

On the north side of the park the trees begin to show signs of the fire, thick trunks blackened on one side and whole standing dead trees, bereft of leaves and branches.  Across the street a newly formed meadow holds slash piles and the forest is still be cleared of it's many dead. 

A burned out section of the forest.

Birds flit in and out them, I can hear flicker, raven, and sapsucker calls.  Out of death comes life.  Soon stands of white fir will compete with new lodgepole pine.  Black Forest is strong and is already rebuilding.