Spring in the Rockies

I would like to start this post off with two notes.

1. I'm not going to write about ecology and animal consciousness.  I'm not really qualified as much as I'd like to be. If you are interested in the subject i would offer you the recommendation of buying as many books on your species as you can.  Also, Bernd Heinrich has several good books that are not super sciencey (though he is a scientist) that deals with the topic, Mind of the Raven, Ravens in Winter, Life Everlasting, Summer/Winter World and The Homing Instinct are fantastic.  Joe Hutto has three books, though i can only recommend his Illumination in the Flatwoods and Touching the Wild.  Not because the other one is bad, i just haven't read it.  If you would like some suggested readings on specific species i can give you a few titles ( depending on the species!)

2. Birdcast (Cornell University) is showing that this should be the first week of massed migratory movement as birds return to their northerly breeding ranges.  Be respectful of the birds, they have flown thousands of miles and may fly thousands more before they are finished.  Lock your cats up, and keep your kids and damn dogs on leashes.  If you are looking for birds go to places with water and "edge" environment.  The edge is the place where two ecotones collide, trees and meadow are always a good draw.  Bear Creek Regional Park, Fountain Creek Regional Park, and even Fox Run park should provide refuge for traveling birds.

 

I pulled out of the gravel driveway, rocks actually showing through the dirty coat of ice and snow, my car slewed to the side as the small engine over revved.  I can't say that I don't enjoy pretending to be a rally cross driver.  The car straightened itself quickly and I was off, a blue blur on the sweeping prairie.  The dirt ends in a buttonhook left turn that puts me into the wrong lane for a second at the very apex.  There are trees, dripping their frosty blankets, and in the trees a male red winged black bird is already calling. Letting his rivals know that he has claimed this tiny bit of drainage.  My tent, sleeping bag, unpacked bag and other sundries roll around in the back seat.  I haven't spent a night outside in too long, I'm a little wary of how this will turn out too, it's supposed to be very cold. 

A ferrugenuous hawk sits on power line staring down into my car, that's an auspicious start to this outing.  Not fifty yards later a tiny grey merlin sits on the same line, though he is staring out into the prairie, hoping for an unsuspecting house finch.  It's settled, this will be a great trip.

One turn later and I'm on Highway 24, heading west.  The drive is a long and boring one, traffic is building up, this first nice weekend in so many months is pulling all sorts of people out and onto the roads.  Woodland Park has the densest traffic, but many of the cars disappear up highway 67, or behind the McDonalds which will lead them into Pike National Forest.  Eventually I shake all but one compensator truck and a bus when I turn left onto Highway 67 in Divide.  I am heading out to the 667, a place I've written about twice, both times in fall.  This trip will be very different, the mountain is still decked out in a dazzling cloak of pure white snow, the temperature will only just reach above freezing, and only for the first afternoon that I am here.  There is an irresistible pull though, to be in that deep, dark spruce forest that is always so alive.  I've been here in winter before, though I admit that at the time I had little interest in ecology, birds, or anything other than escaping from a humdrum reality.

I pull off the road on the right side, the lot has several cars in it, including a police man talking to some guy who is flaunting a pair of bright red snowshoes; maybe I should have brought mine, just in case.  The little man in the big truck whips around me and in a belch of toxic black fume begins riding the buses bumper.  He's really got life figured out.  I park, assemble my bag, strap the tent onto the outside and realize that this sleeping bag is gigantic.  I have to stow it on the outside of my bag with an s clip, so it swings around just under my pack, a real nuisance. 

The first section of trail is a tight, partially eroded sinew of ice and loose gravel that switchbacks higher into the forest.  At this point the sky is still visible and the trees are shorter and younger.  Limber pine with stripey grey bark, white fir, and a few young spruce.  The trail turns sharply right and the landscape changes abruptly.  The ice is replaced by hard pack snow and the trees begin to show their eons.  Reaching high into the air the mighty Engelman Spruce closes the suns radiance from the aspen and pines below.  The creek which runs in a ravine next to the trail makes no noise; frozen, waiting ever so patiently for the warm flood that will burst through the beaver dams high up the slope.  Snow shoes are unnecessary, the trail is firmly packed down, trapped in the thaw and freeze cycles of early spring.  The park looks completely different.  I know where there are rocks hidden under the snow and I walk on top of them and can't feel any trace of their existence, there is no ground moss, just the wispy patches that hang like beards from the lower branches of the Spruce and Fir.  And it is silent.  Not eerily silent like you're waiting for something to happen.  Perfectly silent, no breeze, human voices, the snow under boots doesn't even crunch it's so frozen.  The silence is broken in the same clearing that I photographed a group of Gray Jays a few months earlier.  This time instead of the soft mewling calls of the fluffy white jays it's the hammering of a downy woodpecker searching for beetle larvae under the skin of an ancient tree.  There would be several dozen sightings of this familiar and beautiful bird. 

Male Downy Woodpecker hunting for bugs

Near the end of the clearing a small pile of bark and pine cones had accumulated under a spruce.  From a hole in the snow in the middle of this mess a tiny grey pine squirrel peeps out before rocketing up the tree, cone in mouth.  Pine squirrels are larder hoarders, they spend most of the summer and fall burying as many cones as they can find in the same hole, enlarging it as they need too.  They don't eat on the ground, so they place these pantries underneath a tree that becomes the middle point of their breeding season territory.  They will fight most other animals to protect this hoard.  If you look high enough up into one of these trees you will likely see a messy collection of twigs and leaves.  This is the squirrels actual home, its drey, where it spends the long cold night wrapped in a luxuriant tail.  I moved off the trail hoping to get a very close up of the tiny squirrel with the white eye rings, I sank up to my waste in powdery snow.  After a few steps the game was up, the squirrel sounded his churring alarm call and pressed even higher up the tree.  Large predators are pretty clumsy in deep snow. 

Pine Squirrel at his larder tree

After clearing as much snow out of the tops of boots as I could I pressed on in the direction of the "falls".  Even when they aren't frozen they aren't as spectacular as the name sounds.  Just an uncontrolled rip of water rolling down a pink granite rock face into one of the many small creeks that feed the marshy meadow that splits the forest.  I know where I want to camp, in the valley next to the falls at the base of granite slope.  Once in the valley though, there is literally no where that I can compress down enough to provide a decent base for the tent.  So I head up the slope and find a place at the top that is icier, which is a good feature if you're looking to compress snow. 

I make camp and sit down to read for a little bit.  Breaking trail in all that snow is very tiring! After a breather I head back down the slope and back towards the meadow, I only have about two hours before I want to be back at the tent, it's a lot easier to keep the tent warm if you're in it before the sun finishes setting.  So that means eating, hanging up your bag, taking care of your business and being in the tent, in the sleeping bag by the last rays of sunset.  There are more woodpeckers and squirrels and I make it back just in time. 

Sunset

Night is long and cold.  That's about all I want to say about it. 

The next morning though, is beautiful.  The sun hits the valley first and slowly spreads up and over the rock tower.  I take my breakfast down onto the sun warmed slope; which means about 20 degrees instead of the less than zero of the tent, and look at the collegiate range in the distance.  And then, a soft mewling call, two gray jays swoop into one of the spruce, then flit to another, before settling in a limber pine that is growing out of the rock.  I toss them a piece of bread and soon all three of us are eating the sandwich.  I felt bad about the meal of white bread, which is actually about as nutritious for birds as it is for humans so I get an apple and we share that out too. 

I would like some of that fine sandwich!

Until another call rings out loud and shrill behind us.  The two little gray jays bolt for the safety of the limber pine.  A Clark's Nutcracker, another type of jay, is sitting in an aspen, clacking its bill open and close, asking for a little bit of apple too.  There's little left but the core, which I give it after a few photos. 

Clark's Nutcracker

My feet are freezing, I had planned on looking for grouse up near pancake rock, but have since changed my mind.  I break camp quickly, and when I look up there is a huge raven sitting in a spruce, it calls to me, a gruff contact call.  Apparently he wants something to eat too.  It's the end of the winter and these birds have all survived a very hard winter, even by Rocky Mountain standards.  So I leave another apple after taking a few bites to get through the skin and make my down the granite slope and back to the trail.  Ravens will eat just about anything, and if this one refuses the apple I know two gray jays that will be on it before too long.

Raven, from a different trip

The little jays are waiting for me in the limber pine.  Well they're really just waiting for food which they know I have.  I tell them goodby and wish them a long happy life, I promise to come back soon with peanuts, any corvids favorite and pretty healthy too.

Gray Jay, everything about them seems soft

The walk back is always the worst.  There's always more to see, more birds, more squirrels, more behaviors and survival strategies.  I have to remind myself that I can only be a visitor here, to be anything more would only invite disaster on this place and on the furred and feathered denizens who call the 667 their home.