It is late in the month, and since I have been planning to
highlight a photo each month, I had better get to it!
I wish I could say I took this photo this week. Alas, we
have not had really good snowshoeing snow yet this season, at least not down
low here and nearby. This was taken a
couple seasons back about two miles south of our home and a mile west of
downtown Castle Rock, in an area that will soon be developed into a regional
park. It will be a lovely place with miles of trails connecting the butte tops.
The area between Denver and Colorado Springs is peppered
with buttes, as the foothills fall off and break up going east to the high plains.
Most of these are flat but some are capped with a conglomerate stone, like the namesake of the town. Here around the city of Castle Rock itself, several of the
flat tops had historic quarries up top where a building stone called rhyolite
was quarried from the late 1800’s into the 1900’s. It is a fairly soft stone of pressed
volcanic ash, spread eons ago from an enormous eruption over a hundred miles to
the southwest. Local stone ranges from whites to grays to pinks and light
purples, and even today graces many an old building in the greater Denver area.
The butte in this photo had such a quarry at one point, attested by the scrap
rock that can be seen pitched from the cliff edges.
Any guess as to what may have left the tracks that cross
mine in two places? Look it over, and I’ll give the answer below. There is
enough detail to make a determination.
About the only tree the photo shows is the ubiquitous Gambel
(a.k.a. Scrub) Oak, though a few Ponderosa Pines show off to the left in the
shadows. This is pretty typical of the foothills here at 6200 feet elevation. Though
small in stature (only up to twenty feet in height, usually smaller) and thus very
unlike the huge oaks in the rest of the continental U.S., Gambels still provide
an unusually large crop of acorns for being so small, and so offer a much
needed deer browse when the ground is clear of snow. And actually, contrary to
popular opinion outside Colorado, snowcover in the Denver area is very much the
exception than the rule. Though we average 57 inches of snow annually, what we
get does not last long; moderate temps and intense high altitude sunshine see
to a very quick melt. This would not be the case, of course, another three or
four thousand feet higher where the snows can last the winter.
The openings you see are not clearings but natural high meadows.
It is actually pretty amazing to come across openings even high in the
mountains, called alpine meadows, interspersed among the pine and spruce forests. Found where they are
due to moisture and drainage patterns, these gorgeous places are typically
covered with all sorts of wildflowers the whole spring and summer long. I’ll
post some of our alpine meadow photography some time.
To the attentive eye, each moment
has its own beauty, and in the same
field it beholds, every hour, a picture
which was never before seen and
shall never be seen again.
~Emerson
OK, the tracks? Those belong to cottontail rabbits. When the
tracks begin to melt they can start to look like human footprints, but these
remain on top of the snow and don’t ‘posthole’ like a typical footprint. A series
of clumps about the size of a man’s shoe, going in a roughly straight path with
about an eighteen-inch center, tell the cottontail’s sign. These rascals have
proliferated around here like, errr… like rabbits, and also offer a tasty
regular morsel for area coyotes, bobcats, black bear, mountain lions, weasels,
hawks, owls and eagles.
Well, a naturalist can talk on and on about what might seem
to some not much of anything! But there is a great deal to see in nature
observation, wonders in fact. Consider Ralph Waldo Emerson: "To the attentive
eye, each moment has its own beauty, and in the same field it beholds, every
hour, a picture which was never before seen and shall never be seen again.” Or
how about Emerson’s colleague Henry David Thoreau, who said, “That man is
richest whose pleasures are simplest.”
Thanks for sharing in some of God’s riches I have known.
Next up next week? “From My Nature Journal…”
~~RGM, January 28, 2013
