I wanted to write today about three dangerous enigmas in America:
• The ongoing offensive by Trump’s Republicans to undermine democracy.
• The ongoing opposition by selfish Americans to coronavirus vaccinations.
• The reckless Russian Roulette that Congress is playing with the economy.
But I scrapped them all. Today, a break, to simply stare at the matchless marvels of Mother Nature.
Marvels like this.
Here in Colorado, we are in the peak of Fall colors. I’m taking you along the Roaring Fork River, which cascades from the top of Independence Pass— at 12,000+ feet it’s part of the Continental Divide— through the ski resort of Aspen, emptying out in the Colorado River about 50 miles downstream.
This week, some family and I biked those 50 miles— 50 in each direction— with dinner in Aspen and a night’s sleep in-between. You could drain your IRA after an overnight in Aspen but it’s worth every ache and pain your legs (and your seat) endure.
Fall colors don’t last long. As days grow shorter and temperatures drop lower, certain kinds of trees— deciduous trees— produce less chlorophyll, so their pigments change, and only a couple of weeks later, their leaves fall to the ground. But for these two weeks, this is nature’s wonderland.
And if you’re lucky, you’ll also happen upon other sights along the way. Like goats at work.
Someone joked when we saw this sign that after we turned a corner, there’d be a line of goats working in cubicles on computers. But no, these goats— written up just a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times— are working in brush, contained by a temporary electric fence, reducing the fuels on which wildfires feed.
As The Times described it, “Goats are browsers that eat the grass, leaves and tall brush that cows and other grazers can’t reach. After the goats digest the brush, their waste returns organic matter to the soil, increasing its potential to hold water.”
At least when they’re not on strike.
Another sight is the wastewater treatment plant just north of Aspen. Normally wastewater treatment plants don’t make the cut in picturesque pieces about Fall colors. This one’s different. In a valley like this, there’s just no ugly place to treat wastewater.
One of the stirring sights along the route is Mount Sopris. It is far from the tallest peak in the state— Colorado has 58 “fourteeners,” nearly 600 “thirteeners,” and about 750 summits above the 12,000 foot mark— but what’s distinctive about Sopris is, its twin peaks (at 12,965 feet above sea level) rise more than a mile above the valley floor (at 6,181 feet).
All told, we don’t have the oaks and ash, maples and hickories you’ll see in the Fall splendor of New England, the Ozarks, and the Catskills.
But we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got. And when you’re cruising this Fall corridor, you can forget for a day about all those enigmas in America.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Wow! Great pics....worthy of framing!
A mental health break! Nice!!!