Back "Home" in South Fork, Colorado

We are back in South Fork, Colorado for another week, enjoying the cool weather and the mountains.  We have to run the heater to warm up the motor home each morning, and Denisa is wearing a jacket in the evening.  We believe that this is the first July in our lives that we are running the heater instead of the air-conditioner.

We have another week to see the highlights around South Fork, and we can already tell we won't have time for it all.  We are still hiking almost every day, loving that pine scent of the forests in the mountains.  One short hike was to the biggest tree in the Rio Grande National Forest.  It measures 65 inches around the bottom, and is estimated at being over 500 years old.  Oh the stories it could tell!  The ghostly figure in the picture is actually Denisa, trying to give some scale to the size of that big tree.




We were startled by the flapping of heavy wings as we approached the big tree.  We found that we had scared up a grouse.  These birds remind us of a chicken in size and shape.  Normally land-lovers, they don't often perch in trees; but she was obviously wanting to put some vertical distance between us.

We also made a trip to Million Reservoir, several miles south of South Fork.  With the clear water mirroring the clouds and trees, it looked like a postcard.

 We hiked the half mile to the lake, then all the way around the lake for a bit more exercise.  This squirrel scurried over to check out the two nuts that were walking around the lake instead of fishing.

We also saw lots of evidence of the beavers at the lake.  They had cut down a half dozen trees with their characteristic pointy cut.  But they also left some unusual tooth marks up and down the trunks of the logs on the ground.  We would have loved to picture them at work, but they work best without an audience.

 

It was a beautiful hike around Million Reservoir, and Denisa prefers this postcard to the one at the first of the hike.

One might suspect from this blog that we all we do is hike.  Just to prove that we are multi-faceted, we're including a bike picture too.  We've come to find that even though it's in the mountains, the town of South Fork is predominately flat.  We rode all over town, surprised at the many cabins tucked away into residential areas that we didn't even know existed before our ride. 

So we found that there are more people sharing our current "home town" than we thought.  But the area has never felt crowded to us.  In fact, we realized that in all the hikes we have taken in the South Fork area, we've never seen another hiker on the trail. It's a good place to live right now!