This is for the Birds! and a Peach Update

While we were camped at Caddis Flats Campground near Placerville, Colorado, Denisa seemed to take an unusual number of pictures of birds. So this blog is for the birds! For example, we did some bird watching from our camp site. These little yellow birds were busy with the purple thistle plants that have gone to seed.

Denisa watched as this little bird de-fuzzed the entire thistle head, pausing only momentarily from her work for this picture.

Another day we took a drive just west of us at Woods Lake.

Shortly after we arrived it started to sprinkle, and we were afraid our kayak plans would be rained out. But like the other showers we have experienced this summer, it was just long enough for the five other paddle boarders to hustle off the water and take cover. So after the short rain, we had the lake to ourselves! Without those other paddlers, the water was perfectly still to mirror the mountains and clouds in front of us.

Well, actually we didn't have the lake all to ourselves. We had to share it with the resident birds. We don't often take pictures of ravens, but this pair looked so different from each other. One looked so sleek . . .

and the other not so sleek. We guess that if a person can have a bad hair day, then a bird can have a bad feather day.

The gray clouds that brought the rain shower were making some interesting cloud shadows and sun streaks in the sky as we continued our float around Woods Lake.

As we brought the kayak back into the dock, Denisa was taking more pictures of--you guessed it--the water birds.

It was fun to see this little guy, mirrored in the lake water below him.

We were the only ones left at the lake as we dried out the kayak and loaded it into the car. It doesn't follow with the bird theme, but we have to include the picture of the mule deer buck that appeared out of the forest for his evening drink at the lake.

Back to the birds--yesterday on the trail we found this ptarmigan hiking just in front of us.

About the size of a chicken, these birds have brown feathers to blend with the forest floor where they usually hang out. In the winter, they will have white feathers to match their snowy environment.

Sometimes we need a random blog to use up some random pictures, and this seems to be a good day for that. So we thought we would also make a random update to what we did with all those peaches we bought in Orchard City. Remember that beautiful 25 pound box of just-picked peaches?

Well, we gave some of them away to neighbors, and we used some of them on bran flakes for breakfast. Dozens more went on hikes, where they made a tasty trail treat. But dozens more went to make desserts. We first made a four-layer peach delight (and forgot to take a picture). Then we made a peach crunch (which is a little different from a peach crisp), that was delicious topped with ice cream.

Then we used a strawberry dessert recipe and substituted it with peaches to make the first-ever fresh peach frozen fluff (and forgot to take a picture). Our final dessert was a brownie cheese cake, and instead of topping it with the usual cherry pie filling, we topped it with homemade peach sauce.

All of our peach experiments were tasty, and we are sad to say that all 25 pounds of peaches are now gone. So now we can end this random blog, by saying that we are having a good wander through Colorado, eating Colorado peaches and taking pictures of Colorado birds. How random is that?!?

Celebrating our 39th Anniversary at Blue Lakes!

We get to do so many special things on a daily basis, that we really have a hard time planning something special for a really special day like a wedding anniversary. So this year we decided to re-hike one of our favorite hikes of all time. We have never repeated a hike before, but the Blue Lakes are so beautiful that we wanted to do it again. 

It just happened that the best day to make the hike was on our 39th anniversary. 

So we celebrated like everyone does, by setting the alarm for 5 a.m. and eating a breakfast of milk and dry cereal while we drove to the trail head in the dark. We found two different herds of elk on that dark highway drive, so God was taking care of us on our anniversary that we managed not to hit any of them.

We are up so early because the small trail head fills up early because this is a very popular hike. We aren't the only ones wanting a repeat look at the Blue Lakes. But we probably are the only ones celebrating a 39th anniversary on this trail today. We noticed that all of the hikers we saw this morning were in their twenties, so we're sure they haven't been married 39 years. It was still a little dark in the forest where we were walking when the first light of the morning was hitting the top of the mountains.

After a couple hours of walking in the forest, we came out into a valley ringed with beautiful mountain peaks. We have obviously wandered into more of God's wonders on this anniversary!

We probably would have gotten to that mountain vista a little earlier, but Denisa discovered that the raspberries are ripening on the trail. She loves fresh berry trail snacks--especially on her anniversary!

We also would have been faster if it weren't for all the time we spent watching the "marmot village." We've never seen so many of these very social creatures in one place. At one point, we could see seven marmots at the same time.

Normally they are happy to sit on a rock, and watch the passing hikers.

Every time we took a picture, it seemed we had two or more in the frame because they seem to like to hang out together.

But for the first time, we saw controversy in the marmot world. We had never seen a marmot fight before today.

Just a little further down the trail, and we got our first views of the first of the blue lakes. The emerald water is something that we hadn't forgotten since the first time we saw it five years ago. But when we compare the pictures from last time, we see some differences. In August 2015, there was more snow on the mountains behind the lake, and the meadows were filled with wildflowers. So 2020 not only brought us Covid, but it also brought us a Colorado drought and its side effects.

We continued the hike up and onto the next ridge, to get the overhead view of that emerald lake now below us.

Then we hiked on to the next valley for a look at the second of the blue lakes with its rocky ridge line. Again, we're missing the wildflowers we marveled at in 2015.

Most people stop with the first or second lake, but we had to continue to the third blue lake of the day.

The trip to all three Blue Lakes and back is 10.3 miles long, with 2,595 feet in elevation gain, and took us about 6.5 hours of hiking. So of course we took more pictures than that. In fact, we took way too many pictures. We like keeping the pictures in the blog as a fun reminder for ourselves of God's magnificent wonders we got to wander on our anniversary. 

While we scroll through some of the pictures from today, we thought we would scroll through some anniversary memories from past years.

First anniversary - We were living in a one-bedroom efficiency apartment and starting our senior year of college. We estimate it was about the same square footage as our motor home is now. We celebrated by defrosting the top layer of our wedding cake, that had been taking up too much room in our tiny freezer for a year. Mark will eat anything, but even he had a hard time eating that dried out wedding cake.

5th anniversary - Mark had fallen in love with a brand new Buick LeSabre on the local car dealer's lot. Denisa thought it was too extravagant and too expensive, but figured we'd be buying it eventually. So she bought the car herself, put a big red bow on it, and picked Mark up for lunch in the new Buick on our anniversary. He was really surprised!

7th anniversary - Our first baby was less than one month old, and we dared to take him with us to our favorite pizza place for our first meal out as parents. He woke up and started crying about the time the pizza arrived. So we boxed it up and took it home to eat cold pizza for our anniversary.

10th anniversary - Mark and his brothers were going on a trip to the Colorado mountains, and taking the horses and pack mule. Mark let his brother pick the date, and they left on the trip on our tenth anniversary. So Denisa was at home alone with our 3-year-old and 4-month-old to celebrate this momentous occasion. To make up for his absence, Mark bought her an aluminum frying pan (because the tenth is the aluminum anniversary)--and a string of pearls.

15th anniversary - While raising kids, our anniversaries seem to be a blur. But Denisa planned this one to re-enact our first date. She got barbecued ribs from one restaurant in town, and onion rings from another, plus she made Texas toast and apricot preserves to complete the same meal we ate on our first date. Then she ordered the movie we watched at the twin theater that first date night. The name of the movie we watched was, "The Promise" (even though Mark still says he wanted to go to "The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again" that was playing at the other theater.)

Those are some good memories of some of the early years of our marriage. It's hard to believe that some of those memories are from so long ago! Our 39-year marriage has truly been blessed in so many ways. We did find a few wildflowers on the mountain-side this trip, so we had to snap a picture of them. Denisa is a lucky woman, because she has a husband that treats her to beautiful views and a bouquet of flowers on her anniversary!

Moving Day to the Red Rocks of Caddis Flats

After five good days in Ouray, it's time to head to our next campground. Instead of continuing south down the million dollar highway, we're doing a bit of back-tracking on the drive today. We are heading back north to the town of Ridgway first. Mark found a parking spot big enough for the motor home with the tow car attached, so Denisa could go to the Ridgway Farmer's Market. This little mountain town was made famous in 1969 when the movie, "True Grit" was filmed and John Wayne walked these streets. We even ate at the True Grit cafe.

It's down the street from this building that was built as the fire station for the movie set. It served as the town's post office for years after the movie, and is now an art gallery.

Also on that street is the "Fort Smith Saloon." Now that's a strange name for a sporting goods store in Ridgway?!? The movie "True Grit" was set in Fort Smith, Arkansas, so this building was designated as the saloon on the movie set. They've left the Fort Smith name on the building to please the movie fans that come to see the True Grit sites.

The town's museum is in the house that was the movie residence of John Wayne's character, Rooster Cogburn. Out front is the jail wagon where Rooster transported the outlaws he caught. So Ridgway is full of True Grit trivia and movie locations.

After leaving Ridgway, we turned west on highway 62, to drive the beautiful stretch of highway that frames the Mount Sneffels wilderness. In the foreground, we couldn't miss the wooden fence that goes on for many miles in front of those mountains. The fence designates the 17,000-acre Double RL ranch owned by Ralph Lauren.

These are beautiful mountains, and we will return in the car to this area for a special hike tomorrow.

Earlier, we drove the car to the trail head of that hike. We drove the 9-mile gravel road in the car to the forest service campground in this area, because we were hoping to camp near the trail head. But we found that the road was too narrow and too rocky and too bumpy (that's a lot of too's!) for the motor home. On a wide and smooth section of road, we saw this trailer heading to that campground. We wonder if they will make it when the road gets worse?!?

So we are heading on down the highway in the motor home to the Caddis Flats campground instead.

This is a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) campground, so there are no hook-ups. But with views of the red rock cliffs that surround us, it is certainly a bargain because it is a free campground. We snagged one of the three official camp sites, but there is room for half a dozen more RVs in the large parking lot behind us.

This campground is popular because the San Miguel River runs beside it. We had groups of fly fishermen arrive every morning that we were here.

The water is clear, and the multi-colored rocks on the river bed make an interesting picture. In August the water level is too low for kayaking, or we would have attempted to float this section of the river.

We didn't see any of the trout that peaked all those fishermen's interest. But we did enjoy the cool water foot bath in the San Miguel River.

After getting set up at Caddis Flats, we explored some of the red rock roads in our new neighborhood.

During our explorations, we drove north to the town of Norwood to buy groceries. It's nice to shop in a town where real people live, rather than touristy mountain towns where everything is doubled in price. At the Norwood grocery store we bought items for a picnic, and then ate it at the local park. We are glad to report that the Norwood playground is well-equipped with toys that are good to entertain kids of ALL ages.

We enjoyed blue sky weather and delightful temperatures while we were camped at Caddis Flats. This has been a summer of high temperatures in the 70's for us, and we're loving that! That's important since we don't have any electrical hook-ups for running the air-conditioner. Our site had some shade, and those trees provided a nice place to hang our hammock.

After spending a record amount of money on our crowded camp site in the town of Ouray, it's nice to have so much space and quiet here at Caddis Flats for free. We love the sights and sounds of the sun setting over the San Miguel River in our campground. We think we're going to like it here!