Who would have thought we would end up at the ER?

We're way behind in getting travel posts published because we were having way too much fun traveling! So we won't be confused about when each "wandering" happened, we'll start each blog with its actual date.

August 15, 2023

We've been in Colorado many different times and in many different places. But one of the places that we had never been to was a hospital emergency room. (But we'll keep you in suspense about that until the end of the blog.) Another place that we had never visited was Fairplay, Colorado. It's a 45-minute drive from our campground, so we decided to take a road trip. On the way, we had a hike planned. It was a six-mile drive down a bumpy rocky dirt road to get to the trail head at Horseshoe Campground. We had our eyes wide open because we had read that a female moose and her calf had been hanging around here. Sure enough, we talked to a camper that reported this pair had made appearances several times since they had arrived two days ago. But we didn't see any moose. We've been bam-moosled again!

The Limber Grove Trail takes off right where the moose had last been seen. So we hurried up the shaded trail through the forest in hopes of a sighting. After a mile we had only seen moose poop, but no moose. But our forested trail opened up to a big rocky landscape.

That's when we got our first view of the Limber Grove.

The majority of the trees here are limber pines, named because of their flexible branches. But the special thing about this particular grove was that most of the trees were around 1,000 years old.

We think that a 100-year-old tree is old. But this was a one with three zeroes behind it. That very old tree will probably be twisted and gnarled after 1,000 years. The sign at the beginning of the grove states, "These trees have been shaped by lightning, fire, screaming winter winds, blowing snow, ice, below-freezing temperatures, and drought."

They only grow at very high altitude, so they grow slowly because of the very short growing season up here over 10,000 feet. This was rocky ground with poor nutrients, but the trees continue to survive.

We love the beautiful colors inside these ancient trees.

Mark loves to climb on trees almost as much as he loves to climb on rocks. But that's not the reason we ended up at the emergency room.

The information signs in the forest explained that limber pines have flexible branches, and their long needles grow in bundles of five. They grow pine cones that are 3-10 inches long and have thick, rounded scales.

This grove also includes a few very old bristlecone pines. They were identified by tufts of needles that were arranged on a thick stout branch so the tree looks like a bunch of baby bottle brushes. Another description was they look like fox tails, so they were sometimes called foxtail pines.

You'll only see these two pines at high altitudes. We started at over 10,000 feet in elevation, and continued hiking up to around 11,000 feet.

After taking way too many tree pictures, we continued the hike to the other end of the trail and another trail head. We could turn around and go back the way we came, but we love a good loop hike. So we decided to walk back to the pickup on that rocky dirt road. That took us by some prime moose habitat, but we weren't lucky enough to see one this day. We did see dozens of intricate beaver dams constructed on the creek below the road. But no wildlife pictures because we didn't see any beavers either.

It was while we were hiking, that Mark started having a pain in his chest. This wasn't a difficult hike by our usual standards, but that pain on the left side of his chest wouldn't go away. We drove into the town of Fairplay, where we ordered a sandwich and ate it at a nice covered picnic table overlooking the river. Our plan was to explore this little town and then take another hike. But that pain in his chest persisted. When Mark started googling medical clinics in Fairplay, Denisa got a little excited. We stopped in at the community clinic, and got to talk to a nice nurse practitioner that saw us right away. She told us that she could take an EKG and draw some blood for a heart test, but all of that would have to go through the parent hospital for results. That hospital is an hour's drive away in Salida. So her advice was to go there for quicker results.

After consulting with our physician son, and our physician assistant daughter-in-law, and our cousin that is a nurse at the Salida hospital, we headed that way. We arrived at the emergency room at the Heart of the Rockies Hospital in Salida around 2:30.

Within four minutes we were in an emergency room and they were starting the EKG. When you enter a hospital emergency entrance and announce that you are having chest pains, things happen pretty fast. They gave him four baby aspirins as the fastest and safest preventive medicine, and they started an IV. They drew blood, and they did a chest X-ray. Then we waited for results while Mark's chest started feeling better. 

It took a couple hours to get all the results, but everything came back very good. His EKG was normal, the chest X-ray was good. They were testing him for promotine in his blood--which is an enzyme released in the blood if your heart is stressed. He had zero promotine. His other blood work was perfect. So they found no problems with Mark's heart, and sent us home. Perhaps it was the high elevation today, but we have been hiking at high altitude on strenuous hikes for the last couple weeks. Why would Mark feel bad today on this easy hike? We'll never know. As we left the emergency room, a pair of twin fawns were hanging out with their mother in the grassy area next to the hospital.

For all the beautiful places we went today, who would have thought that our wildlife picture of the day would be taken in a hospital parking lot?

We went back to the motor home to take it easy for the rest of day. When we left the motor home this morning, who would have thought we would end up at the ER?