Monday 9/13
Today was going to be a lazy one. Just take a drive up highway 12, the scenic "Highway of Legends." I'm not sure who named it that or why, but it was printed on the signs and labeled on the map.
On the way we passed the turnoff to the Wildlife Watching area, so we drove down a gravel road to reach it. The road ended at a big sheltered display with no useful information at all--Colorado doesn't seem to spend too much on putting information on their displays, just plenty of quotations about nature. I wanted to know what animals had been sighted there, but all we had were a couple of panels of wildflowers and a big one in the middle with some boring quotations.
We walked along the path to the bird/wildlife watching blinds, but Zack being what he is (old and slow), we didn't get far before he had to be carried. And it was getting hot by then--it was after ten o'clock.
It was a very beautiful walk, but unpleasant with Zack and all the stickers on the ground. I saw a couple of small falcons on the rocks above the creek, a few sparrows, some lizards, and absolutely nothing else. A couple of plats of very interesting scat could easily have been bear, though. My guess would be about a week old.
We went on with the drive and soon found ourselves heading high in the mountains, headed to a memorial wildflower meadow as a destination. It was high up and very beautiful. Almost no people anywhere up there, either. Nice place to camp.
I'd pictured the mountains out here as all snow-capped peaks, but these are older, rounder, and don't even have a tree line. Still the scale is vast beyond imagination.
Here is a magpie. It's the same bird in both shots--apparently the blue only shows when the sun hits it in a certain direction.
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