Well, it didn’t take long for fall to arrive here in the
Colorado mountains; at least, not above 9,000 feet.
I hiked/climbed the “Bel-Ox” pair (Mt. Belford and Mt.
Oxford) on Wednesday and was startled to see large swatches of yellow. The next
day Betsy noticed that the slopes of Mt. Columbia, in view from Snowy Peaks RV
Park, had, seemingly overnight, become streaked with yellow. However, nighttime
temperatures here in BV have so far remained north of 40 degrees.
I saw something very odd while eating
lunch on the summit of Mt. Oxford with two other guys. One of them was talking
on a cell phone (considered “bad form” and something I try to avoid when others
are within earshot). It was very still and calm when a sudden gust of wind hit
us and I heard a “zzzipp” sound and saw something fly by out of the corner of
my eye. It was the guy-on-the-phone’s hat; one of those round, floppy things
designed to shade the face and neck. I didn’t pay it much attention and assumed
the hat was long gone. The guy talked another 15 seconds or so and hung up. He
and I were musing about the sudden gust of wind when he looked up at the sky
and said; “Hey, there's my hat!”
Sure enough, floating maybe 100 feet or so above us (approximately 14,300 feet above sea level) was his
hat. The hat slowly circled, sort of like a helicopter or a drone, and then
began dropping. Eventually it landed not far from us and he walked over and
picked it up. Very weird.
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| Retrieving the "helicopter hat". |
The two guys also brought a flag with them that they said
had flown over the Capitol building in D.C. and had also traveled to Iraq and
Afghanistan. They took photos with the flag and offered to take some photos of
me holding it, which I took them up on.
Mt. Belford has a unique, red rock summit and is named for James Burns Belford, Colorado's first U.S. Congressman who was known for his bright red hair (and avid support for the free coinage of silver). The Bel-Ox is a pretty hike on a good trail with very little talus or scree but, with nearly 6,000 feet of elevation gain over 11 miles, it is a bit of work and requires really good weather because of the exposure during the long traverse from the Belford summit to the Oxford summit and then back over the top of Belford. Fortunately it was a beautiful, perfect day to climb these two mountains.
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| Belford's unique red summit cap. |
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| It's a long way over to Mt. Oxford; and, don't forget, you have to come back. |
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| Oxford's long, flat summit affords great views of nearly a dozen other 14ers. |
On the way down from the Bel-Ox I shot this video of a ptarmigan
and her chicks. If you are interested in more information about this
fascinating bird that lives above tree-line year-round here’s a link.
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| Prosit! |
On Friday we drove over to Breckenridge for the town's annual Octoberfest celebration on Main Street. Like most things in Breck, it was very nice with a distinctly upscale feel to it. A little different than the gigantic "Zinzinnati" Octoberfest that we attended about this time last year in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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| It didn't seem quite right to drink an IPA at a German festival, but I did. |
On Saturday we stopped in at the laid-back, beer-less Apple Fest in BV for some pie and "farm fun". In the photo the kids are using an old-fashioned press to make apple juice.
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| Putting the squeeze on some apples. |
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| Front-porch music at the Turner farmhouse, site of BV's Apple Fest. |
I also stopped by one day to get an up-close look at the 365-foot smokestack that towers over Salida. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there was a major smelting operation in Salida that employed a lot of people at the task of superheating massive piles of rock to squeeze out a few ounces of silver.
Unfortunately, a byproduct of this smelting process was billows of toxic smoke released from the smelter stacks that sickened and killed, people, animals and most of the trees on the side of a nearby mountain.
The solution to this "problem" for the company that owned the smelter was to quietly pay off people for the damages and, in 1917, to build a new, much taller, smokestack that they hoped would disperse the toxic smoke higher in the air where it would, hopefully, dissipate and be less noticable.
However, the silver market crashed at the end of WWI and the company closed down the smelter for good in 1920 after just three years in operation. The gigantic smokestack was soon considered an eyesore by city leaders and there were attempts to tear it down into the 1970s. But as the demolition became imminent the townsfolk began to embrace the big stack as a symbol of a bygone era when Salida was a mining boomtown and transportation hub. The stack transitioned from eyesore to historic icon and is now a registered National Historic Landmark.
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