Category: Colorado Mileposts
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A Natural History of Trail Ridge Road: Rocky Mountain National Park’s Highway to the Sky
As you’ve followed this blog, you’ve learned that I love to write about nature, especially what I can see around me in my home state of Colorado. One of my all time favorite places in Colorado is Trail Ridge Road, in Rocky Mountain National Park. With ten miles above 11,000 feet, Trail Ridge Road is…
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Winter Fantasy Land
Colorado has been on the edge of the extreme cold that has gripped the eastern half of the country this winter. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo/2015/01/08/united-states-climate-2014-tale-two-regions/#more-9604 That means that we’ve had more of a Midwestern kind of a winter than the Midwest has, complete with ice storms. This morning, we woke up to a winter fantasy land, west of…
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Tundra Fall
I always think of the mountains as getting any storm before we do. Not so. Here is what the storm looked like from high on Mount Evans, where it was a beautiful, sunny day. I also thought that, since fall had arrived on the plains, there would be no more flowers in the High Country.…
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Eyelashes and Hummingbird Tongues
I learned some new things about hummingbirds this week. First, I learned that for years now, I have had two types of hummingbirds coming to my feeders. I knew that I had broad-tailed hummers — they are the most common hummingbirds in the Western US. With a flashy red throat “gorget” and a metallic ringing…
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Great Wildflower, Part 2
From our great spring crop of blooms, (http://coloradogeography.wordpress.com/2014/04/29/get-out/) this continues to be an outstanding season for wildflowers. Every time we begin to dry out, we get a rainstorm that waters the plants. And the flowers just keep comin’. According to the USDA Plants Profile webpage, http://plants.usda.gov/core/profile?symbol=MOFI&photoID=mofi_004_ahp.tif you can find pink bergamot all over North America.…
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Mathematical Patterns in Plants
One of the things that I really enjoy about nature is that it produces proofs that it obeys natural laws in the most unusual — and beautiful — ways. This spring and early summer I ran across three examples of math in plants. Scorpianweed, like most plants in the hydrophyllaceae family, has a flower stalk…
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Spotted Towhee
I love to wake up to the sound of birds singing. The “twup tewerp” of robins, the trills of house finches, the hyena-like call of Northern flickers. But in the past few years, I’ve started to hear a new sound in the mornings: “Cha cha cha che e e e ! Cha cha cha che…
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Cornices
My brother and I took a quick trip up to the top of Berthoud Pass to take some photographs of snow cornices earlier this week. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a cornice is “the decorative top edge of a building or column”. A secondary definition, though, is “an overhanging mass of windblown snow or ice usually…
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Miniature Upslope Storm
My husband and I took a quick trip to the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado last week to see the largest migration left in North America — The Sandhill Cranes! Up to 20,000 Cranes and 20,000 other ducks, geese, coots, plovers and any other type of waterbird that you can imagine migrate through the…
Amy Law, Science Geek 