Category: Colorado Mileposts
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Thanksgiving Dinner
There are two animals in this picture. Can you find them? The first is relatively obvious. The second may take some searching. There are two creatures in this tree. Can you find them both? I took this photo on Thanksgiving Day. I noticed the hawk in the tree as we were getting our own dinner…
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Some loose, some win.
This is the time of year when the sun gets low in the horizon. The change in light must make our windows appear clear to birds visiting our feeders. One of the visitors has learned to take advantage of this problem. We have all sorts of birds come to our feeders — house sparrows, finches,…
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Beautiful, mesmerizing, educational.
My mom sent me this website a couple of weeks ago. http://hint.fm/wind/index.html It shows the direction and speed of surface winds for the entire country. This screen shot doesn’t do it justice, because on the webpage, the wind lines flow. Beautiful. In addition to being mesmerizing and beautiful, the map is very educational. When you look…
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Record-demolishing Storm
We have just survived what was probably a 1000 year event in central Colorado – a week of torrential rain that has left the Front Range in a shambles. This isn’t the first time that the Front Range has flooded. In the twentieth century alone, we had four monster floods: Pueblo, 1921; Denver, 1965; Big…
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Don’t kill the snake!
Lately, as I go up to check on my Project Budburst site on Apex trail, I have met a lot of people with golf clubs. Since there are no putting greens on the trail, I have to assume that the clubs are brought along for another reason. The only reason I can think of is…
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High Summer Humidity in Colorado = Thunderstorms
My son, in his first days as a freshman at Colorado State University, overheard some kids from Washington State commenting on how they loved the dry heat. He laughed. Yesterday was one of the most humid we’ve had in a humid-for-Colorado summer. How humid was it? At 4:00, when it is usually about 10-15% humidity,…
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Let them eat pine nuts
Pine trees use two strategies when it comes to seeds. Ponderosas and many other pines produce cones with a spine or bristle at the end of each pine cone’s scales to keep animals from pilfering the seeds. Their seeds often have paper “wings” to help them float at least a little distance from the parent…
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Colorado Monsoons
The weatherman is calling for thunderstorms tonight, as “monsoon moisture returns to the state.” I always feel weather forecasters are a little presumptuous calling summer moisture in Colorado monsoons. I mean, although we can have the occasional gully-washer, our piddly precip is nothing compared with the six months of torrential rain that most people normally…
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Blue and Black Magpie follows me on the trail
This magpie was my buddy at my BudBurst site on Apex trail in Jefferson County earlier this week. It and two others have been calling back and forth to each other for a couple of weeks, but this time, one of the magpies stayed with me as I made my way up the trail and…
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Gold on the trail! Or not.
The several days of light rains in Apex Canyon have washed a lot of fool’s gold down into the erosion control dams that cross the trail. Those portions of the trail glitter! Fool’s gold has a gold color that fooled many beginning prospectors from the ancient Greeks to the Colorado gold rush. It didn’t help…
Amy Law, Science Geek 