High Country: Fauna, Fossils and Family

Hornbeck Homestead from Florissant Fossil Beds trail

Shortly after dawn struck the aspens, Nancy and I both awoke. The urge to wander the gravel Trout Haven roads grabbed us. Just walking gave our lungs more experience with the altitude. The cabin sat 3,000 feet above Colorado Springs’s elevation, which provides just two-thirds the oxygen at sea level. Pike’s Peak offers half the oxygen of sea level, so we fell somewhere between.

The night before, it created an odd sensation. As I lied down, my stuff nose and the air conspired to make me feel like I was drowning. Luckily the sensation passed. To combat the cabin heat, we cracked a window, letting a relieving flood of cold air. It hadn’t warmed up by morning, but I didn’t want warmth, just a tolerable level of mountain cold.

Shortly after daylight, the urge to walk snared us. The temperate, slightly chilly morning felt perfect for opening up our lungs and exploring the high ground where she spent the summers and Christmases of her youth.

Regular visitors at Trout Haven

At the bottom of the hill out of the mountains we found a herd of mule deer. No bucks roamed with them, just females and young ones ranging from a few months to less than two years. Even the smallest had lost the spots from their coats. They mostly ignored us until we stepped within a dozen feet, then fled up a hill.

A parade of cars cruised down the dirt roads, headed to work. From here, a car could reach The Springs (how Coloradans refer to Colorado Springs) in less than an hour, so Trout Haven has become a commuter town.

In a short distance, the birds provided plenty of color. Steller’s jays darted out of the pines, and the occasional magpie cruised through the canopy. The jay caught me unaware - its black crest and blue body made it appear to be a reverse negative of a blue jay. At one point a woodpecker tapped into branches just feet from us. As we approached its branch, an unseen bird emerged from the branches, nearly flying right into us. The woodpecker bolted too. The dirt roads sparkled from local minerals, mostly quartz. Quartz is so common here that large chunks line the cabin's front path.

None of it made for a sturdy walking surface. When one car passed, I stepped aside only for the ground to shift beneath, sending me to my knees. I got away without any damage; clumsy people know how to take a fall.  Even as new homes filled in the neighborhood some landmarks remained. A red chimney emblazoned with a white peace symbol stuck up from an overgrown lot. In the Seventies, a group of free-loving squatters took residence.

After breakfast, we ventured to one place in the region familiar to both of us. On my lightning 2008 jaunt to Colorado, I ventured as far as the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. At the time, I had no idea it sat in the backyard of the future love of my life’s favorite place.

From the Trout Haven development, Twin Rock Road forks into upper and lower branches. Nancy’s dad pointed out the homes of people long gone, including the doctor who created the breathalyzer. We took the upper branch, which passed homes of random shapes and veered close to its namesake rocks before flattening out as it approached Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.

 The Florissant Valley has a classic western look – anchored by the Hornbeck Homestead at its northern end, the grassy plains ripple into forested hills crowned by craggy peaks and rocky formations. Pike’s Peak is never far away. A set of other mountains form the north and western horizons.

Since my 2008 visit, the double-wide that served as fossil bed headquarters had been replaced by a 21st-century visitor center. Historic displays shows off the insect fossils found in the rock of Florissant. That was the treasure of these fossil beds – not the megafauna we want to see, but the kind of fossils not often seen. Insects often get left out, but not at Florissant, where volcanic mud slides buried a lake bed 34 million years ago and preserved rare, extinct species.

The inescapable Pike's Peak

Florissant’s more spectacular fossils come from the other end of the size spectrum. Florissant’s fossilized redwoods had not changed since I last visited. They shouldn’t have. Protected by the elements by a massive pavilion, the trees stumps had only aged seven years compared to their previous 34 million years.  Only a handful of people milled around the massive fossils, but several black squirrels played in the nearby grasses.

We hiked out to a series of big stumps near a wooded peak along the old lake bed. Little buzzing grasshopper bounced as we progressed along the trails. We ran into a patch of shadeless trail that got us sweating until we reached a patch of pines and rough stumps. At 8,000 feet of elevation, thin air and a sunny day can slow down anyone unaccustomed to these heights.

In the Woodland Park grocery aisles, we plotted out a family dinner. On a whim, we stopped for a beer at the Ute Pass Brewing Company, right on Woodland Park’s main drag. I had an IPA that tasted vastly different from any I normally quaffed. Questioning the bartender, he said the beer’s unique flavor came from locally grown hops. Nancy went with a bruising but nice double IPA.

After a quick trip through a Woodland Park grocery to collect the pieces of our dinner recipe, we hustled back to Divide and Trout Haven. We had guests coming to the cabin. Nancy’s cousin Alan and his wife Beecher own the Ouray County Plaindealer, a weekly newspaper covering the Ouray and Ridgeway area in southwestern Colorado. They drove five hours to visit for the night.

For hours, everyone caught up. For the most part, I listened to the family stories unfold. Back in the day, there had been weekends where 20-plus people under this roof. The Todd boys had hijinks in these hills (there were seven boys plus one girl), such as attempting to knock over a dead tree that housed a hornet’s nest.

I talked a little with Alan about the news business in Ouray. The idea of being surrounded by the fortress-like mountains of southwest Colorado appealed to me greatly, so much that I could consider returning to journalism. In a way, I envied the reporter they were interviewing that weekend.

Grilling at 9,600 feet proved challenging, much more than the hot dogs we roasted the previous night. The rosemary chicken breasts lingered above the flames for close to an hour, when they might have lasted 25-30 minutes in Tennessee. Braising leeks also posed problems. But when augmented with fresh Colorado corn and a hearty salad, the final product came off well. Soon after dinner, Alan and Beecher departed for Cripple Creek.

Nancy and I adjourned to the porch. Again the stars poked out, the soft glow of our distant galaxy fleshing out the sky and placing into proper context the few pathetic stars we city dwellers normally experienced. Soon we retreated due to the cold and fear of a black bear cornering us on the patio deck.

Florissant redwood remnants