The slow feel (forest bathing in Mueller State Park)

 

I feel like a latecomer to foresting bathing. Colorado’s state parks often hold sessions. Despite my interest, it took me a long time to bite. The forest bathing exercise brought an opportunity to see a place I knew relatively well in new light. 

I try to get up to Mueller State Park on Pikes Peak’s north slope once a month for a 2-4-mile hike. Outside of peak leaf season, it is rarely crowded, and the scenery always stuns. The quiet drive from Colorado Springs fit the meditative mood that forest bathing seeks to inspire. 

Little did I know I would get an ample dose of new light by showing up 90 minutes early. Past the visitor near Elk Meadows, I braked for a cluster of five mule deer bucks who crossed a few hundred yards ahead of me. I pulled off to watch them graze. 

The bucks were wary, but I kept my distance. Other cars slowed when spotting me with my camera but no one stopped. Until they grazed out of view, I had them to myself. 

I get the disinterest; mule deer are common. I see them on my street all the time and the neighborhood has a quartet of robust boys. Sometimes they eat my shrubs. 

But I could not write these deer off. These healthy boys were in a phase I had not seen. All had well-developed antlers completely draped in velvet. Soon they would begin rubbing the velvet into bloody strands as their hormones build for the rut, which follows the elk rut. The boys might graze peacefully in August, but soon enough they’ll shift into competition for females. They took turns looking back at me, then each returned to their grasses. 

When the sun emerged, the real treat arrived - its angle made the antler velvet glow. I had never before seen a sight like that. 

 As the moved deeper into the forest, headed to Elk Meadows. I wandered a trail for another 30 minutes. It rained heavily the night before, and the cloudy morning kept the moisture from burning off. The rain opened every plant in the forest, and the odors of pine and other high-altitude foliage were relentless and magnificent. 

Here I had to cut the hike short or risk missing the forest bathing session. 

Forest bathing and a vigorous hike don’t really cross oaths. In two hours, we covered just half a mile. But that was the point. Think of it as a great slowdown. You walk slowly, take multiple stops, stay silent, close your eyes and the wilderness of the park opens up. 

We stopped often and took an extended sit atop a group of rocks above the trail. You touch objects in the forest. Bark of a tree, a bed of pine needles, a rock’s surface. You keep your phone holstered. I still took some pictures with my camera but also let the pauses without tech or talking linger. 

We broke from the trail onto a spit of land covered in soft soil and pine needles. The facilitator invited us to wander and find a spot for our focus. I sat at the foot of a dead, soaring pine. I chose it as a focus due to its brown needles and the life it still supported. A gray jay ruffled among the high branches. Below a woodpecker probed for meals under the bark.  

For a different perspective, I saw under several pines where a dead tree formed a mini-ecosystem. The trunk had rotted to where it formed a cave of sorts. The mouth never received sun, and the cavity teemed with life, with patches of lichen and a few seedlings reaching for sunlight. 

The session leader conducted a tea ceremony at the end of the bathing session. We walked the same trail back, but now the rocks and little crannies on the mountainsides were not a blank slate. Through the exercise of forest bathing, we melted into the landscape, became less obtrusive and more attuned to the natural world around us, if only for a short time. 

Elk Meadow

Chasing Alferd Packer (Littleton edition)

 

Having come to Littleton, I had to find one last point of interest. 

Among its hilly terrain looking west to Colorado’s Front Range, I cam upon the sea of headstones inside  the Littleton Cemetery, the final resting place of Alferd Packer, better known as the Colorado Cannibal. 

Packer's story is a well-known chapter in Colorado history. If Packer is known elsewhere, it’s largely due to Cannibal: The Musical, the early live-action film by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. They play Packer’s stories for laughs and occasional horror in a Rogers and Hammerstein-style musical. The locations are all in Colorado including some tied to Packer - Parker and Stone stealthily filmed their courthouse scenes in the Hinsdale County courthouse in Lake City, the oldest continually operating in Colorado. 

I had the block number of Packer’s grave and wandered the cemetery in search. I felt a little like Eli Wallach’s Tuco hunting a grave filled with gold in The Good, the Bad & the Ugly. Of course the grave I would find in Littleton was a lot more prominent. 

While there are bigger monuments in the Littleton cemetery, Packer clearly remains the most famous resident. Cement covered the grave in the 1970s to deter would-be graverobbers. A historical marker explains Packer’s infamy - He remains the only person ever convicted of cannibalism in this country. 

A Union veteran of the Civil War, Packer went west like many men searching for easy riches. Packer led a prospecting party from Provo, Utah to Breckenridge that ended up in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. That alone made Packer a pretty poor guide through Colorado. Near present-day Montrose, his party came upon the camp of Chief Ouray, leader of the Tabeguache (Uncompahgre) band of the Ute tribe, who resupplied them but advised against crossing the San Juans in winter. 

Some of the party wintered with Ouray but Packer and five others headed off in February. Sixty-five days after heading into the San Juans, Packer alone emerged at Saguache, looking too well-fed for someone who nearly starved and claimed to have eaten his shoes. 

Packer’s story fell apart and the bodies were discovered. He was jailed, despite asserting he only killed one man in self-defense. As for the others, he had eaten their flesh, but only after they died. The locals charged him with murder. 

While awaiting trial, he escaped from jail and spent nine years on the run until a former acquaintance spotted Packer in Cheyenne, Wyoming. After two trials that ultimately spared him the gallows, Packer served 18 years of his 40-year sentence at the Colorado state penitentiary, receiving parole in 1901, but not a pardon. 

By all accounts, Packer lived a quiet life in Littleton after his release. He died in 1907 and received a veteran’s stone for his service in the Civil War. Various historical groups have improved the grave that brings traffic to the otherwise quiet cemetery. 

Despite many efforts to figure out the truth, we will probably never know what really happened in the mountains in winter 1874. I believe that harrowing situation in the San Juan Mountains probably led Packer to some desperate decisions. 

What information we have about the man does not mark him as a murderer. After his recapture and awaiting trial, the man built a dollhouse in jail. 

Packer’s influence runs across Colorado. The draw of a gold or silver claim and beautiful scenery has always populated Colorado with colorful characters. Despite the cannibalism, he fits in with the state’s assembly of eccentrics. Even as the state has grown, the spirit of strangeness still endures. 

At some point, I must travel to Creede and Lake City in the Colorado mountains. Packer was tried in Lake City and the courthouse still stands, while a nearby memorial marks the gulch where the bodies of his five compatriots were recovered months after he reappeared. The Hinsdale County Museum has the largest collection of historic items tied to Packer’s mountain party. 

The cemetery shows that Packer died free, even if his name will never shed the infamy of his unfortunate record as a guide and prospector. And of course, the cannibalism. 

 

A tale of two farms (The Littleton Museum)

1862 farmhouse recreation

Original 1892 farmhouse

A historic farm can lure a creature of the city. Don't just remove me from traffic and constant gadgets, take me back a century or more. 

The Littleton Museum boasts two farms on one site. The free museum details the city’s history, but its living exhibits bring together two ages of farming in the Mountain West separated by just 28 years. 

With my Denver days ending, I needed that little field trip to Littleton.Settlement came to Littleton and its prime spot on the South Platte River in 1859, during the Pikes Peak gold rush and shortly before the 1861 formation of Colorado Territory.  In the 1950s suburban boom, Littleton became firmly enmeshed in metro Denver. 

The city will always be connected to the 1999 shooting massacre at Columbine High School that didn’t occur in Littleton proper. But the name still resonates decades later. 

While the farm buildings have been moved to the site of the Littleton Museum, they still operate as farms, growing crops while raising various livestock. One farm reaches back to 1862 and the other to 1890. They use methods of the time, and volunteers are also period appropriate. 

A sheep shed and schoolhouse moved to the site also date to the 1860s, although the ice house dates to 1910 before refrigeration grew widespread. The 1862 farm had sheep, cattle, goats, pigs, donkeys, and horses. 

The 1862 house feels like a product of the frontier. If it were original, it would have been built from trees that grew on the floodplain of the creek that feeds the small nearby reservoir, Kedring Lake. The cornstalks in the vegetable garden also carried a drought-weary look. A dry winter and record-setting summer had no mercy on these crops.. Drought sapped the creek dry this year, while the reservoir ran painfully low. 

Hemmed by several large trees, the McBroom Cabin seemed comfortable enough for a family that would spend most daily hours working the fields and tending to livestock. In 1862, farmers made their own clothes or bought them from a independent woman in the village who made them (as the reenactor explained to me, that partially led to the term spinster). 

The original cabin has moved indoors for preservation reasons, while the rebuilt cabin is still welcoming, as were the volunteers. We can imagine the people who populated this farm – they would have crossed the Great Plains on ox-driven wagons, the dry country too tough for horses. 

 A root cellar sits a short distance from the cabin, close to the replica barn built with period tools in the 1980s. Even on a 90-degree day, one can imagine a wintry dash from the house to the root cellar. 

A herd of sheep roamed a large paddock, lambs springing around the edges of the group. A large male grunted and called from a corral separating him from the others. 

When reaching the 1892 farm, the different is stark. The exhibit includes a working blacksmith shop. With the clouds gone and the heat soaring, I stayed far away.

The 1890s Bemis Home looked almost contemporary. By that time the railroad brought materials from the east. Clothes could be shipped from eastern textile mills, as could building materials. 

Some farm staples went unchanged – a cow grazed at the feed bin with a watchful eye on her two-week-old calf. Mom finally gave me the stink eye and I moved on. 

A windmill turned slowly at the 1890 farm’s edge, a symbol of the homesteading farms that would dot the west after the Native tribes were driven to reservations. Colorado’s tribes were expelled after the White River War in 1879; only the small Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute lands in far southwest Colorado remain. 

Both farms represented a life immeasurably more difficult than what prevails in 21st century Colorado. Something in that life remains attractive. Those would have been grueling days. Farming not just to bring something to market, but to ensure your own survival. We have no concept of the risk involved, that a few bad winters could wipe out anyone. 

With open terrain and wild animals all around, those could have been terrifying nights. Wild animals and wide-open lands all around. Grizzly bears still lived in Colorado, and mountain lions would not have been relegated to the mountains. 

The farms provided ample opportunity the let my vision blur out and dream a about a hard, fruitful life on the mile-high frontier. 

Between the pastures

Quicksand avoids all pitfalls

An unusually rainy evening seemed the perfect time to step indoors at the Black Sheep and catch up with a 90s alternative favorite thriving in its second run. 

Quicksand was one of the mid-90s also-rans, when major labels swooped to sign every punk, hardcore and post-hardcore band in hopes of finding the next Metallica, Nirvana, or Green Day. Critically lauded, Quicksand's sales did not follow. Quicksand put out two albums of engaging heavy rock (Slip and Manic Compression) before breaking up in 1995. 

Twenty years later, they resume the band and have put out three records in the decade since, including 2026’s Bring on the Psychics, the reason for this tour. These days Quicksand plays as a trio, sacrificing none of its intensity. 

The less said of the openers, the better. Two were relatively innocuous hardcore bands, while the third could only be described as “What if Michael Rappaport fronted a punk band?” That was not a question I wanted or needed answered. I'll leave the band names out of the blog. 

After nearly three hours of openers, Quicksand could not emerge soon enough. When they did, not a note disappointed. In a little more than an hour, Quicksand belted out 17 songs, including all of Bring on the Psychics with songs from their two 1990s records peppered in. 

Their energy and technique pulled the show back from its dampening start. They set out with a blistering pace and never eased up. They get labelled as post-hardcore, but to me they play the brand of grunge-influenced 90s rock that defined my teen years. They would fit comfortably on a bill with Helmet or Local H. 

That they could still bring that noise convincingly after a 20-year hiatus and seamlessly blend in new material was a testament to Quicksand’s skillful playing. 

 There was no encore, but none was necessary after Quicksand’s scorched earth song choice.

The Toledo Zoo's endless encounters

It would be impossible to visit the Toledo Zoo & Aquarium and leave without experiencing some level of sensory overload. A zoo, an aquarium, and a natural history museum all land on the same admission. The latter two could easily stand on their own. On summer nights, an amphitheater opens for concerts. 

My Pueblo Zoo membership earned me a discounted admission ($16 instead of $30). The ticket clerk had never heard of it, but they go off a list, and there it was. I will take a zoo discount any day. 

The zoo kicks into gear quickly with Arctic Encounter, where a lively polar bear splashed in its pool and flung a bucket around. An indoor blind allows visitors to see how huge the bear really is. The massive bear showed off his size and speed after leaving the pool and moving around the enclosure. In the adjacent exhibit, the harbor seals and California sea lions had no idea how lucky they were, an apex predator just one exhibit away. 

Many of the African animals can only be seen from a great distance without getting tickets for a train ride. We opted to feed lettuce to the giraffes – staff requires you to stop if six-month-old giraffe Eugene approaches, but even with three giraffes our lettuce leaves disappeared in seconds, their giant prehensile tongues showing no hesitation. At that point the zoo felt a little slight. I didn’t realize the rest was across the highway. 

Our tour guides – Meg’s nephews – showed us to the pedestrian bridge. There’s also a tunnel that runs under the street. From the bridge we descended into the big city zoo I expected. We passed the cassowaries and entered a large aviary that offered a cross-section of species from across the globe. 

Among newer exhibits, the Works Progress Administration construction of the 1930s zoo buildings still stand tall. Many have been renovated but the stone facades were incorporated into their new looks. 

The zoo includes several attractions that could stand alone. One is the aquarium building, which hosts enough creatures and galleries to fill an hour. A sea turtle with paralyzed rear fins propels through the tank solely by her front fins. Numerous small sharks cruise the tanks – leopard sharks, bonnethead sharks, and nurse sharks. The bright silver scales of a tarpon glimmer. A sturgeon moves slowly, barbed face hiding a gentle demeanor. 

No aquarium attraction draws as much attention as the saltwater touch pool, where rays, skates, and other fish cruise around. I bumped a few rays’ heads and grazed fingers on their squishy backs. 

Bonnet head shark

 

Sturgeon

Japanese crabs in the dark

But the giant Japanese spider crabs break out furthest from the other exhibits. Giant crabs move silently in a darkened tank. They are conserved in Japanese waters to prevent overfishing. With their oversized limbs they move methodically across their tank, alien and unknowable. Crustaceans don’t often get a spotlight, but these crabs deserved their large, delicately lit tank. 

The zoo’s other standalone is The ProMedica Museum of Natural History, founded as the Toledo Science Museum. It’s a stately WPA building, with taxidermied remains of numerous animals spread across two floors and a rainforest exhibit we ran out of time to visit. 

Reconstructions of extinct Ice Age species tower on the main floor, from the short-faced bear to the giant sloth to Irish elk. One gallery gives visitors an ant’s eye view, with mushrooms, toads and other ground coverings pushed to massive proportions. 

Walking through this gallery, I spotted another touch pool in a distant chamber. This pool had no line and no visitors. I washed my hands and dipped my fingers into the freshwater, hoping to run them along the back of a sturgeon. 

More than a dozen sturgeon cut through the pool. They favor the pool bottom and did not make touching easy. I caught of the backs of a few larger ones. Bony fish is no joke, as my fingers traced their vertebrae down to the tail. 

Sturgeon touch pool

 The most recent WPA building to receive an overhaul was the Reptile building. The stone and brick core of the original building remains, but the Toledo Zoo has refreshed the exhibits with steel and glass, giving the animals more room to move. Viewing areas also displayed the American alligators and a separate pool for a massive saltwater crocodile estimated at 60 years old. Along with its eyes and snout above the water, the pool viewing window revealed its armored tail.  

Dwarf caiman

But the smallest member of the crocodilian family stuck with me most. A dwarf caiman occupied a much smaller exhibit than its cousins. They tend to top out at five to six feet, and sport bony plates across their body that prevent them from being easy prey. They are a keystone species across much of South America, including the Orinoco and Amazon watersheds, their presence the indicator of a healthy ecosystem. In a zoo where no one could see everything in one visit, the little crocodiles and sturgeon pool are the things that stuck most with me. 

The last stops spotlighted the zoo stalwarts, the animals that make a visit incomplete if we don’t see them. The African elephants leisurely grazed in their yard, a calf following its mother and sometimes hiding beneath her legs. Tigers hid in the midday heat, as the takins seemed unfazed by the 90-degree afternoon despite their Himalayan roots. 

Bears have no trouble retreating to the water when the heat grows too strong. A trio of brown bears splashed and lounged in their exhibit’s pool. The signs identified one as a Kodiak bear. The Kodiak subspecies can grow twice as large as standard brown bears, even as large as polar bears. It was not hard to figure out which one hailed from the Alaskan island, as its head was way bigger the other three brown/grizzly bears. 

Unlike the solitary polar bear on the zoo’s other side, the brown bears didn’t seem to mind each other as the water warded off the heat. 

Just like that, three hours breezed by, the Toledo Zoo’s almost limitless animal encounters filling every second.

Snapshot of the Great Lakes

 

Seated at the western end of Lake Erie, Toledo seemed the right spot for the National Museum of the Great Lakes. 

Like many Great Lakes ports, the riverbanks of Toledo are still heavily industrial in spots. The city returned some of the old industrial area to parkland, but the history of commerce and travel across the region gets chronicled at the National Museum of the Great Lakes. Tracing the history back to Native trade across these waters, the stylish museum sits adjacent to two historic vessels are permanently docked on the Maumee River’s east bank. 

Poor air quality made it hard to fully appreciate the ships. We took the staff’s advice and viewed them first before delving into the museum. 

The museum includes summertime access to the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker, a lake freighter that stayed in service for nearly 70 years, and the Great Lakes Towing Co. tug Ohio. The inside of the Schoonmaker offers a glimpse at the freighter’s immense cargo holds, which could host coal, grains or other materials. The engine room is a from a different time and different world, and one can only imagine the sweaty work involved to keep the ship running. 

The crew chambers were spartan, with a kitchen not unlike a diner, while the officers dining hall felt straight from a high-end restaurant. The aft of the ship hosted quarters and a wooden parlor for the shipping barons, which were elegant and unlike everything else on the Schoonmaker. Life might have been hard for the crew, but not the captains of industry. 

After walking the deck, engine room, bridge, and parlors of the Schoonmaker, we breezed through the tug Ohio. 

There’s a whole history of lake travel lost to the 21 century. Passenger ships were regular until the business grew unprofitable from car and air competition in the 1960s. Perhaps the last shipping baron of note was George Steinbrenner, better known these days as the longtime owner of the New York Yankees. 

You can’t get into the lore of the Great Lakes without the Edmund Fitzgerald. The museum knew this well. 

In one of the crew chambers of the Schoonmaker, the lyrics Gordon Lightfoot’s seminal song about the Great Lakes’ most famous wreck are framed on the wall, which seemed appropriate. It was a ship of an earlier generation, but one that would have faced the rough Great Lakes weather that arrived with November. Lightfoot took immediate inspiration from the tragedy of the largest ship to sink on the Great Lakes, breaking in two and sinking to the bottom of Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975, claiming all 29 men aboard. 

What did surprise me were the artifacts from the actual Edmund Fitzgerald exhibited in the museum. These times bobbed up from the wreckage site, some 500 feet below the surface. The inflatable lifeboats deployed automatically due to building water pressure as the ship sank. 

Freighters still ply the Great Lakes, but the museum made me wish that passenger ships still did. I know little of Lake Erie’s north shore outside of the border crossings on either end. Even a ferry from Cleveland to the Canadian side always felt like an omission. 

Sure, no major population center awaits just over the horizon in Ontario, but it felt like a good dream. After all, the Great Lakes should not be the sole dominion of giant freighters and those who can afford their own boats. 

The other side of the lake

From the deck of the SS Schoonmaker

 

Downtown mural

Tallest building and open drawbridge

No travel barrier exists along the Lake Erie shore between Toledo and Cleveland. Anyone can just follow the roads west. 

But Toledo was just an abstraction to me. Two hours down the Ohio Turnpike or Ohio Route 2 was too far and never once considered a travel destination. The furthest point west my family traveled in Ohio was Cedar Point. The closest I came was a 2002 Put-in-Bay trip, and several trips north on I-75 toward Detroit or Ontario. Passing on the Ohio Turnpike doesn’t count since it cuts south of the city. 

Meg hails from Toledo, as do several generations of her family. In late July, I finally stopped in The Glass City. The small but sturdy skyline of Ohio’s fourth-largest city lies on the Maumee River at Lake Erie’s west corner, surrounded by farmland once occupied by the Great Black Swamp (small patches have been restored or preserved). 

The drive up from Cincinnati would wait till the Sunday drive home. We crossed rhe Ohio at Louisville and headed up to Indianapolis then a diagonal to Fort Wayne. We crossed the same farm country that occupies most of Ohio west of Columbus. Red-roofed barns and wide-porched farmhouses sat at the edge of fields, properties broken by little thatches of forest. A congregation of Amish and/or Mennonites in their traditional clothing sat at a truck stop due to some mechanical problem on their bus. 

 But the picturesque farm country quickly grew hard to enjoy let alone see as smoke blotted out the sun. I didn’t count on Toledo having the worst air quality in the country during our visit. The weather app might call it fog, but it’s smoke. 

No fire appeared. Where is the fire, you might wonder? It sure wasn’t local. The fire comes from one thousand miles away, raging in the ancient forests of north Ontario. A series of strong winds ushered it south. Politicians of a certain stripe were quick to criticize Canada and slow to mention climate change. 

Perhaps taking care of the wildfires ravaging the west would be a more prudent. Eighty miles from my Colorado home a cadre of Canadian firefighters and equipment have battled one fire after another. 

I never experienced anything like that smoke on the Great Lakes before. With the root causes of the fires unlikely to end, I expect it might be the first of many smoke alerts. 

But back to Toledo. In some ways, it felt like Cleveland. Strong institutions, well forested, some rundown areas (although it was often block to block).  

Toledo can claim one of the best-named teams in minor-league baseball – the Toledo Mud Hens, which goes back to 1896. The Detroit Tigers affiliate plays in a nice downtown ballpark surrounded by a revitalizing warehouse district. 

We had dinner at Quenched and Tempered, a sleek but unpretentious taproom across the street from the ballpark. Less than 20 minutes before game time, the team cancelled the Friday game on account of air quality. The sports culture ties into Michigan more than Ohio. Ohio State and Cleveland sports fans are secondary to University of Michigan and Detroit support. Before the Mud Hens games, Tigers gear was everywhere. 

Toledo has stayed vibrant through another Michigan connection, the auto industry. Toledo remains the headquarters for the Jeep brand, with Jeep Wranglers still constructed at a Toledo-based plant. It still underwent a major population drop, but it was also sturdier. You could see the blocks that fell into disrepair, but not necessarily whole neighborhoods. Sometimes vibrancy changed block to block. 

The city’s population has not grown since the 1960s, but it never grew as large as Detroit or Cleveland. Areas with a suburban feel stand only a few miles from downtown. Once heavy on German and Irish immigrants, it has a heavy Eastern European influence (as seen with Tony Packos, a local dining institution). 

When the smoke cleared, I got a better view. Despite its industrial origins, the city has shifted toward riverfront parks and paths. The small skyline finally broke out. Industry has not been moved away, not with the advantages of Lake Erie shipping so close, but it seems to do well. 

Maybe the smaller scale is appealing in middle age or whatever I qualify as now. Still, I can’t help but see the bones of any Rust Belt town and know they are sturdy. This one just anchors a different part of the lake. 

Let's try it with a little less smoke next time.