I get shade at least half the afternoon from the clouds that have built up over the continental divide. And yet I don't really get wet.
Unfortunately it's rattlesnake-infested as I wrote in the last post. I worry about my dogs more than myself.
The middle band in the photo is a spruce and fir forest. The less said about that, the better.
Finally there's the flattened mountain above the trees. A sky-dome of coolness. That would be a great place to mountain bike or hike at 10 in the morning, but even if I could get my trailer up there, I worry about being blasted by lightning.
One day I drove to town right by this nonchalant ungulate.
I finally tried to shoo it away so that it would look a little exciting. It acted like a pet. The next day we were mountain biking by the same place. Coffee Girl, my young Australian kelpie (cattle dog), was off leash and took off like a rocket.
I don't want to sound like a softie but I really didn't want her to catch the antelope. At first she seemed to be gaining on him and yet he had the effrontery to stop once and look at her. In seconds they were so far away that I could barely seem them. Finally the antelope reappeared, this time in silhouette at the top of a ridge. This occurred only a day or two after I wrote about how much this kind of image affected me, and all the more so when a drama of nature is being acted out.
The good news is that Coffee Girl trotted back to my side a few seconds later, with her teeth still shiny white rather than bloody red. What a look of pure joy she had on her face!
Then I moved upstream on the Rio Grande to a spot near South Fork, CO. Along the way a horseman and two dogs were moving two heavy-footed ungulates to a different pasture. Comparing these beeves to that antelope gives you an idea of what a wide range ungulates cover. John Wayne, in The Cowboys, said that a cow was just a lot of trouble tied up in a bag of leather. But the two Australian shepherds didn't seem troubled. One of them was only half grown. Was he getting trained by the older dog?
The saddle I found to camp on is the ideal altitude, 8500 feet, but it is proving to be one of my stranger boondocking sites. There are dozens of bovines caterwauling most of the day. They resent our intrusion, I reckon. Were they going to go on like this all night?
Toward sunset a pickup and horse trailer parked next to us, and out jumped a cowgirl, an Australian shepherd and eventually an ungulate of the equine persuasion. They drove the cattle downhill somewhere, and that was the last I saw of them. To honor the occasion I watched "The Cowboys" one of John Wayne's last films, and with an unforgettable score by John Williams.
