Our Environment: “Touring the Rockies” by Scott Turner
Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Despite the steady swoosh of wind through the spruce and fir around Echo Lake, I could hear the gently gurgling song of a Mountain Chickadee wafting from the tree canopy.
The silver-and-gold of a setting sun behind 14,000-foot Mount Evans illuminated the frozen lake upon which several fellow tour-goers strolled. The lake was solid ice more than a foot deep, making it unlikely anyone would fall through, said our tour guide.
Nonetheless, I stuck to the shoreline, gazing at the mountaintop, where I could see the tree line end and alpine terrain begin.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAs a side note, I also noted several ghostly patches of dead trees within the high-elevation stands of lodgepole pines. These were the handiwork of mountain pine beetles and blue fungus infections—a deadly insect-pathogen combo that has emerged from the hotter-and-drier summers of climate change.
Echo Lake sits 10,600 feet above sea level. It is located within Arapaho National Forest about an hour west of Denver, CO. The National Forest is managed jointly with Roosevelt National Forest and Pawnee National Grassland. Alone, Arapaho is about 725,000 acres, or slightly smaller in than Rhode Island.
This was the Front Range of the Rockies. We were west of Denver but east of the Continental Divide. Arapaho is the name of the Native American tribe that inhabited the plains of what is now Colorado and Wyoming.
About a foot of snow covered the ground on this late afternoon. The air temperature was 20 degrees, but with the wind, it felt closer to single digits.
Reaching Echo Lake meant negotiating a snow-covered switch-backing road onward and upward up from the town of Idaho Springs, CO, elevation 7500 feet. Climbing that curvy stretch marked the first time that I observed blue spruce in its native habitat, versus as a specimen in a New England yard or sold as a Christmas tree.
As for Idaho Springs, that’s where the Colorado Gold Rush began in 1858-59, attracting Easterners, and failed miners from the California Gold Rush 10 years earlier. In fact, on that drive to the lake, we’d passed several abandoned mines and their yellow piles of tailings.
Our four-hour tour was billed as a Rocky Mountain Escape from Denver, where I was working that third week of January. This was my first visit to the Rockies. They’re 3,000 miles long and up to 300 miles wide. So, I barely scratched their surface on this sojourn.
Still, I saw some spectacular scenery and stunning creatures. For example, entering Idaho Springs, I spotted several Bighorn Sheep clustered on a rock shelf. Males and females flock by gender, and given the huge horns on a sheep facing the road, I figured these were males, or rams. That foremost ram wore a thick woolen coat of gray and tan, with a whiter-colored rump.
On the way back to Denver, we spotted 15-or-so bison in a field. The animals are part of a herd managed by the Denver Mountain Parks System,
According to the non-non-profit marketing group, VISIT DENVER, the bison, ‘with their prominent shoulder humps (like those you might see on the back of a nickel), along with DNA testing, indicate that the herd is indeed a rare vestige of the original American bison.”
Behind the bison stood a small herd of elk. Thirty years ago, I saw bison in South Dakota. This was the first time I’d observed elk. They were much larger, and browner-red, than the white-tailed deer of our Ocean State.
Although the tour was just four hours long, on this brief visit through the canyons and creeks, the range felt like home.
Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.com.
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