Great Walk by Lake Dillon

My dog Sawyer and I had a wonderful walk by Lake Dillon in Frisco this morning about 10:00am. It had snowed during the night and I had woken up to the sunrise Alpenglow on Buffalo Mountain which was dusted with snow. By 10:00 most of it had melted but there was still some snow on Peak 1 and quite a bit on the Fourteeners of Grays and Torres up on the Continental Divide to the east. The melting snow had made a small stream that had intersected the dried up part of the lake and filled a small pool that disappeared a couple of weeks ago. I love the forest after precipitation, snow or rain. The pine trees are greener and drops of water cling to the ends of the needles, lit up by the sun like many diamonds. The berries on the juniper bushes are bluer and the moisture brings out the dusty blue color of the foliage. The scrub oak have turned to a tarnished copper hue, and some of the ground leaves in the grasses are bright red. The grasses are so many different yellows and browns. Here and there a few asters are still blooming, small lavender daisies hugging the ground. And a lone purple hairbell clings to a stem.

Met the guys finishing up the Summit County bike path resurfacing. They have built some great steps down off the path to the wetlands dog walking paths from the Prospect Point path. One of them is from Leadville and his grandmother bought a ranch south of town in the 1940s for running cattle and growing hay. It was originally homesteaded by two men from Sweden - probably the only hardy soles who could stand farming at that extreme altitude - Leadville is the highest incorporated town in the United States. The town has a big dispute going with the town of Alma, south over Hoosier Path from Breckenridge, that is higher but is not incorporated. I imagine that Swedish farmers, used to three months of almost 24 hour darkness, thought that Leadville was a great place to live. There are many ranches in Summit County whose water rights extend back to the late 1800s. I love living in a place with the history of the Ute Indians, the beaver trappers, the gold and the silver miners and now the ski industry. Growing up in Europe with its long history including the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and its modern wars, it is a different kind of history in the high country with pioneers who came to an unknown land to explore and make a living in rather harsh conditions. So the rest of us are just waiting for massive amounts of snow to fall, but for the guys doing the bike path, snow means that they have to leave the county and find work where the ground is not frozen.

I have to say that I meet all kinds of interesting folks walking Sawyer each day, and it is really great to live so close to Lake Dillon with its incredible views. No matter the season it is never the same on any given day. The whole county morphs with the weather and the light on a daily basis. What a great place to live.