Off to the Butte!

Zoom! Another summer weekend disintegrated and another "to do" list only half completed.

We kept close to home for the holiday, happy to visit with a friend from New Mexico and dance with our neighbors at the Riverside Park band shell before last night's fireworks. We've had enough rain this season that the "grand finale" wasn't grass fires on S Mountain, as it was last year.

This morning we took a hike up Bear Creek, just downriver from town. I'm finding it quite delightful that a year after his arrival in the Upper Arkansas valley, the DM is finding new routes and taking me places I haven't been in my seven years as a local. We marked this trail a winner, full of an amazing diversity of plant and bird life. Dry slopes and wet creek bottoms... warbling vireos and hermit thrushes. Pine, fir, scrub oak, aspen, maple, juniper... cactus...yucca... moss.

And one particularly lush stretch of horsetail... (I decided to be kind and not post the images of the DM making his way to and from this particular slippery perch.)


On the way back down, we took a pic of this lovely butterfly, some species of comma, but I'm not sure which one. (Hoary comma?) Once I started messing with the image, I realized there's likely another linocut in here. Yikes! Suddenly a backlog of linos.



And I'll be lagging for another week, since tomorrow I'm off to Crested Butte for a week of teaching at the Wildflower Festival. I'm looking forward to it, but Double Yikes! It's already 5:00pm and I still have to pack gear and food and clothes and...

I'd better get with it.

Not sure if I'll be able to post whilst away since hijack-able wireless signals can be hard to find. See you all when I get back!

Things that metamorphose in the night

Day Two, continued. After the xiphactinus and before the pachycephalasaurus, I spent a little time in the balmy Butterfly Hall at the Academy. I found a nice little bench out of the main traffic flow through the exhibit (an important consideration when drawing in places where hordes of children and clueless adults could stream past at any moment) and settled down to draw.

Lots of nice, colorful wings flitting here and there. A lovely morpho on the other side of the room. Graphic shapes, bold colors. Just the sort of thing I like to draw. What settled next to me? Brown and subtle owl butterfly, of course.

At some point the morpho came across the room, and literally bopped me in the back of the head. (Some might say dope-slapped.) Did it settle? Of course not.

Later I moved to another bench, after stopping for a visit with the little poison dart frogs. Again, what settled nearby? Subtlety. Again, what bopped me in the back of the head? Morpho. The butterfly equivalent of taunting, I am sure. (Either that, or its favorite nectar bar was serving really fermented brew.)

Still, it was nice to have a little taste of summer in the far-from-it early days of March. I think I'll go hunting for green blades of grass this afternoon, just to convince myself the season's on its way.