A New Door

We had an energy audit done last year and it showed that one of our doors was leaking cold air in great quantities. They took infrared pictures and it is amazing to see how much cold air was coming in especially on the bottom left. The blacker the color, the more cold air is coming in.

  Since it's starting to get colder again it was time to fix it. Fixing it was actully going to be harder than just replacing it so on Sunday afternoon we replaced it completely. The weather was perfect fortunately. It's in and sealed up now and should make the utility room a lot warmer this winter. We sealed the heck out of the new door with foam and insulation. Dale stand proudly here with his pry bar with remnants of the old door frame. Below is the new door about to be intalled.

Fall weather

Fall weather arrived on Monday with a cold front and rain off and on. There was new snow in the mountains, some 16 inches or so. It has been like that for three days now and already the leaves are starting to turn. Here are some pictures of one of the burr oaks starting to turn color. As I took these pictures I was nearly attacked  ( in a friendly sort of way) by an over-eager squirrel we have nicknamed "Nikki" since she's got a small nick in her left ear. She's a mother and had a brood this summer and gets very hungry when she's nursing a batch of babies. She learned that we were good sources of food for hungry mother squirrels. I was out taking a few pictures and she was so anxious for a peanut she practically tripped me as I tried to take the shots. A lot of squirrels hang around and we can't resist feeding them.

Here she is climbing the door. You can see the nick. She's a bit blurry because she never stops moving.  It's really funny when she runs toward the opening door as the cat is going out - they end up touching noses.  He doesn't chase her but he will take a mild swat at her if she gets too close. We collected a bunch of acorns from the park last week but Dale forgot to take them out of his bike bag when we got back.  By the next morning there wasn't an acorn left but there was a big hole chewed through the bag.

The rain has started up again now - it's one of those 3-day weather funks we occasionally get here. By the weekend it will  probably be hot and sunny again. We have a good store of wood stocked up now that we've gathered all summer, and we started firing up the wood stove on Monday. It's so nice and toasty.

Willows at Michigan Creek

Here's our camping spot, early morning. You can see the smoke from morning campfires hovering over the valley.  Also here are some very disguised beasts on a bed of sunflower shells that we saw at the Moose Center. The larger one is a Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel. The smaller ones are probably Colorado Chipmunks.

Never Summer Range

This holiday weekend took us up highway 14 to North Park where we ended up camping in the Never Summer Range. True to form it was chilly with a mean wind  blowing and  it rained several times on us. The original plan was to camp on the State Park lands but their rules are very restrictive now and only allow camping in official campgrounds, as closely packed together as a trailer park. That's not the kind of camping we like to do.
   We had a whole afternoon available to explore since we weren't camping there, and specifically went looking for a place where we had camped in 1997 when the kids were young. It was the back side of a high spur of ridge with a spectacular view of the whole range heading northwards. While we were there the kids built a temporary fort out of old  fallen logs and branches. The road was a little logging road that had branched off of the main road.  We couldn't find it at first - they had closed off many of the old roads for regrowth.
  Parking the car at a barricaded road that we thought might be the old original road,we set off hiking. It soon became apparent that the overgrown road we were on wasn't the right place but the hill off to the west looked familiar. Leaving the road we hiked up the ridge and found ourselves exactly in the old place we had camped long ago. It had been clear cut right before we had originally found it, but now with twelve years of new growth it was filled with small aspens and pines. I could even see the place where the kids had built their fort long ago. We walked back down the overgrown road and ended up several hundred yards from our car.
   We found another newer open road in the park near the same area that provided a spectacular view of the whole range.  The red-brown patches on the mountains are the large areas of trees killed by the beetle infestation that's killing off all the pine forests all over Colorado. In 1997 it was all green.

Forgotten pictures

I realized I forgot to put on the closeup pictures of the Durango train. So here we have a closeup of the engine and a crew member working on it, and also a shoe-tying engineer. We suspect it was a deliberate photo opportunity cause when he was done he went and tied his shoe again at the opposite window on the other side of the locomotive. Somehow I feel like that's cheating.

Cumbres Toltec Train

Since we had to go past it on the way home we stopped by to see one of Colorado's other famous trains, the Cumbres Toltec train. This train goes from Antonito CO to Chama NM and back. We arrived in Antonito just as the southbound train was preparing to leave. This train is a great train and a fabulous trip to take. The route is rugged with cliffs and tunnels and bridges and takes the greater part of a day to go one way. It is also highly scenic.