June 2024
- James by Percival Everett
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie
- The Ballad of the Sad Café and other stories by Carson McCullers
- The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks
Trails walked:
- Wild Basin Backpack plus Thunder Lake day hike in Rocky Mountain National Park (May 31st-June 2nd)
- Mill Creek Basin traverse in Rocky Mountain National Park (June 6th)
- Lobo Peak near Taos, NM (June 13th)
- Prairie to Pines Triple Loop near Boulder (June 18th)
- Lawn and Crystal Lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park (June 25th)
Song of the month: Raye - Genesis
Scientist Spotlight – Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber, Synthetic Nitrogen
June Summary:
I guess I inadvertently "celebrated" Juneteenth this past month in two ways. One was in reading the novels James and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn back to back. James is a retelling of Huck Finn from the viewpoint of Jim, the escaped slave, and it's incredible. See my write up below. James is bound to be an American classic alongside Huck Finn. The second way in which I inadvertently recognized Juneteenth was by watching a baseball game on June 20th. It was the St. Louis Cardinals vs the San Francisco Giants and it was taking place, not in either of their large stadiums, but at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Rickwood is the oldest professional baseball stadium still standing. Its first game was 100 years ago and was home to the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro League. In 1924, and up until Jackie Robinson broke that barrier in 1947, Blacks were not allowed in the all white Major League Baseball (MLB) system. Two events occurred recently to make this game at Rickwood even more significant: One, MLB made the decision to include Negro League statistics into MLB statistics (one of many results of this is that Ty Cobb's 96-year-old record of the best career batting average of .367 was surpassed by Josh Gibson's .372 average). The other incident that occurred was the great Willie Mays passing away on June 18th at the age of 93. Mays is one of the best baseball players to ever take the field and he played for the Birmingham Black Barons at the age of 16! For many (including me), Mays is the greatest baseball player ever. There were already plans in place for this particular game to honor Mays before his passing, but his death made for an eerie coincidence two days before. Three things struck me before and during the game. One was Reggie Jackson's honest and blunt description of the racism he encountered during his career (and he came into the league 16 years AFTER Mays and 20 years AFTER Jackie Robinson). Another was watching 99-year-old Bill Greason throw out the first pitch before the game. 99! He was a teammate of Willie Mays. And he had a little windup before he threw the ball! And the third thing that I loved was listening to Bob Kendrick, curator of the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, talk about the players of the Negro league. He was part of the announcing booth for a few innings; I'm sure he was initially scheduled to be there for only an inning like most guests, but he was so mesmerizing and genuinely excited to talk about these Black men playing the game they loved against all odds that it was great theater and he stuck around for several innings bringing a ray of light to the announcing booth. Just watch/listen to this clip during the game; he's infectious. It was a special day for baseball. I'm hoping it helped to inspire more Black kids to try the game. Currently the percentage of MLB players that are (non-Hispanic) Black is at around 6%, down from 20% in the early 90s. I think that the rise of the NBA during the Michael Jordan era is one reason for this, but income level plays its part also (basketball requires very little equipment for young kids, most football programs provide the equipment needed, but baseball equipment is expensive and beyond reach for many young Black kids). I would also have to admit that, compared to basketball and football, baseball may seem a bit boring and slow for the increasingly distracted kids these days. It wasn't when I was a kid. We played street baseball nearly every day in the summer, much to the chagrin of neighbors with broken windows....
It was a productive month! Five books and five big hikes. My reading brought me two differing views of Life on the Mississippi in the mid 1800s, a hopeful and pragmatic book on solving our biggest issues on Earth, some wonderful short stories by one of the great writers of the American South, and an inspiring book about (metaphorically) climbing your second mountain in life. My rambling included a three-generation backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National park, and two other big hikes in that park, plus a steep climb in Taos and a triple loop in the Boulder Open Space. Enjoy!
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Scientist Spotlight: Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber, Synthetic Nitrogen
There's a very cool website out there called Science Heroes which ranks scientists in the order of how many potential lives they've saved with their inventions. I ran across this while reading Hannah Ritchie's book, Not the End of the World which I write about below. It had been known for a long time that nitrogen was key to making plants grow. Farmers had been using legumes (part of the Native American Three Sisters plants) to provide this nitrogen. Eventually, as population soared and crop demand rose, certain bird droppings off the coast of Chile were found to contain high concentrations of nitrogen, so this coastal area was being ravaged for its bird droppings. By the start of the 1900s, scientists had been trying for 100 years to synthetically create nitrogen, but without success.
This changed at the German chemical company Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik (aka BASF) when Carl Bosch and Fritz Haber combined their expertise. Contrary to their evil genius looks in the photos above, they were genuinely good men (Bosch criticized the Nazi regime and was removed from his post, while Haber was Jewish and had to leave the country). Haber unlocked the scientific mystery using rare and expensive catalysts such as uranium and osmium, but his process was expensive and not feasible for industrial use. Bosch solved this engineering part of the problem by discovering that nitrogen could be refined by an available iron compound. Then he designed a room that could withstand the pressure and temperature required to create the fertilizer in large quantities; it took him four more years to do this. Haber received his Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 and Bosch received his in 1931. According to the Science Heroes website: "Vaclav Smil, in his book Enriching the Earth, says that the Haber-Bosch process "has been of greater fundamental importance to the modern world than...the airplane, nuclear energy, space flight, or television. The expansion of the world's population from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to six billion in 2000 would not have been possible without (their discoveries).""
I subscribe to a music newsletter from the New York Times where I'm introduced to musical artists I've never heard about or music that I wouldn't normally listen to. Even though I normally tend to drift towards what is loosely defined as folk or singer/songwriter music, I have also enjoyed particular songs in many other genres. So while you'll always find artists such as John Prine, Tom Waits, and Nanci Griffith on my Song of the Month feature, I have also written about and appreciated artists as diverse as Tupac Shakur, Billie Eilish, Cassandra Jenkins, Lizzo, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Meschiya Lake, and Laufey.
When I was listening to the song Genesis by the British artist Raye, I thought, this is amazing. The music kept changing genres, and the words seemed like they were insightful, but I couldn't catch them all on the first listen. Then I replayed it with the words in front of me and they hit me like a ton of bricks. I haven't yet gone down the rabbit hole of Raye's musical history yet, but I plan to. Because anybody that writes a masterpiece like this, has what it takes to be great. In an article about her, she says she has a quote by Nina Simone on her bedroom wall: "An artist's duty is to reflect their times." And boy does she live by that credo in this song.
There is a really big issue confronting young people in the world these days that has been manifesting itself in increased levels of suicide, depression, and mass shootings. It's the lack of real community being replaced by "look at me" individualism, and the growing hatred of tribalism. David Brooks talks a bit about this in his book, The Second Mountain (which I write about below). Raye spends the first part of this great song describing this problem youth are experiencing using some R&B and Rap to describe it, then at around the four and a half minute mark the music turns into a hopeful blend of New Orleans Jazz and Gospel with her incredible voice to sort of feel the "light" that is needed to lift young people out of this malaise they're experiencing. What is this "light"? It's not clearly defined, but I think we all have an idea of what it might be: connection with others, spirituality, religion, community. They say God made the world in exactly 7 days according the Genesis book in the Bible; well Raye made this song, Genesis, in exactly 7 minutes of heart-rendering tragedy and redemption. Listen to the whole thing. The words in the video are hard to fully understand, but pull them up here and read along while listening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOX8gyc27K4&authuser=0
The next morning I got up early (it got light at 4:30am with birds chirping all over the place), made some coffee and oatmeal and just hung out eating and enjoying the peace and quiet (well, except for the birds). Got my daypack loaded (I actually emptied my backpack of everything except for what I’d need for a day hike) and headed up the steep camping trail towards Thunder Lake. At about 3 miles and a thousand feet up I reached the junction for the Lion Lakes trip which I did back in July of 2023 (that was a great, and long, day hike). This time I went left towards Thunder Lake. From this point, for the remaining 2 miles and 1,600 feet up it was slushy snow that got deeper and deeper as I climbed. The last half mile was basically checking my map and heading towards the lake any way I could as there was no longer a trail. But oh, man, the reward at the end was worth all this effort. I couldn’t believe it was June 1 and the lake was still frozen, plus the remote ranger station was half buried in snow. The lake is surrounded by the stunning peaks of Alice, Tanima, and Pilot mountains. So beautiful. I gathered up my energy for the 2-mile slog back through the snow (at least I had my own footprints to step in) and then the 3 miles back to camp after the junction. I plopped down in that hammock and fell asleep with the walkie-talkie on my lap waiting for my grandson’s call.
An hour or so later, the walkie-talkie woke me up...”Grandpa Mike, we’re hiking on the trail and we’ll see you soon!” That was a fun wake-up call. I headed down the trail a bit to meet them coming up: It was my son and oldest grandson (who were spending the night up here), plus my daughter-in-law and youngest grandson who were coming up just for the afternoon. We all hung out at camp for a while until my daughter-in-law and youngest grandson headed back down the trail. By then it was dinner time, so we sat around the dining table (a big flat rock) and cooked our meals. Grandson loved the small backpacking stoves and the sporks and nesting bowls and cups. He quickly ate and then proceeded to climb every rock in the area. My son brought up a couple of beers, so we toasted to a special moment. We all went on a little hike to the waterfall before bedtime and then went into our tents, exhausted at 9pm. There was a big thunderstorm during the night, but grandson didn’t get scared, just asked what it was and went back to bed. Disaster averted. Thunder and lightning in the mountains from inside a tent is really humbling.
In the morning, after another chilly night for me in my broken sleeping bag, I got up with the birds and made coffee and oatmeal while son and grandson slept in a bit. We hung out for a while, then packed up camp and headed back down the trail to civilization. It was a great weekend, even if I was cold at night (lesson learned for the next big backpack).
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| Lounging in the hammock on the first evening |
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| Still lots of snow on the way to Thunder Lake |
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| A little dicey crossing this bridge |
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| Thunder Lake covered in Snow |
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| Ranger cabin mostly covered in snow |
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| This is why you only plan 1.5 mile backpacking trips with 4 year olds... |
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| Grandsons enjoying the outdoors |
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| Daugther-in-law and grandson |
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| First backpacking meal |
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| Mac n cheese, yum |
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| Hammocking |
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| Son and grandson |
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| Ready for bed, er sleeping bag |
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| Hiking out |
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| Kids get sidetracked A LOT on hikes |
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| We're almost there, let's keep walking |
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| Or dad will just carry you |
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| 3-gen backpack |
“You’re walking down the street and you see that Mrs. Holiday’s kitchen is on fire. She’s standing in her yard, her back to her house, unaware. How do you tell her?”
“Fire, fire,” January said.
“Direct. And that’s almost correct,” I said.
The youngest of them, lean and tall five-year-old Rachel, said, “Lawdy missum! Looky dere.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Why is that correct?”
Lizzie raised her hand. “Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.”
The novel, James, follows Twain’s story of adventures fairly closely, but James is credited with many more of the heroics credited to Huck in the original novel. James has fascinating philosophical discussions in his dreams with the likes of Voltaire, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau because those are philosophers whom he’s studied secretly in the library of his white owners. And it was entertaining when James would slip up and talk like the literate person he was, and Huck would ask him why he was talking so funny. There are a couple of new scenes that were terrific, including one with a traveling minstrel show and the final scene in which Jim/James is freed. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jim is freed because his white owner died and wrote in her will that he be freed. But in James, he took things into his own hands to free himself, along with his wife and daughter, and several other severely abused slaves. Oh, and there was a big surprise near the end regarding James and Huck Finn.
Both of these novels are great and probably should be assigned as a pair in high school or college literature courses. Both are adventurous, funny, and full of social commentary. Both are a joy to read (even though James had some heavy scenes). And even though many writers of color have issues with Twain’s work, Everett had this to say about him in his acknowledgements: “His humor and humanity affected me long before I became a writer,”
Here are some quotes from both novels:
HF: I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever.
HF example of Jim’s vernacular: she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but she didn’ want to, but she could git eight hund’d dollars for me, en it ’uz sich a big stack o’ money she couldn’ resis’. De widder she try to git her to say she wouldn’ do it, but I never waited to hear de res’. I lit out mighty quick, I tell you.
HF: he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a n!gger.
HF example of Huck’s hypocrisy on slavery: Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this n!gger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.... and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.
HF: Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the river’s always gnawing at it.
JAMES: Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.
JAMES: That Tom Sawyer wasn’t really a danger to Huck, just a kind of little fellow sitting on his shoulder whispering nonsense. But his father being back, that was a different story. That man might have been sober or he might have been drunk, but in either of those conditions he consistently threw beatings onto the poor boy.
JAMES: So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.” “Don’t make eye contact,” a boy said. “Right, Virgil.” “Never speak first,” a girl said. “That’s correct, February,” I said. Lizzie looked at the other children and then back to me. “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she said. "Mumble sometimes so they can have the satisfaction of telling you not to mumble.”
JAMES: "...the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better they feel.” The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.” “February, translate that.” “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
JAMES: “Where am I?” I asked. “You’re in Illinois,” the old man said. “So, I’m in a free state?” The men laughed. “Boy, you’re in America,” a muscular man said.
JAMES: We stared at each other. Young George seemed to smile until the whip found him again. Blood was dripping down his legs. He found my eyes and mouthed the word Run. I did.
JAMES: He was basically honest, his practice of owning people notwithstanding.
JAMES: “See if you can clean out the wounds,” I said. I removed the rag that had been my shirt and Norman used it to wipe at my back. It burned like crazy. I tried to relax my body and not bite my tongue. “What did you do?” Norman asked. “What did I do? I’m a slave, Norman. I inhaled when I should have exhaled. What did I do?”
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| View from Bierstadt lake |
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| DIL taking in views from Bierstadt |
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| Taking a photo of the perfect Christmas tree |
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| Crossing Mill Creek |
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| Long and winding path |
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| Bull moose |
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| Peaks peeking |
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| Lots of downed trees on this less maintained trail |
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| Cub Lake |
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| DIL rocking |
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| Big bull moose lounging so close to the trail |
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| Starting up the Yerba Buena trail |
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| Getting steep |
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| Almost at the top...I'm coming! |
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| Up on top with epic views |
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| See? |
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| Daughter and son-in-love with granddaughter |
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| A very happy couple here |
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| Lunch spot |
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| Contentment |
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| Cool clouds |
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| Looking back up at the not very prominent Lobo Peak |
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| Sure footed mama carrying her daughter |
Back in 2018 Hans Rosling wrote a book called Factfulness, in which he set out to prove, with data, that the world is actually in better shape than most people believe. I loved Rosling’s optimism and his surprising results. Hannah Ritchie read that book and it changed her life. She is now being touted as the Hans Rosling of climate change. Bill Gates wrote, "With comprehensive data and sometimes counterintuitive conclusions, Hannah Ritchie does for the environment what Hans Rosling did for health . . . I hope people around the world read this book, understand our planet isn’t a lost cause, and get inspired to help fix it." And Margaret Atwood wrote, “Not the End of the World is an inspiring data-mine which gives us not only real guidance, but the most necessary ingredient of all: hope...practical and truly essential”
That’s what this book brought to me, a sense of hope. Fighting for progress on climate change can be an exhausting and depressing activity. Not only do I have to deal with the science deniers and political ideologists, but also with doomsayers who believe nothing can be done to solve it, and also with news headlines that tend to exaggerate the climate problem in order to, well, make headlines. The headline exaggeration problem is something Ritchie handles very well. Many of her chapters begin with an actual headline from a major news source about the population or food or the environment, which she then goes on to dispel with data. She’s a scientist, so she knows that global warming is a huge problem, but she sifts through the data to find real progress being made, even if not quite fast enough. She talks about the upside down U-shaped carbon curve of countries trying to improve the lives of their people. The US and EU became rich and powerful by moving from wood fuel to fossil fuel; now we’re realizing what it has done and we’re taking steps to fix it. Developing countries also want the opportunity to ride this fossil fuel curve to uplift their economies. But the world can’t afford this, so what do we do? She has answers. In the book she says, “My job is not to do original studies, or to make scientific breakthroughs. It’s to understand what we already know. Or could know if we studied the information we have properly. Then explain it to people: in articles, on the radio, on TV, and in government offices so they can use it to move us forward.”
She talks a lot about the global food supply, biodiversity, ocean fisheries, land use, and poverty which all need consideration in dealing with climate change. She provides several examples of times when humanity was able to deal with seemingly unsolvable problems (the Ozone hole, acid rain, extinction and recovery of the buffalo/blue whale/bald eagle, world hunger, the invention of nitrogen fertilizer to feed the world, and on and on). There is hope she says, but we also need to work together for the same goal and stop fighting each other over small disagreements (like nuclear energy, effectiveness of recycling, genetically modified crops, etc.) because all of the above is needed to provide the world with food and energy without continuing to burn fossil fuels.
She is pragmatic in her approach, for example when she talks about replacing plastic straws with paper ones: “Paper and water don’t go together. Paper is made of a compound called cellulose, which dissolves in water. Why anyone would think it’s a good idea to make drinking straws out of paper is beyond me. They really are useless.” Paper straws is the sort of topic that can really turn people off on environmental issues. That, and exaggerated headlines that turn out to be proven false quickly. And this list of common things that people think make a big difference, but usually have a surprisingly small impact on carbon footprint:
- Recycling your plastic bottles
- Replacing old light bulbs with energy-efficient ones
- You don’t have to stop watching TV, streaming movies or using the internet
- How you read: whether it’s Kindle, paper or audiobook, it doesn’t matter
- Washing your dishes in the dishwasher, it doesn’t matter much
- Eating local food (this can be worse for your carbon footprint)
- Eating organic food (this can be worse for your carbon footprint)
- Leaving your television or computer on standby, it doesn’t matter much
- Leaving your phone charger plugged in, it doesn’t matter much
- Plastic or paper bag – your plastic bag actually has a lower carbon footprint, but it doesn’t matter much
Here are some lines (whittling them down was nearly impossible as it seems like I highlighted nearly half the book!):
Air pollution is the silent killer that doesn’t get enough headlines. It doesn’t shock us like images of a flood or a hurricane, but it kills around 500 times more people a year than all ‘natural’ disasters combined, in most years.
Millions die from fossil fuels every year, with estimates ranging from 3.6 to 8.7 million – 1 to 2.5 million come from electricity, and most of it from coal. Nuclear and renewables are hundreds, if not thousands, of times safer.
We won’t solve climate change, stop deforestation or protect biodiversity without changes to how we eat.
I’ve asked many economists what we need to do to tackle climate change. Every single one has given me the same answer: put a price on carbon. It is, perhaps, the only thing that economists agree on.
Per capita emissions in the US and Germany have fallen by a third since the 1970s. They’ve more than halved in France, and fallen by almost two-thirds in Sweden...Countries have slashed air pollution while growing their economies at the same time.
If everyone in Europe stopped using plastics tomorrow the world’s oceans would hardly notice the difference (Because most of Europe’s plastic go into landfills).
People in the 1950s weren’t thinking ‘let’s screw over the generations that come after us by locking us into an energy system built on coal and oil’. Fossil fuels were the route to a better life.
In 2014, Uruguay was getting just 5% of its electricity from wind. Now it’s closing in on 50%.
One in 10 people don’t get enough calories. Four in ten get too much and are overweight.
The world now produces more seafood from fish farming than it does from wild catch in the ocean. Wild fish catch has barely changed since 1990. Fish farming has made up for all of the extra demand. If we had tried to meet it through wild catch alone, our oceans could be in a terrible state.
Kenyan proverb: ‘Treat the Earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children.’
My colleague, Max Roser, estimated that one solar panel in 1956 would have cost at least $596,800 in today’s prices. Despite being wildly expensive, the solar panel didn’t die out, because we needed it in outer space.
We already have most of the tools and knowledge we need to reduce air pollution. What’s missing is money on the table and the political will to act.
Living standards in Sweden are just as good as they are in the US, if not higher. Yet the average Swede emits just one-quarter of the emissions of the average American, and half as much as the average German.
The biggest solution to ending plastic pollution is not a glamorous one. It’s not a Tesla electric vehicle or a nuclear fusion breakthrough. It’s the grimy but necessary investment in waste management. If every country had the waste-management systems that rich countries have, almost no plastic would end up in the ocean.
China uses more cement in three years than the US did in the entire 20th century.
The lower emissions of driving an EV means that an electric car quickly ‘pays back’ its debt. In the UK, this payback time is less than two years. So, within two years your EV is already better for the environment. Within ten years it has emitted just one-third of the CO2 of a petrol car.
Death rates from ‘natural’ disasters, measured as the number of deaths per decade per 100,000 people. Deaths have fallen – not because disasters have become less frequent or severe, but because our infrastructure, monitoring and response systems have become much more resilient to them.
for every 100 calories we feed a cow, we get just 3 calories of meat back in return; 97 calories are effectively wasted.
One of the worst ways to get someone to reduce their meat consumption is to tell them to go vegan. It just doesn’t work. We need to make it simple and enjoyable for people to cut back a bit.
Cowspiracy would believe that cutting out meat will stop the climate crisis. The film claims that more than half of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock. This is nonsense. The actual number is just under a fifth.
if both McDonald’s and Burger King made all their burgers a 50:50 blend of beef and soy, it would save 50 million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year. That’s equal to the emissions of Portugal.
what we eat matters much more for our carbon footprint than how far it has travelled to reach us.
Some might see electricity as a luxury – an unnecessary drain on natural resources – but it has become essential for a healthy and productive life. We need it to keep vaccines and medicines cold; to keep our hospital machines running; to cook our food and wash our clothes without spending all day doing chores; to keep our food cool and contamination-free; to power lights for children to study at night; and to keep our streets safe.
Plastic really is a wonder material. It’s sterile, waterproof, versatile and cheap. Plastic is derived from the Greek plastikos, meaning ‘capable of being shaped or moulded’, and it lives up to its name, in that we can make almost anything out of it. We complain that it has become so ubiquitous in our lives, but this is a testament to the fact that it is such a useful material.
I don’t mean to be too down on recycling. I still tell my friends to do it. I still do it. But I don’t delude myself that this is what’s going to save the planet. My advice to you, then, is to recycle. It’s a good thing to do. But if it’s the only thing you do or one of the biggest things you do for the environment, then you need to up your game.
the energy system and industry is responsible for around three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions. Our food system is responsible for the other quarter.
Those who squabble about whether nuclear death rates are a little bit higher than solar, or a little bit lower, or whether solar is more deadly than wind are completely missing the point. Separating these is like splitting hairs. The big headline is that all of them kill far, far fewer people than any fossil fuel.
The prairie was as green as Ireland but with grass as high as my waist with great views of the Flatirons. Slowly I rose above the prairie and into the pines in just a couple of miles on the Flatirons Vista South trail. From here I connected to the Dowdy Draw trail for a long switchback down into a beautiful valley, where I hopped onto the Springbok trail which took me further into the woods. I’d say that the Goshawk Ridge trail was the highlight of the day. Dense brush, a large variety of trees, open meadows, and even more spectacular views. It would be possible to drive to a different trailhead and only do the Goshawk loop hike in only 4 miles. No big animal sightings on this day but it wouldn’t surprise me to see some on the Goshawk Ridge trail in the early morning or late evening.
I did encounter the South Boulder Canal on this hike when I connected the Springbok and Goshawk Ridge trails. I read up a bit on it. 20% of Denver’s water supply flows through this canal! Water from Gross Reservoir (which is currently being expanded due to the increasing demand for water along the Front Range) flows down South Boulder Creek, then through a diversion dam in Eldorado Canyon were some of it continues down South Boulder Creek and the rest of it flows down the canal to Ralston Reservoir north of Golden. Water in the West is a fascinating story; Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is a book I highly recommend about the history of water in the West.
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| Definitely in the prairie here |
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| Nice pond with mountain views |
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| Lots of wildflowers out |
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| ..and some horseback riders |
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| A peak at bigger mountains beyond |
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| Beautiful and green |
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| Many shades of green |
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| Pretty day |
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| South Boulder Canal |
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| This was my lunch spot |
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| Lunch spot |
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| Trail art |
The collection I read included the short novella The Ballad of the Sad Café, plus another six short stories. All of them were filled with beautiful writing and fascinating characters. The story Wunderkind is a sort of autobiography about her early life as a music prodigy and beautifully portrayed the pressures of this life. Certainly the anchor was the Sad Café novella which told the strange story of Miss Amelia Evans, a 6 foot 2 inch woman with the strength of a man who ran a store and café in a small town in Georgia. A long lost hunchbacked cousin appears one day and they form a special bond. Their story, along with the townspeople and her ex husband who returns from prison to create havoc create a vivid story of life in small town Georgia in the first half of the 20th century. Here are some lines:
It was not a common thing to have an unknown hunchback walk to the store at midnight and then sit down and cry.
he was like nothing any man among them had ever beheld until that time. The room was still as death.
For years, when he was a boy, he had carried about with him the dried and salted ear of a man he had killed in a razor fight.
But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.
At eleven o’clock the bride took a lamp and went upstairs. The groom followed close behind her. So far all had gone decently enough, but what followed after was unholy.
The moonlight brightened the dusty road, and the dwarfed peach trees were black and motionless: there was no breeze. The drowsy buzz of swamp mosquitoes was like an echo of the silent night.
It was in the fourth year that Miss Amelia hired a Cheehaw carpenter and had him board up the premises, and there in those closed rooms she has remained ever since.
Restlessness scattered her attention.
He had the face of a born gambler, carefully adjusted, the expression a permanent deadlock between fear and greed.
they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and—finally—endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.
By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.
The forecast called for no rain in the mountains on this day, which really means nothing in the mountains. But for me, on this day, it meant a perfect day in the 60s with blue skies and a few clouds…until the very last mile back to the car where rain, lightning and thunder found their natural way into the mountains. It was a pretty steady climb from 8,500 feet to 11,000 feet in 6.5 miles to Lawn Lake. Easy enough with a day pack, but I did see backpackers struggling with the elevation gain and distance. Even the last mile and half to Crystal Lakes wasn’t too bad with “only” 500 more feet of elevation gain. By the time I got to Lawn Lake I was pretty hungry, but still felt great, physically, so I knew I would make it up to Crystal Lakes. I finished my sandwich while taking in the views of the lake hemmed in by 13ers Fairchild Mountain, Mummy Mountain, and Hagues Peak. There were a surprising number of people up here, some for the day and some backpackers. I’d say there were around 10 folks milling around. After finishing lunch I headed up to Crystal Lakes for yet another astounding RMNP sight. These crystal clear lakes were nestled up against the base of Fairchild Mountain with snow-covered cliffs forming an amphitheater. I didn’t quite have the place to myself. There were three high school football players and their coach up here also. Nice kids and coach who were taking in the views mostly in silence, which is actually pretty surprising for high school football players. There were 3 small snowfields that I had to traverse plus a bit of bog, mud, and streams, but not too bad for late June. On the way back to Lawn Lake I spotted a large bull moose grazing about 30 yards away. I sat staring for a while and waited for the high school kids so I could point him out. They were stoked!
It was a pretty good animal day too. In addition to the moose, I saw a couple of adolescent male deer, some marmots, and my second snowshoe hare! I still haven’t been able to get a photo of the hare; they are so skittish and fast. I made my way downhill alongside the Roaring River which was roaring all the way. Crystal Lakes is the source of this river. I wrote this about the 1982 Lawn Lake dam break in my Ypsilon Lake write up in July 2023:
In 1982 the dam at Lawn Lake (built in 1903) burst, sending 30 million cubic feet of water down Roaring River. Stephen Gillette, who worked for the park service, went to work an hour earlier than normal that day to collect trash at the Lawn Lake trailhead. When he got there he heard a noise that sounded like a jet engine about to crash and then he saw huge pine trees rocketing down the river. He backed his truck up to block the entrance to Endovalley road (likely saving the life of at least one tourist who was about to enter). He called the rangers from the emergency phone (which didn’t always work but thankfully did that day) who began evacuating campers. Three campers died during the flood, but likely dozens where saved due to the fact that Gillette went to work early that day and reacted quickly.
You can see the remnants of that flood all along this hike. It would be a terrifying thing to witness. I got rained on the last mile of the hike, but it felt nice and refreshing after 16 miles. Other than sore feet, I felt pretty good after this long and beautiful day in the mountains.
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| The Roaring River in the early morning sun |
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| Young buck |
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| Small creeks everywhere with the melting snow |
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| Pretty Lawn Lake |
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| Tiny flowers surviving up here |
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| Lawn Lake floral view |
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| Looking back at Lawn Lake on the way to Crystal |
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| Lots of flowers |
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| The smaller of the three Crystal Lakes |
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| The next larger one |
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| ..and the largest one at the base of Fairchild Mountain |
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| Beautiful Crystal Lake |
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| Cool clouds |
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| Lawn Lake from high above |
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| Big bull moose |
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| Moose with background |
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| More cool clouds |
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| Big ole marmot |
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| This was my view for the majority of the hike...still not bad |
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| Storms a comin' |
The second mountain is a metaphorical mountain that many people climb after they've already climbed their first mountain. That first mountain is the place most of us strive for to satisfy our individual/family need for food, shelter, success, and happiness; ie self-satisfaction. Once we've achieved this and our family has grown, some people just stay there and are satisfied with their life. But many others come to a place where we ask, now what? That's when some start climbing that second mountain, which is less about yourself and more about serving others. A relatively few people actually climb that second mountain before they even try for the first mountain. These are usually young people who decide that the social injustice they see is too important to finish that accounting degree and decide to open up a community center in an impoverished place instead. These people are rare in today's world of individualism.
After describing a bit about his life and what the two mountains mean, he takes the reader through a set of commitments that are necessary in order to climb that second mountain; there are four of them: Commitment to a vocation, commitment to a marriage, commitment to philosophy and faith, and finally commitment to community. In each chapter on the four commitments he references a wide range of philosophers, psychologists, religious scholars, and inner city activists. It's uplifting to read about all these experts and their take on finding your true moral values and on finding that a commitment to serve others rather than the self is what ultimately brings full joy as opposed to temporary happiness.
For me, starting to write this blog was a way to sort out how I feel about certain things and what I can/should be doing to make a difference. I'm still climbing my second mountain (literally and figuratively). I'll let you know when I think I've reached the summit. Here are some lines:
If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.
Most of us get better at living, get deeper and wiser as we go, and this book seeks to capture how that happens.
The Internet is commanding you to click on and sample one thing after another. Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace.
Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse.
As the young writer Veronica Rae Saron put it, “Conversation after conversation, it has become more and more clear: those among us with flashy Instagram accounts, perfectly manufactured LinkedIn profiles, and confident exteriors (yours truly) are probably those who are feeling the most confused, anxious, and stuck when it comes to the future."
The reason American lives are shorter today is the increase in the so-called deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdose, liver problems, and so on. And those, in turn, are caused by the social isolation that is all around us.
People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.
Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred.
The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer.
After her first daughter was born, a friend of mine, Catherine Bly Cox, told me, “I found I loved her more than evolution required.” I’ve always loved that observation because it points to that deeper layer.
That’s the paradox of privilege. When we are well-off we chase the temporary pleasures that actually draw us apart. We use our wealth to buy big houses with big yards that separate us and make us lonely. But in crisis we are compelled to hold closely to one another in ways that actually meet our deepest needs.
“I’ve been working in this field for fifty years,” he says, “and I’ve never seen a program turn around a life. Only relationships turn around lives.”
to be married is to volunteer for the most thorough surveillance program known to humankind.
Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories. They are also measured by how gently they correct each other’s vices.
The only way to thrive in marriage is to become a better person—more patient, wise, compassionate, persevering, communicative, and humble.
Psychologists joke that a marriage is a battleground in which two families send their best warriors to determine which family’s culture will direct the couple’s lives.
(Frankl) spent the rest of his long life arguing that human beings’ primary motive is not for money or even happiness, but for meaning.
In a rich community, people are up in one another’s business, know each other’s secrets, walk with each other in times of grief, and celebrate together in times of joy. In a rich community, people help raise one another’s kids. In these kinds of communities, which were typical in all human history until the last sixty years or so, people extended to neighbors the sorts of devotion that today we extend only to family.
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community.
Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal.
Until next time, happy reading and rambling!