July 2025

Books read:

On the Hippie Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer by Rick Steves
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adrianna Hunter)
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Trails walked:

Wheeler Peak near Taos, NM (July 7th)
Beaver Creek trail from Beaver Reservoir near Ward (July 15th)
Storm Pass Trail from Bear Lake Road in Rocky Mountain National Park (July 18th)
Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park (July 20th)
Hogback Ridge and North Sky trail near Boulder (July 23rd)

Song(s) of the month: Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione

July Summary:

On one of my drives to Rocky Mountain National Park this month I came upon a fascinating site. It was very early in the morning along highway 36 towards Estes Park; a mist was rising on the highway. I brought my car to a complete stop. Luckily there were no other cars at this hour. In the middle of the road was what I can only describe as a bird funeral. A magpie lay dead in the street. Its friends and family members (all dressed in black and white) were fluttering around the body, presumably in mourning. They were laying grass and leaves at the body’s side! It took me to another place for a few seconds, like I was watching something sacred. A car was coming up behind me, so I reluctantly moved around this little ceremony, sad to know that it was to be broken up soon by an unbroken string of cars, which were likely the reason for the funeral in the first place. Later that day I read up on this. It turns out that magpies and crows, along with elephants, dolphins and some primates all engage in some sort of a ceremony for their dead. It’s fascinating to watch live. I’m far from an animal activist. I still eat meat (although much less than I used to), my wife has a dog, but I probably wouldn’t have a pet otherwise. But all the time that I’ve spent in nature over my life has helped me to feel a sense of kinship with all living things that I encounter on my hikes. There is a reason that I feel refreshed after hiking in nature and it’s not just the exercise (probably why gym memberships have gone unused too many times in my past). It’s probably also why I stopped fishing for sport many years ago. That’s tough now with young grandkids because fishing with grandpa seems like an ancient rite of passage to me. I can’t really explain to a young kid how I feel about this, but I also don’t think it would be a stretch for a 5-year-old to wonder if a fish feels the pain of the sharp hook in its mouth. Robin Wall Kimmerer expressed her Native American view on this in “The Honorable Harvest” chapter of her great book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Basically, it involves an appreciation for the animal’s life you are taking in order to feed yourself. It’s about taking only enough for your needs and leaving the rest for others. Trophy fishing and hunting is a completely foreign concept for the Native American. It doesn’t respect the animal in any way. I often think of the Thoreau quote: “The squirrel you kill in jest, dies in earnest.”

My tiny vegetable garden this year has only tomatoes, cucumbers, and some marigolds. The tomatoes are still green but are growing nicely. And for the first time ever, I’ve been able to reap cucumbers from a garden! I tried in Phoenix but was never able to get them to grow. I’ve already eaten two delicious sandwiches with cucumbers from my garden! In other garden news I’ve been on a rampage trying to get rid of Japanese beetles that have invaded the rose garden. Invasion of British Beatles = good; invasion of Japanese beetles = bad. I’ve been trying to keep the spiders healthy while picking off the beetles one-by-one. For some reason I can’t bring myself to appreciate those beetles like other animals because of the destruction they wreak in the garden. It is amazing how fast they work; half of the leaves on some bushes are full of holes which impacts the plant’s ability to photosynthesize. As of press time I think I have them under control….

This month’s reading has taken me across the old Hippie Trail with Rick Steves, to a possible parallel universe, a look inside the shipment of Jewish children to the UK just before World War II, and into the lives of another fascinating family created by the great Zadie Smith. My rambling has taken me from the highest point in New Mexico, to a continuation of a hike from the previous month, into Rocky Mountain National Park for a couple of hikes, and a nice foothills walk near Boulder. Enjoy!

Things My Grandkids Say:

Here’s a recent conversation with my 5-year-old grandson after dinner:

“Grandpa, I’m so full!....can I have a popsicle?”

“I thought you were so full!”

“I am only full of healthy food. Can I have a popsicle?”

“Of course you can.”

Song(s) of the month: Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione

I’ve been thinking a bit about my musical journey lately. Although I still have a somewhat varied taste in music, I have settled mostly into my love of what used to be called “folk” music, but now has many names: Americana, roots revival, bluegrass, gospel, blues, Cajun, Austin folk, Nashville folk, country. If you were to peek into my “damn good folk music” playlist you would see music by Guy Clark, John Prine, Hank Williams, The Rolling Stones, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Sierra Ferrell, Hurray For the Riff Raff, Tom Waits, and on and on. There’s that old saying about obscenity not being able to be defined, but “I know it when I see it.” For me, I can’t really define folk, but I know it when I hear it.

When I was in high school, I was trying to figure out what music I liked. And it was really a strange mix back then. I listened to War (my first concert), Edwin Starr, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Monkees (my first album purchase), The Carpenters, Bad Company, Steve Miller Band, Jackson Browne, Fleetwood Mac, etc. All over the board. Two of the songs I remember from those days are these two crazily different ones I’m highlighting mainly because both artists passed away this month.

Paranoid by Black Sabbath – Ozzy Osbourne passed away this month, but not until he had helped organize the highest grossing charity concert ever. He died 17 days after his July 5th reunion concert with Black Sabbath. They raised $190M for Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Acorn Children’s Hospice and Cure Parkinson’s. That was more than Farm Aid, Live Aid, or any other benefit concert ever! What a way to go. I vividly remember hearing Paranoid for the first time in high school. I was immediately hooked by the starting guitar licks, the driving bass and drum beat like a locomotive, and of course Ozzy’s voice was maybe second only to Robert Plant’s for rock music. And then the words were sort of exactly what a teenager may be feeling: “All day long I think of things, but nothing seems to satisfy!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOTIIw76qiE&list=RDBOTIIw76qiE&start_radio=1

Feels So Good by Chuck Mangione – How is it possible I could like a flugelhorn instrumental as well as Ozzy Osbourne? I have no idea. This song actually came out after I graduated from high school, but I pretty much had my high school brain for the first three years of college anyway...and maybe the first three years after college too. I still like both of these songs now. Feels So Good is so breezy and, I don’t know, seems like it was written centuries ago. It was Grammy nominated for Record of the Year but lost out to Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” which is also a great song. I never watched the cartoon, King of the Hill, but evidently Chuck Mangione had a running gag role on the show where he would talk about things that "feel so good." Also, his composition, Give It All You Got was the theme song for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, NY!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOtxTyJmxVI&list=RDZOtxTyJmxVI&start_radio=1

Wheeler Peak near Taos, NM – The last time I hiked this highest peak in New Mexico was in October of 2021. From that blog post, “Wheeler Peak, at 13,167 feet, lies near Taos Ski Valley and is part of the Sangre de Christo Mountains which is the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains.” On that October day, it was extremely windy and freezing cold up on top. My face was frozen. On this July day it was still windy on top, but not nearly as cold. During July and August, you risk running into afternoon thunderstorms and I kept eyeing the storm that was covering the village of Taos as I climbed. But the wind was keeping the storm away from the peak the entire time, so I was confident I’d be OK. At 1.7 miles I reached the junction to Willams Lake and in another mile I was above the tree line at 11,700 feet. The views for the final 1.5 miles to the top are outstanding. The last mile to the top of the ridge is extremely steep (about 1,300 feet in under a mile), but I just slowed my pace a bit and did fine. On that October hike I had to use micro spikes to manage the ice, but there was no ice today. Up on top there was a family from New Hampshire, and I told them my son got married there (at Sunapee Ski Resort). We talked for a bit and then I headed back down, still eyeing the storm clouds. I was still keeping dry, but expected I’d get rained on before I reached my car. I didn’t see any interesting animals other than some cute little pikas scurrying around for food. There were maybe a total of 15 people climbing the mountain on this Monday after Independence Day weekend, and they were all pretty spread out, so it seemed like I had the place mostly to myself. I started hearing thunder about a mile from my car, but the rain gods held off until I reached the car. I drove back to town in the rain, with very sore legs and a big smile on my face.

Floral view of the ski valley below

Tree line visual

Ridges

A few folks hiking the ridge above

Beautiful

Really pretty up here

On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves – When I started travelling to Europe on a regular basis for my job back in the 1990s, I wanted to know more about this continent not only out of curiosity but also so that I could hold semi-intelligent discussions with my co-workers in France. At the time, they knew far more about my country than I did about theirs. I took a community college course on European History, which was great; and I discovered Rick Steves who wrote two books about Europe that I carried with me everywhere: Europe Through the Back Door, published in 1979, and Europe 101: History and Art for the Traveler, published in 1984. Steves was fairly well known at this time by people who wanted to visit Europe as a traveler rather than a tourist. He became even more well known in the 1990s when he started his TV shows about European travel. Those shows continued through 2023! He’s written several travel books and has mobile apps with self-guided tours throughout Europe. He also created the perfect bag to travel through Europe with; I know, because I bought one in 1994 and I still use it for almost all my travel.

But about this book. By the time he graduated from college, Steves had already been to Europe several times with his family (who had relatives in Norway) and had also backpacked through the continent after graduating from high school. As a college graduate, he wanted to expand outside of Europe, so he and his friend, Gene Openshaw, decided to travel what was then known as The Hippie Trail. From the mid-1950s through the late 1970s, members of the counter-culture would travel this route from eastern Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal (among others -see map below) in order to seek enlightenment and cheap drugs. This book was a collection of notes that Steves had written about this experience as a 23-year-old.

The Hippie Trail

Their trek took place in 1978, and coincidentally it was probably the last year of the Hippie Trail because in 1979 the Russians invaded Afghanistan and Iran had its Islamic revolution. Those two countries became too dangerous to travel through. It was interesting to see how Steves’ view of the world was starting to come of age at this time. Their travels were not easy. Hours long bus rides, customs problems, travelers’ diarrhea, aggressive beggars, no rooms at times, but like all travel there were gems that made the trip worthwhile: People inviting them into their homes, families that had never seen a westerner before, weddings, religious rituals in India and Nepal, and the beauty of the Taj Mahal, the Himalayas, mosques, and temples. His writing was already pretty good at 23. Here are some lines:

Before he left, he told me, “A third of the people on this planet eat with spoons and forks like you, a third of the people eat with chopsticks, and a third of the people eat with their fingers like me…and we’re all civilized just the same.”

what little we knew about them. Turkey—chaos. Iran—repression. Afghanistan—tribesmen with rifles. Pakistan—mosques. India—beggars and holy cows. And finally, Nepal—the backpacker’s dream of gentle people, high mountains, and high tourists.

Finally, after four long hours at the border, we rolled under the “Welcome to Iran” sign and passed from the omnipresent gaze of Turkey’s Atatürk to that of Iran’s divine Shah.

I had never cared about, or even noticed, what I was now realizing was a big ethical issue: the giant difference between rich people and poor people. Not between rich and poor countries…but the difference within countries.

We have passed a kind of boundary: the end of safe water. From now on it’s iodine or halazone tablets.

The wind and heat were fierce. The barren plain stretched out in every direction. I turned to Gene and said: “So this is Afghanistan.”

Mysterious tribesmen came in with American $100 bills—I’m afraid to imagine where they got them.

Each man who passed looked like something straight out of a hundred-year-old travel poster. Strong powerful eyes behind leathery weather-beaten faces. Poetic wind-blown beards long and scraggily and turbans like snakes wrapping protectively around their heads.

Though I don’t really understand the situation, the USSR seems hell-bent on getting messed up in Afghanistan and my hunch is that they’re underestimating the spine of this poverty-stricken nation.

Kashmir was dreamy. The landscape was mystically beautiful like the seductive landscape behind Mona Lisa that I’ve long wanted to explore.

This was Jaitpur. A village that has probably never seen a tourist. Jaitpur had not a hotel, not a restaurant, not a painted house, not a car, not a paved road, and not an English-speaking person anywhere. In other words, it was exactly what we were looking for.

This was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income of just over $100 a year. This is a country that India gives aid to. This is a place that makes India look advanced. But this is a proud, peaceful, and as far as I can tell, happy land. I’m so glad to be in Nepal.

Smoking hash is cheap and easy here and enjoying it seems almost like a tourist cliché, like drinking beer in Germany or tea and scones in England. We bought a pineapple, a melon, a lemon, and a couple grams of hash (all for around a dollar) and returned to our hotel.

The 30-minute warning whistle was the signal for the boy to clear the water buffalo off the pasture and get ready for an airplane.

I’m an evangelist for the notion that good travel is more than bucket lists and selfies. I believe that if more people could have such a transformative experience—especially in their youth— our world would be a more just and stable place.

Beaver Creek Trail from Beaver Reservoir – Last month I hiked the Beaver Creek trail from Brainard Lake. I didn’t get very far past the Mount Audubon junction then, due to heavy snow, mud, and water. Today I decided to hike the same trail, but from its other terminus at Beaver Reservoir. I was hoping to make it to the point where I had to turn around last month, which would mean a 12 plus mile hike. This was also sort of a scouting trip for a hike I want to do later this summer or early fall: Sawtooth Mountain. Sawtooth is a 14 plus mile hike with a very steep scramble at the end. On today’s hike I wanted to see if it was possible to either drive or bike part of the four-wheel drive road on which the hike begins. On both today’s hike and the Sawtooth hike, you have to walk 3.5 miles (so 7 miles total) along this 4WD road. If I could figure out a way to either drive or bike the road, then the Sawtooth hike wouldn’t be so daunting. No such luck. That road is meant for heavy duty all-terrain vehicles like Polaris RZRs, not Subarus. And biking it would be miserable; very rocky, big boulders, very slippery traction. So, I’ll just have to get in really good shape for Sawtooth (or rent an RZR?). Today’s hike was a good start.

Beaver Reservoir is a pretty lake north of the Brainard Lake Recreation Area. Much of the surrounding area is privately owned by the American Legion which reserves much of the land for combat veterans. I parked by the four-wheel-drive road entrance on the northwest corner of the lake. I imagine on weekends there are several ATVs up here, but I didn’t see any on this Tuesday. As a matter of fact I encountered only one other person on this 12 plus mile hike (he was a diehard hiker who was just completing a 30 mile loop that started at 3am – no thanks). The first 3.5 miles along the 4WD road was not that interesting, although I did come across lots of moose and bear poop. At the end of the road (actually I think the road continues on, but you’d have to cross pretty deep water to get to the other side this time of year) you are rewarded with a stunning view of Sawtooth Mountain and other peaks in the Indian Peaks Wilderness and Rocky Mountain National Park. This would be a great spot to just hang around and dip your toes into Coney Creek. But I wanted to try to get to the point where I had to turn around last month, so I took a sharp left turn onto the Beaver Creek Trail and headed up to the tree line. I finally reached the turnaround point which is in a spectacularly beautiful spot with great views just above the tree line. I turned around and headed back the 6 plus miles to the trailhead. Those last 3.5 miles of 4WD road weren’t fun, but I had a good feeling of accomplishment even though I didn’t hike 30 miles today. No big animal sightings today.

3.5 miles (each way) of walking on this 4WD road

Some pretty meadows on the way up

Fancy bridge crossing (are we back in New Mexico!?)

Nice view of Sawtooth

Horizontal view

Last month I started this trail from Brainard Lake

Views from up high. That big reservoir is where I started

Still a few snow crossings up here

Better light for this Sawtooth photo

Water crossing for the 4WD road

Beaver Reservoir

Same shot zoomed in

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier (translated by Adrianna Hunter) – From the New York Times book review: “A jet flies into a wild storm and emerges shrouded in mystery, forcing its passengers and the world at large to re-examine everything they believe about the meaning and purpose of existence. As you read “The Anomaly,” by the French author Hervé Le Tellier, you might find yourself wondering what sort of book it is, exactly. Is it science fiction dressed up as philosophy? Metaphysics disguised as high-concept thriller?”

The book was a best seller in France where it won the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious book award in that country. The storytelling is what keeps you reading and then the mystery isn’t unveiled until halfway through the novel. After the mystery is unveiled the storytelling gets even better. In the beginning, each chapter focusses on a specific character and the people in their lives. All are interesting, including an assassin, an author, an architect, a lawyer, some with families, some without. Eventually you come to realize that all of these characters happened to have been on an Air France flight from Paris to New York that was very bumpy, but managed to land OK. Then, once you’ve gotten to know all these characters, the author revisits them, but now they are all seeming to be rounded up by agents in all the various countries they live in (France, Nigeria, the US, the UK, etc.) Why are they being rounded up? Next, a new character is introduced, a statistician at a university. He receives a call saying that protocol 42 has been implemented and he is picked up in a government car and flown to a secret air force base. Then you’re in the pilot’s cabin on that fateful flight and the captain is trying to maneuver through this storm as he approaches JFK airport. His communications with the ground are a bit mysterious…they keep asking about his personal life. Why? He needs to safely land these passengers through this intense storm. Here, the novel is at its midpoint and things get crazy. Religious leaders, political leaders, philosophers, and intelligence agencies all converge onto a giant puzzle about the meaning of life. So good.

Here are some lines:

If you’re going to despair about life, the universe, and everything, you might as well do it on a Parisian café terrace.

All smooth flights are alike. Every turbulent flight is turbulent in its own way.

If you think you’re strong, come to Lagos, and then you’ll see.

She guesses that (the statistician) is brilliant. If he were bad at heart, he’d have headed off into finance long ago.

“I’m English, Adrian, I warn you, if you try to rape me, I’ll lie back and think of the queen.”

To understand why Adrian Miller must answer the bulletproof charcoal-gray smartphone on this June 24, 2021, we must rewind to September 10, 2001,

Jamy Pudlowski and her team are in the underground crisis room at the White House, where they have brought together a dozen male individuals all convinced that, thanks be to God, they were born into the right religion: two cardinals; two rabbis—one Orthodox, one Reform; an Eastern Orthodox priest; a Lutheran pastor; another Baptist; a Mormon leader; three learned Muslims, one each representing Sunnism, Salafism, and Shiism; a Vajrayana Buddhist monk, and a Mahayana one.

Are we living in a time that’s just an illusion, where every apparent century actually lasts only a fraction of a second in the processor of a gigantic computer? And what does that make death, other than a simple ‘end’ written on a line of code?

Joanna has always believed in the benefits of being out of doors, she’s never been in any doubt that the wind, sky, and clouds bring answers the way storks bring babies.

On Aby’s twelfth birthday his grandfather told him that, no, the tattoo wasn’t the word he thought he’d read backward, it wasn’t OASIS but 51540, his prisoner number at Auschwitz.

There’s a Jewish joke that says God often rereads the Torah to try to understand what’s going on in this world he created.

“No one takes their own life, didn’t they teach you that? There are just tortured souls who escape by killing their torturer.”

“Do you know why your ‘double’ committed suicide?” “He probably wanted to die. That’s the main reason for suicides.”

I think the United States of America is just a name now. There have always been two Americas, and now they don’t understand each other. Seeing as I tend to identify with one of them, I don’t understand the other one either.

Storm Pass Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park – This is another one of my attempts to connect previous hikes by walking on trails I hadn’t walked before. I snagged an early entry permit for Bear Lake Road between the hours of 5am and 7am and got to the trailhead at 6:30. There are only 4 parking spots at the Storm Pass trailhead, and they were already taken. I tried the nearby Bierstadt trailhead parking, but it’s still closed for construction. I was headed to Sprague Lake which would have added a mile to my walk but found a pullout not far from the trailhead. I pulled in there and walked 100 yards or so to the trailhead. The first junction I hit was for the Glacier Creek Trail which I hiked in May of 2021 through very deep snow. At 1.5 miles I reached the junction with the Wind River trail which I snowshoed in January of 2022. At 2.5 miles I reached an open area with fantastic views of Rocky Mountain National Park. This would be a good spot to turn around if you didn’t want a big hike. At 4.3 miles I reached a three-way junction where I stopped to eat brunch in the forest with no people to be found (nor animals for that matter other than squirrels). This was my ending point as I had been on all of these other trails before: I hiked to Estes Cone via Lilly Lake back in July of 2022 and from the Longs Peak ranger station in May of this year. So, it was about an 8.6-mile hike today with a fairly steady incline that seemed steeper than it turned out to be. I was pretty tired at the end of the day, but happy to have walked another new (to me) trail and to connect several other hikes that I had been on before.

Nice views near the trailhead

Views as you rise in elevation

Estes Cone from a different perspective

Long uphill climb through a pretty forest

Views from the trail

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald – This novel was winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, and in the top 10 best books of the 21st century according to both the New York Times and The Guardian. When I first started reading this quirky novel, I thought maybe it was written in the late 1800s or early 1900s. I was surprised to learn that it was published in 2001! The writing seemed so formal, as the narrator (presumably the author) described the story of Jacques Austerlitz through conversations he had with him over the years from the 1960s through the 1990s. There were black and white photographs throughout the book which gave the novel a feeling of being more a biography than a novel (I discovered later that the author just used a bunch of miscellaneous photos he had collected over the years). I would say that the first 100 or so pages didn’t capture my attention very well, as I was sort of put off by the eccentric Austerlitz. But once his past started being revealed, it became difficult to put the book down. I would say that memory is the key theme in this interesting book. Sebald did a masterful job of slowly unwinding Austerlitz’ fascinating past life. Raised in the Welsh countryside by a somewhat nefarious pastor and his wife, Austerlitz didn’t know his given name until he was in high school. It turns out that when he was only 4 years old, he was shipped off to England from Prague by his parents in 1939 just as the Nazis were taking over Europe and purging the Jews. There were many of these kindertransport shipments of Jewish children before the war as parents tried to do whatever they could to save them from the horror that was coming (England took in over 10,000 of these kid refugees).

The key part in the book was when Austerlitz (after much research) discovered in Prague the woman who had been his nanny for the 4 years of his young life before being shipped to the UK. She unlocked a lot of what had been closed to his memory all these years (including some words in Czech, and scenes from his train and boat ride in 1939). He discovered that his mother was shipped to the notorious Theresienstadt Ghetto in eastern Czechoslovakia where 60,000 Jews were crammed into a one-kilometer square area and where many of them either perished or were shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi controlled Poland. His father had escaped to Paris but he was never able to find out what happened to him (likely he met his fate in a Jewish concentration camp also as many Parisians turned in Jews to the Nazis).

Austerlitz’ personality is certainly explained by all this trauma, along with his two nervous breakdowns which are fascinatingly described. There are wonderful descriptions of Antwerp, London, Prague, and Paris as the two men walk and discuss all of these stories (along with the architectural history of those places). But I will mostly remember the harrowing descriptions of what the Jews had to deal with in all these European cities at this dark time in the world’s history. Here are some lines:

Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with preformed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

She was carrying a large bunch of rust-colored chrysanthemums in the crook of her right arm, and when we had walked side by side across the yard without a word and were standing in the doorway, she raised her free hand and put the hair back from my forehead, as if she knew, in this one gesture, that she had the gift of being remembered.

Great description of depression: And in this dreadful state of mind I sat for hours, for days on end with my face to the wall, tormenting myself and gradually discovering the horror of finding that even the smallest task or duty, for instance arranging assorted objects in a drawer, can be beyond one’s power. It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyze my entire system.

And so, said Austerlitz, no sooner had I arrived in Prague than I found myself back among the scenes of my early childhood, every trace of which had been expunged from my memory for as long as I could recollect.

your father, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, then in the utmost danger, did not leave until it was almost too late, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of March, by plane from Ruzyně to Paris. I still remember, said Vera, that when he said goodbye he was wearing a wonderful plum-colored double-breasted suit, and a black felt hat with a green band and a broad brim. Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere.

I had discovered the sources of my distress and, looking back over all the past years, could now see myself with the utmost clarity as that child suddenly cast out of his familiar surroundings: reason was powerless against the sense of rejection and annihilation which I had always suppressed, and which was now breaking through the walls of its confinement.

Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park – Although I’ve been to this pretty lake numerous times in all four seasons, this was the first time I have walked here with my wife! She is still working and tends to want her weekends to be filled with things she WANTS to do. But lately she’s been working herself back into shape and I told her that this hike was a good test; it’s fairly short (1.6 miles each way) and moderately steep (700 feet). It’s tough to get a Bear Lake permit on a summer weekend, so at 7:00pm the night before, I asked my son and daughter-in-law to try for a permit while I also tried. My daughter-in-law and I had no luck, but my son was able to get a 5am-7am entry permit. We left the house at 5:45am and got to the park at 6:40. The next decision was whether to try and find a parking spot at Bear Lake or take the shuttle. We decided to take a chance on finding a parking space, but the car in front of us got the last one! Shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee! They don’t allow you to wait for someone to leave so we headed back down the road to the park and ride and took the shuttle. This only cost us about 20 minutes.

The shuttle was packed, and the trailhead was teeming with people speaking all kinds of different languages. We headed up the wide path past Nymph Lake filled with its yellow water lilies, then past Dream Lake with its spectacular views of Hallet Peak. After Dream Lake the path gets steeper, but my wife did great, and we made it to the beautiful Emerald Lake in about an hour. I got some nice photos for proof of hike and then we headed back down to the trailhead, grabbed the shuttle, then drove back home, but not until we had picked up a cherry pie at The Colorado Cherry Company in Pinewood Springs. A nice morning…and now my wife had the whole rest of the day to do what she WANTED to do.

Hallett Peak from the lily filled Nymph Lake

Trail art

Sun dappled Dream Lake

Tyndall Creek

Proof of hike shot of my wife at Emerald Lake

Horizontally

The two of us with Longs Peak in the background

On Beauty by Zadie Smith – One of my favorite authors, I’ve now read five of Smith’s six novels. All of them great. All of them award winners. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was on the New York Times’ list of best 100 books of the 21st century. Although published in 2005, this novel would be incredibly timely in today’s environment. It’s set at a fictional university, very similar to Harvard, and tackles issues of liberal vs conservative ideals in a university setting. Like most of her novels the topics of race and class are explored in humorous and tragic ways. But I think that her main strength in this novel (and in all her writing) is her portrayal of family tension. The arguments between the married main characters are so realistic that I was getting uncomfortable reading them! Her dialogue writing is terrific and her novel was somehow able to capture the cadence of a 16-year-old wanna be rapper, academic professors, a right-wing black activist, a street poet, a Christian college student, and many more as if she were all of these things. The novel is supposedly loosely based on EM Forster’s Howard’s End which I will now have to read.

The story centers on Howard and Kiki. Howard is white, British, and a college art professor. Kiki, his wife, is black, American, and a former health care worker who stopped working to raise their three kids. Thirty years of marriage is at risk due to infidelity on Howard’s part. The kids range in age from 16 to 23 and their lives are expertly intertwined among the marital strife, academic pressures, and race and class tensions building on campus. It was over 400 pages but I wished it were longer. I looked forward to reading about the Belsey family drama every day. And the ending may be perfect. So good. Do yourself a favor and read Zadie Smith because she’s a jewel. Here are some lines:

Kiki stayed in her strange moment, nervous of what this black woman thought of another black woman paying her to clean.

This nodded at the recent trouble. It was an offer to kick open a door in the mansion of their marriage leading on to an antechamber of misery

When people get married, there is often a battle to see which family – the husband’s or the wife’s – will prevail. Howard has lost that battle, happily. The Belseys – petty, cheap and cruel – are not a family anyone would fight to retain.

his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears

Jerome said, ‘It’s like, a family doesn’t work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?’

His well-madeness as a human being made her feel her own bad design. She folded her arms across her chest and then refolded them the other way. Suddenly she couldn’t stand in a position that was even half normal.

Zora was extremely fond of scheduling meetings about her future with important people for whom her future was not really a top priority.

People said ‘She’s forgiven him’ about Kiki, and only now was Howard learning of the levels of purgatory forgiveness involves.

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn’t be able to protect them from self disgust.

In Claire’s presence, you were not faulty or badly designed, no, not at all. You were the fitting receptacle and instrument of your talents and beliefs and desires. This was why students at Wellington applied in their hundreds for her class.

He had not seen her since that afternoon. And with the miracle that is male compartmentalization he had barely thought of her either.

What a period this was to live through! His children were old enough to make him laugh. They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. They weren’t even the same colour as him. They were a kind of miracle.

Jerome’s right, this is not the way you go about solving social problems, this is not how you –’ ‘So how do you do it?’ demanded Levi. ‘By paying people four dollars an hour to clean? That’s how much you pay Monique, man! Four dollars! If she was American you wouldn’t be paying her no four dollars an hour. Would you? Would you?’

Hogback Ridge and North Sky trails near Boulder – I had hiked Hogback Ridge in the snow in January of 2023. On that day, after completing the 2.5-mile ridge loop, I headed south on the Foothills North Trail to the Four Mile Creek trailhead. Today, after completing the thigh-busting Hogback Ridge trail, I headed north on the brand-new North Sky trail. The trail was completed and opened in July of 2024 and connects the Foothills North trail to the Joder Ranch trail which then allows access to all the Left Hand Canyon biking paths. It’s a pretty trail, winding its way along the foothills, parallel to highway 36 between Boulder and Lyons. Yes, you hear the traffic, but wandering around these foothills makes up for that. There was a trail crew digging out some water diversion channels. They were all young kids in their teens or early twenties. I saw two of them guiding a tennis ball along the path with picks and shovels. I asked them if it was a new game they invented while they were bored. They looked at me like any young kid would look at a Baby Boomer and said, no, the ball was emulating the flow of water so they could know exactly where to dig the diversion channel. That’s pretty darn smart and I told them so.