Chautauqua Park and Flagstaff Mountain

On Tuesday, October 18th, we were up a little early and checked out of our hotel, the Quality Inn and Suites Boulder Creek, a little after 10:00. On the whole, we were pleased with our accommodations, in room number 214. This is an old motel that has been rehabbed, but the walls are still thin. There were only two occasions when that was problematic. Early on our first afternoon there, there were visitors in one of the neighboring rooms and you could hear practically everything that was said. However, after a short time everyone left, and we never had that problem again. One night, when we were in bed, we heard a rhythmic bouncing of springs from the next room, for quite a while. But we heard nothing more than that and it wasn’t an irritating noise. I had made sure to get us onto the top (second) floor. We had to wonder about what the people below were hearing, since our floor creaked. We didn’t end up using the pool or the exercise room. But we made good use of the Wi-Fi, had breakfast in the breakfast room every morning and printed off our boarding passes from the printer at their free guest computer.

Everybody had said that if we were into walking, we should go to Chautauqua Park, so we did. Starting in Chautauqua, New York, in the late nineteenth century there was a nationwide movement to have concerts and lectures in a setting that would also encourage outdoor activities. The Chautauqua at the southwest edge of Boulder is apparently still in operation, with rentable cabins and an auditorium, next to one of the city’s mountain parks. One of the standard scenic postcard views is up the grassy hillside toward Saddle Rock and the Flatiron Mountains. We walked up that hillside, on the Chautauqua Trail, from the parking lot off of Baseline Road. When we got into the woods, we changed over to the Bluebell-Baird Trail, ending at the Bluebell Picnic Shelter. From there we followed the Mesa Trail and the Enchanted Mesa Trail through a pine forest and back down to the Chautauqua Auditorium. A very nice walk of two or three miles, though one of the other trails that we had considered taking was closed, due to daily bear sightings. Signs at the beginning and along our whole route had warned us that bears had been sighted in the area and that we might want to consider possibly walking elsewhere. But there were a lot of people out on the trails on this beautiful (if a little cool) day, including a quartet of mothers with their two-year-olds in strollers. We asked a jogger about the danger and she said that you can usually smell bear if they are nearby—there’s a smell something like skunk. She said that if we came across a bear, instead of running off screaming, we should make a lot of noise and not move precipitously. However, she admitted that she herself, when she meets a bear, tends to forget all that and do the running off screaming, instead. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as far as excitement on this blog is concerned), we didn’t run into any bear.

Next, we drove up Flagstaff Road and Flagstaff Summit Road to the top of Flagstaff Mountain, from which, someone had told us, you can see Denver. We didn’t see Denver, but the view over Boulder is impressive, and from Artist Point you can see snow-covered peaks to the northwest.

We went back down to Pearl Street and had lunch at the bar at the Kitchen. Nearly a week later, I don’t remember what it was, but I remember that it was very good.

On our way out of town, we stopped off at the hotel to pick up the book I had been reading, one of Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti mysteries, which our friend Marika had given us when we visited her in Berlin. I hadn’t been able to find it that morning when I packed, but we called the hotel after lunch and it turned out that the cleaning staff had found it, which was good, because I liked the book, Drawing Conclusions. It is very well written, and at that point I had only gotten through seven chapters.

We drove back to the airport via the toll road, which took a lot less time than the route we had taken coming up. There are no toll booths. Instead, they take a picture of your license plate and bill the car’s owner. The guy at the Alamo desk had said that Alamo would simply add the toll to our bill, along with a two-dollar service charge.

We got to our gate in plenty of time, to discover that the plane hadn’t. We were supposed to leave at 6:02 p.m., but ended up leaving around 7:15. The young woman sitting next to me was on her first air trip, which apparently was not going to end well. Her flight to Mason City was to leave Minneapolis-St. Paul at 9:55. We arrived at 10:10. She asked me what would happen. I said that if the missed connection was the airline’s fault (as it apparently was—some electrical problem with the plane), they would presumably put her up overnight in the Twin Cities, give her a dinner voucher and get her on the first flight to Mason City the next day. I hope that the airlines still do that sort of thing and that it hasn’t gone out the window with free meals.

We caught the parking lot van immediately, picked up my car and went home.

Tea and More Tea

On Monday, October 17th, we slept very late, barely getting to breakfast before it ended at 10:00. The day was much cooler (high in the mid-50s) and overcast, with dark clouds threatening rain, which, however, never actually came. We went to the Celestial Seasonings plant, in an industrial park northwest of town, arriving at 11:00, and got ourselves put on the list for the noon tour, receiving our “tickets”: packets of peach herbal tea. We decided to spend the intervening hour visiting the nearby town of Niwot, which Fodor’s guidebook said was of interest.

Niwot, named after the Southern Arapaho Chief Niwot (killed by the Colorado militia at the Sand Creek massacre in 1864), was so small that at first we passed by the Old Town without seeing it. Eventually, we ended up visiting a small gallery whose owner, enthusiastic about her village, told us its history. It was an old railroad town, where farmers had dropped off sugar beets for shipment. Alfalfa had been stored in a building across the street, until it had burned down so many times due to sparks from the steam engines landing on dried alfalfa that they gave up and moved it somewhere else. But now Niwot was a cute bedroom community for Boulder, with some very nice and pricey housing.

We went back to Celestial Seasonings and took the tour, which began with a nine-minute film. The company was started in 1969 out of the homes of some locals who gathered herbs in the fields and mountains around Boulder, packaged them in hand-sewn bags and sold them as herbal teas. In a few years they were operating out of a barn, and eventually they were so successful that they built this highly-mechanized factory, that now, with only 100 line workers, could produce ten million teabags a day. We were given hairnets (and some of us beardnets!) and were shown various parts of the process. The highlight, however, was the Mint Room. Generally, Celestial Seasonings buys only whole ingredients and grinds them all in the factory. One exception is mint, which they buy from growers in Washington State and have ground there, so that it’s shipped to the factory ready to mix with the other ingredients. The problem with mint is that if it were ground in the factory, the menthol oils would escape and contaminate everything. When our guide opened the steel door to the room where they store bags of mint, we were hit by a wave of pure, evaporated menthol, which blew our sinuses clear. Going into the room and standing by the sacks was too much for some people, so they had to leave, eyes watering. Our guide said that the room, which was less than a third full, was usually much fuller, and the intensity of the menthol fumes much stronger. I liked it. All the sacks currently in the room were marked “Peppermint,” and that was the unmistakeable smell—not spearmint or catnip, which they also use.

The tour ended, of course, in the store, where we stocked up on boxes of various teas (not kombucha, though they had that).

Then we went downtown and had lunch at Med, a very nice Mediterranean restaurant. I forget what we had, but remember that it was very good.

We went back to our room and Mary Joy had a short nap, while I blogged. Then we went to the Dushanbe Teahouse for afternoon high tea. The teahouse was a 1987 present from Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, to its sister city, Boulder. The ceramic tile exterior and painted and carved plaster and wood interior were hand-crafted in Tajikistan, assembled there, then disassembled and shipped in pieces to Boulder, where it was reassembled in all its riotously colorful glory. And yet, as Mary Joy pointed out, the whole ensemble had a relaxing effect. In the middle of this lovely space, we had a typical English high tea, as invented (as a card explained) by a Duchess of Bedford, in order to keep up her energy between lunch and dinner. It’s a small world—we had only weeks before seen the statue of a Duke of Bedford in his real estate development—Bloomsbury, in London. We had the house green tea and an expanded Earl Grey (black tea with the usual bergamot, but also with other flowers) called Lady Grey’s Garden, which we liked very much (we ended up buying some to take home). To time the steeping of the tea we were given a tiny three-minute hourglass. The food came on a three-leveled tray: at the bottom were lemon scones, along with artichokes in pastry shells. The second level had tiny cut sandwiches: cucumber and butter on white bread, a southwestern spread on brown bread. At the top were yellow cake with white icing, chocolate cake with chocolate icing and chocolate balls lightly sprinkled with a red dust that gave a shock to the mouth—cayenne pepper! To put on the scones there were strawberry jam, lemon curd and Devonshire clotted cream.

We followed this with a short walk, to use up some of the calories, then back to our room for a short rest, then on to a movie at the big 29th Street mall. It took us a while to find our way to the theater. The movie was one that I had wanted to see, The Way, starring Martin Sheen and written and directed by his son, Emilio Estevez. It’s about a California ophthalmologist whose estranged son is accidentally killed in the French Pyrenees at the start of walking the 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago, the thousand-year-old pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Sheen’s character, Tom, goes to Europe to pick up the body and, impulsively, has it cremated and sets out to finish the pilgrimage for his son, leaving the ashes all along the route. Along the way he has various adventures, eventually sharing the walk with three odd ducks—a gregarious Dutchman who is doing it to lose weight, an angry Canadian woman who is doing it to quit smoking and an Irish travel writer who is doing the walk to try to cure his writer’s block. Mary Joy and I liked this film very much. We were in Santiago in 2005, but we didn’t walk to get there, except on the jetway to the plane.

We went back downtown to get something to eat. We couldn’t find the place we were looking for, so we got into Med again just before the kitchen closed at ten. We both had a very nice chicken Burgundy soup, and then went back to our room.

Rocky Mountain National Park

On Sunday, October 16th, we got up a little late and had breakfast (not bad, but nothing to write home about—so I won’t!). We went to a nearby supermarket called Alfalfa’s to pick up water, sandwiches and a scone. Alfalfa’s is a very Boulder sort of supermarket, sort of like Whole Foods, only more so, with a lot of natural, organic, vegan and raw food products. Mary Joy wanted something extra to drink, so she picked up a kombucha tea, with goji berry. Neither of us had ever heard of kombucha before, but it apparently came originally from the Himalayas and was supposed to give you a lot of energy. Intrigued, she picked it up. When she later tried it, she said it tasted like Rivella (the Swiss orange drink like Fanta), only worse. I like Rivella, but decided to pass on kombucha-goji tea.

Then we headed up U.S. 36 for Rocky Mountain National Park. It takes about an hour to get there from Boulder. We had been there in October 2005, and had crossed the park on the Trail Ridge Road, going back to Denver via Interstate 70. We weren’t sure that the Trail Ridge Road was currently open. Last week it shut down temporarily because of snow, and it was getting close to the time when snow would shut it down for the whole winter.

As we approached the national park from the town of Estes Park, we saw cars pulling off to the side of the road. Autumn is the season of the elk rut, when elk come down from the high country and the males fight to gather harems and mate. Now there was here a small herd of elk (about a dozen females, a couple of adolescent males off by themselves and one adult male with a large rack of antlers), peacefully grazing while people were frantically taking pictures from the road. As did I.

We stopped at the Beaver Meadows Visitor Center. There we saw a 23-minute film about the park, then consulted with a couple of rangers about our options. The Trail Ridge Road was open but icy in spots, and there was a high wind advisory. We asked about Bear Lake, where there was a hike that looked interesting, to Emerald Lake and back, but the ranger said that they had just gotten notice that the Bear Lake parking lot was full. Glacier Gorge? That lot had been full at 8:30 that morning. With weather this nice (around 70 degrees and sunny) on a weekend, even though this was the off season, people were evidently crowding into the park. Instead, he suggested the walk to Cub Lake and back (4.6 miles, three hours), or else onward to the Pool and back to the Cub Lake trailhead via the Fern Lake trailhead (6.1 miles, four hours.

We decided to go down Bear Lake Road, to see what conditions were when we got there. If we couldn’t get in there, we could come back most of the way, turn off at Moraine Park and go to the Cub Lake trailhead. And that’s how it turned out. The drive to Bear Lake was beautiful, with the snow-covered Logan’s Peak and its neighbors directly ahead, with autumn colors (mostly the bright yellow of the aspen trees) mixed in with the dark greens of the pines and junipers. As we came up the last hairpin turn to Bear Lake, we were stopped by a line of cars ahead of us. As we got ahead a little, we saw cars pulling out of the line, making a U-turn and heading back down. There was a line of about a dozen cars stretching out of the parking lot, waiting for someone to leave. We decided not to wait, and also turned back down. The Glacier Gorge parking lot was also full, so we drove back to Moraine Park.

A digression: the word “park” is Coloradoese for “mountain meadow”— e.g., the town of Estes Park and the TV cartoon show “South Park” (set in suburban Denver).

Moraine Park is, indeed, a large, flat meadow, around which people were stopped to watch elk. Since we had already seen an elk herd, we turned off on a side road and went directly to the Cub Lake trailhead. First small parking lot: full. Second lot: full. Third lot: one available space, so we grabbed it.

There were a couple of picnic tables there, so we had our sandwiches, then we walked over to the trailhead and headed up to Cub Lake. Plenty of people were doing the same: a number with small children, a number substantially older than we were. First we crossed a bridge over a gully, then a bridge over a small stream. We spent about a quarter hour following the western edge of Moraine Park, in and out of pines and up and down over rocks. Then we gradually started up a small valley. At that point, a trail came in from the other side of the valley and we met a group of four or five people, men and women, who asked us how long the walk to Cub Lake would be from there. They were from a nearby YMCA camp. They were shocked when I told them it would take around an hour and a quarter from there, and after going up the trail a little, they turned around and went back. There were some ominous dark clouds above the mountains, hiding the sun, so we wondered a little if maybe we should have turned back, too. We continued on gradually upward, then we saw the end of the valley ahead of us: a hillside with a yellow blaze of aspens at the top. Eventually, we found ourselves among those aspens, the yellow leaves littering the trail beneath our feet, and there the trail began to be substantially steeper. We came out above the aspens, into more pines, then the trail leveled out onto a sandy brushland, then into more pines, and we could see lily pads on the water ahead. Cub Lake, at last, after about 1 1/2 hours.

The sun came out, gloriously. We sat on rocks by the water, with the white-tipped peaks in the distance, eating a raspberry scone. We were joined by a couple of very odd-looking (to us) birds. One looked like a bluejay, but bigger, and with a more metallic blue, and a fanned crest. The other was a little larger, mostly black, but with a lot of white and a long tail with some blue in it. Later, I heard a very young girl call a similar bird a “magpie,” a name her father repeated. We were also joined by a chipmunk, obviously hoping for a handout, though signs repeatedly warned people not to feed the animals. We didn’t, but he might have picked up some of our crumbs.

Then it was time to leave. Going down was faster and easier. Going up had been more difficult than we expected, especially since Lonely Planet called this an “easy” trail, and there were so many children and old people on it. Clearly, we were not yet used to the altitude (over 8000 feet). On the way, we met a couple from south of Denver. They had come up the loop, from the Fern Lake trailhead, about a mile down the road from the Cub Lake trailhead, by way of the Pool. They insisted that we absolutely had to see Bear Lake, so once we were back again, we redrove the Bear Lake Road. By now, 4 p.m., the parking lot was no longer full. We were above 9200 feet, so the hike up to Emerald Lake, steeper and higher than the Cub Lake hike, might have been too strenuous to be any fun. Instead, we took the short, easy, wheelchair accessible walk around Bear Lake, which was indeed beautiful, the mountains hovering over it.

Then it was time to leave Rocky Mountain National Park, taking the longer Peak-to-Peak Scenic Byway route. Mary Joy was soon worrying that this route might not have been a good idea. By the time we got to the town of Nederland, at 6:30, the sun was setting, so we had to take the seventeen miles on highway 119 to Boulder in the dark. In these seventeen miles you drop nearly 3,000 feet, following Boulder Creek in its twists and turns down the deep, spectacular Boulder Canyon.

But we came out safely onto Canyon Boulevard in Boulder. Dinner was at Aji, an eclectic Latin American restaurant on Pearl Street, a block off the pedestrian area. Not horrible, but some odd combinations of odd ingredients—too many flavors at once. I had pork loin in a sort of chile sauce, on a bed of little potatoes smothered in a three-cheese sauce.

Then we went to the 9 p.m. candlelight mass at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center church, just off the University of Colorado campus. We arrived a little late, especially because we couldn’t figure out how to turn off the lights on our rental car. (A pet peeve: that rental cars do not generally come equipped with the owner’s manual.) The music was beautiful, a combination of Gregorian chant, polyphony and some similar-sounding new music. Parts of the mass were said or sung in Latin. The small church was crowded with students, in the dark, amid flickering candles. We both liked it better than the mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus the day before, but I really don’t know that re-latinizing the mass is a very good idea. If you don’t understand what is being said or sung, then it’s not worth much. And if you do understand it, then why go to the trouble of saying or singing it in a language other than English?

And so to bed, around midnight, after a very long, very eventful day.

Boulder

As usual, Mary Joy has one Sunday in October off, so we took advantage of that to get out of town. A price of $139 round-trip to Denver was too good to pass up, so we are taking a long weekend in Colorado. The flight to Denver is supposed to take about 2 hours, but we got in early, around 10:10 a.m. But, of course, it took us a while to get our car. We had a very good deal on an intermediate-level car (total: $78 for four days) from Alamo, through AARP and Expedia (being old is worth something sometimes!). The pleasant guy at the desk tried to talk us up to a larger, six-cylinder car, claiming that a four-cylinder would have problems with the lack of oxygen at these and higher altitudes. But we have taken a car over the Trail Ridge Road (highest elevation: over 12,000 feet) and we’re pretty sure it was a four-cylinder car and we had no trouble with it.

They didn’t have much of a selection for intermediate cars, so instead of the Corolla we were expecting (Mary Joy drives a 2009 Corolla), we ended up with a 2012 Ford Focus. We’ve rented Focuses before and liked them: they handle well.
The Alamo guy showed us the two possible routes to Boulder: the E-470 toll road and the slightly longer I-70 and I-270 route. We chose the latter, and got caught in construction on I-270, so it took us about an hour to get to Boulder. We went straight to the Boulder County Farmer’s Market, since it would close at 2 p.m. As it is, we had over an hour to wander around there. It is very different from the St. Paul Farmer’s Market. There is much more in the way of crafts and artisan food products, and almost all the produce is organic. There are also a number of food booths—we each had a Vietnamese noodle bowl for lunch (not bad), and Mary Joy had a ginger ice tea while I had a pomegranate ice tea. Mary Joy picked up some Christmas gifts at the craft booths, then we ate and went to our hotel.

Boulder is something like a cross between Ann Arbor, Michigan and Sedona, Arizona. It’s a college town (home of the University of Colorado), but definitely in the mountain West. It is prosperous and into healthy food and healthy outdoor activity—hiking, biking, climbing, etc. It is also into spiritual healthiness. Twice I saw someone doing Tai Chi in the parks. I also saw people who appeared to be meditating. There is another university in town, Naropa University, which may be the only university in the country founded by a Tibetan Buddhist monk. One of its schools is the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg.

We couldn’t get into our room immediately (it was about 2:45), so, instead, we walked for about an hour on the Boulder Creek Path, which is a nice and very heavily used (by pedestrians, bikes, skateboards and baby strollers) concrete trail along Boulder Creek, right through the heart of town. The weather was gorgeous, 80 degrees and sunny—very unusual for this time of year. Unfortunately, the rest of our stay looks to be more seasonal in its weather.

Then we went to the 5:00 mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, which looks like it was built in the ‘70s: semicircular, with abstract or stylized stained glass. It’s a few blocks north of the Pearl Street Mall. As we got into church, a couple of minutes late, the pastor was explaining some of the changes in the English-language version of the mass. These are going into effect on the first Sunday of Advent (the last Sunday of November), but the Denver archdiocese has apparently decided to get a jump on things by rolling some of it out now. There were laminated cards in the pews, setting out the changes in congregational responses. At the beginning of the mass, these were followed, but eventually the presider had the deacon tell the congregation that they were no longer using the new responses. The Gloria, Sanctus, etc. were from a new mass by Dan Schutte, with the new language. The musicians were good—a pianist, flutist and two singers.

We went down to Pearl Street for dinner. The restaurant Kitchen was highly recommended, but doesn’t take reservations, so we spent an hour wandering up and down Pearl Street, which has been pedestrianized and has a plethora of restaurants, bars, clothing shops, bookstores (one left-wing political, one new-age, one used, one proudly independent but apparently otherwise normal). There were some of the statue-mimes, as in Europe, street musicians (including a pianist!) and a story-teller-juggler-flame thrower (I think—we didn’t really stop to see what she was doing.

Dinner was very nice, generally from local ingredients. Mary Joy had steak frites (steak with French fries), while I had chicken with round cucumbers and heirloom tomatoes. Then we went back to our hotel and I wrote here while she continued reading Les Miserables (she’s getting near the end of the second of the three volumes).

Backyard Visitors

Autumn is here and soon we'll be off to Colorado. Besides the box elder bugs and Asiatic ladybugs, we also have somewhat larger visitors.