Catching up

Happy end of year, everyone, from somewhat snowy Denver.

It was a busy latter half of the year for me. I still have the same job and still live in Denver - or, at least, the greater Denver area - but otherwise lots has changed. I bought a house at the end of November, and have escaped the roasting oven of my downtown apartment. Moving with me to Wheat Ridge (northwest Denver) was the visitor of the previous entry, J., now no longer a visitor. Completing our little winter huddle is our cat Marley, whom we adopted about three weeks ago.

He was the unexpected cat - we saw him in our nearby branch of PetSmart, a big chain of pet supply stores which have adoption areas that can be used by local shelters, but he wasn't the cat that either of us had in mind. Still, we kept going back to see him while we tried in vain to adopt cats from other places. The strangest of these was Adams County Animal Control, where they told us they had some astounding number of cats - 380? - but where they seemed very confused about which cats were ready for adoption and which weren't (we were told that the one we'd gone to see, advertised for adoption online, was in the "storage area" and not available. "It has ringworm. You wouldn't want it."), and where finally they refused to let us adopt the pair of kittens we chose. One of the two was semi-feral and was going to need a lot of attention, but it was a lovely little playful and curious tabby and we decided to take it and its similar-sized and better socialized black playmate. Initially we were told we couldn't have either because they were on medication (this in spite of the large signs posted on their enclosure - "We are available for adoption!"), then told we could put a hold on the black one until it finished its treatment and fill out forms to apply for the semi-feral one. Three or four days later they phoned and told us we could have the black one but not the tabby, because the person in charge had doubts that I had enough experience to deal with it. I'm still astounded that she wouldn't bother to talk to us herself to find out if we knew what we would be getting into or to ask more about our circumstances - just got one of the receptionists to phone us and tell us we could come and pick up the black one and would we like perhaps to choose a different one to go with it? I withdrew my hold on the black one, and gave up on the place entirely. It was a big drab concrete facility in the middle of nowhere, with hundreds of cats in little rooms or individual cages, and they didn't pursue the chance to have us take two of them. A huge machine efficient at sucking in furry bodies, but with malfunctioning apparatus for spitting them out again. If you start imagining this multiplied across the country, all of those unwanted and abandoned cats...

Later that day we went to visit Marley again, arrived conveniently at the time when a representative from the shelter was there to unlock the cage and let us meet him properly, f illed out the papers, and took him home. I'd worried when we'd seen him in his cage in PetSmart that he was somewhat unresponsive and perhaps wouldn't engage much with us - he was described on his paperwork as "shy and retiring" - but once he was home and had managed to get over his fright and come out of his carrier, he turned out to be extremely sociable and playful. He's a delight to have around. We've been cat-sitting too for the past couple of weeks, so it's been quite lively here.

Below is a picture taken of the inside my house, toward the dining-room area. In the winter, at least, we have beautiful warm light coming through that window in the morning and in the afternoon. In fact, it was what swayed me to buy the house (which, like Marley, I had to see on several occasion before I finally made the decision to take it - mostly because I wanted a much bigger kitchen, but these seem hard to come by here, at least in my price range).


The time before moving was hectic with trying to finish up the quarter and close on the house; and the time since has consisted largely of trips to large hangar-like stores on soulless highways to get a never-ending list of necessities; but I managed one more 14er hike in the autumn up Pike's Peak. Nice hike at the beginning, from Crags Campground; miserable slog up the peak itself, to find a big flat concreted summit with visitor centre. A road and a cog-railway go up there. It might have a nice view, but we were too tired and cold to care much by the time we got to the top, and too concerned to find a ride down the first part so that we'd be out before nightfall. Now it's ski season, not hiking season.

Christmas in our house was nice - we had Christmas stockings, a new puppet friend from my brother's family, and a wonderful parcel of goodies to open from my parents. I made pizza, and we drank White Russians. On Boxing Day (not that there is such a thing here) we went to the cinema to see The Day the Earth Stood Still - the recent remake, not the 1950s original. Not my choice, obviously, but I watched the trailer and thought it looked bearable (and it looked so much more attractive after I'd seen the trailer for Valkyrie). It had pretty terrible reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but to my own surprise I thought it was quite good, though marred by a very clumsy end - the premise in this version is that aliens are going to intervene on earth because we're destroying the environment and are apparently incapable of changing; we're saved when the representative alien sees our "other side" - but the scenes in which he's made to change his mind are horribly clunky and unconvincing, and the acting seems to go downhill as if they all know this.

Time passes

If I don't write something tonight there will be no entries for September at all...

For the last three and a half weeks there has been little but work. But I fitted some good things into the end of summer before we started up again.

I added three more 14ers, two of them on August 19th. I climbed Grays and Torreys with my colleague (or rather, climbed Grays with my colleague, and then rushed up the neighbouring Torreys by myself). It had snowed two days before, and was still covered in the upper parts.

Here are the two from the bottom - Grays on the left, Torreys on the right.


We climbed Grays first - here is a picture of it I took later from Torreys:


My colleague was somewhere on her way down that zig-zag path at the time.

Below is Torreys, taken when we were still on the way up Grays. It's not a long trip across the saddle and up the final ascent, once you've made it to the top of the first peak.

Then a friend arrived for a long visit, just in time for the Democratic Convention. On the day we went out to see my favourite little corners of downtown we also got to see Denver looking as it might after an alien invasion. As well as the hordes of obviously non-Denverite Democrats and a notable increase in unwashed anarchists here for the accompanying protests, there were police in black riot gear everywhere, often clustered on the outside of vehicles like weevils or like blood-sucking ticks weighing down a mammal host. Below are some of my photos from that day that are specific to the Convention stuff - not all great photos, but as a record they will have to do. Photos of my favourite corners will come soon.

First, convention crowds and a demonstration crossing 16th:


Police in town:


Obama images were everywhere:


And the one photo I liked - boy and dog:


A day or two later we went down to Cherry Creek State Park in the south of Denver, and saw these pelicans:

On the 4th of September, just before our term began, I went with another friend to climb Quandary Peak. The most difficult one I've done yet - lots of scrambling as you go around or over rock towers at the top of this ridge:

And lastly...

Kasper (I think his name is) on the peak. I didn't know he was with us until we got to the top.

A welcome change, part II

24 days. The weather forecast was wrong, and it was still over 90 yesterday. But not today, and now we're in the middle of a big hail storm. Funny place.

A welcome change

I have just woken up to find it cool and a little cloudy. In Scotland that would be just any summer morning (actually, it would be a particularly fine summer morning), but here it's newsworthy. Today is supposed to break our run of 23 days with temperatures hitting 90˚F or above - that's five days longer than the 1874/1901 record, according to the Rocky Mountain News. Not only that, but in measures closer to my own brain and heart, today is predicted to be under 30˚C. Hurray!

Street names

I made a startling discovery a couple of days ago. I'm house-sitting out in the west of Denver, and as I cycled back here from my office I was thinking about the names of the streets I passed. Everyone knows from films and TV about the American convention of specifying places by the intersecting streets: "14th and Broadway," for instance, often with one of the streets going by a number, as here. I thought it very strange when I was younger, especially having numbers for streets - though it seemed less strange after I'd been to Japan, where streets don't usually get either a name or number (in Japanese cities everything is divided into "towns," and then you get numbers to specify which district, which block, and then the house or building number. To make this as confusing as possible, the numbers of blocks in particular often come in no logical order. It's good to have a detailed map). In any case, it all made much more sense once I came to this country and discovered that pretty much every town and city is built on a grid pattern, so that Colfax (Colfax Avenue, but no-one ever uses the latter parts of street names much), for instance, runs right through Denver from east to west, and a street like Washington, running north to south, might get broken lots of times along the way, but can always be picked up again. Naming by numbers turns out to be pretty useful, too. If you're told that something is on 115th and Sheridan, for instance, you know just how far away that's going to be, and in what direction.

In Denver, Colfax is equivalent to 15th - the streets parallel to it are numbered, down to 1st (obviously), and up to... looks like 168th, perhaps, somewhere way north of the city limits. But my startling discovery is nothing to do with numbers - it's to do with the other names. If you're travelling around the city, you'll pick up quickly on the way that a series of parallel streets will often be named by some kind of theme (and this is true in other cities too, from what I've seen). Some are immediately obvious. Names of states: Mississippi, Arizona, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida. Names of famous colleges and universities: Vassar, Yale, Amherst, Bates, Cornell. Some are less obvious. Names of presidents (I think): Lincoln, Sherman, Grant (no - I'm wrong. I finally looked it up. Sherman and Grant were Generals for Lincoln. Shows what I know of Civil War history). Because of this I often keep myself amused by trying to think of possible links as I pass streets. In this case, I passed Quitman - no idea who that is. Then I had Raleigh and Stuart. I could link them - British history: Sir Walter Raleigh, and the Stuart dynasty (well, Raleigh served under the last Tudor, but not everything has to be perfect in this game). Then Tennyson - OK, British poet. Then... Utica, American place-name, spoiling it all. And either there, or on Vrain, I suddenly had it.

Are you sitting there feeling smug that you could see something here that it took me a year to notice? I'd like you to bear in mind that I've just written all of these down for you side by side, whereas I'm usually driving past them - since though I now find it is a general rule over most of the city, the central area in which I live and walk around seems to be an exception.

Now I have to go and look at maps of other American cities, and see if this is something peculiar to Denver.

Uncompahgre, Ridgway, Sneffels

Last Saturday I went out and bought a replacement sleeping bag, and then took off from Denver again. I went to the southwest of the state, spent two nights near Lake City, and then three nights at Ridgway State Park, and I climbed my second and third 14ers. I chose Uncompahgre Peak from Denver, mostly because it had such a good name. Then once I reached Ridgway I looked at what was close by, and decided to go and climb Mount Sneffels as well, in spite of it having a name like a fluffy full-body-outfit creature in a children's TV program. (I've never seen the attraction of those people dressed up in costumes, I'd like to mention, though I love puppets. In Rainbow, I loved Zippy and George, but Bungle made me uncomfortable. I like the Sesame Street characters, but Big Bird is a clumsy person in tights and stupid shoes. The puppets always have an elegance and individuality to them, they have their own souls even if you know there is someone hidden below and controlling them; the costume creatures are somehow always awkward and embarrassing, too obviously people in suits. People take their children to Disneyland to see people dressed up as Mickey Mouse and the rest. What kind of children can persuade themselves that those big fiberglass and fur heads with their immobile grinning faces are the same creatures as those that run around in the cartoons?)

I didn't leave Denver on Saturday until after 3 p.m. - I'd actually planned to leave the following day, but then realised I couldn't bear to sit around in the downtown heat any longer. I decided to drive as far towards Lake City as I could manage, sleep in my car if necessary, and then finish off the journey the following morning still hopefully in good time to make it to climb Uncompahgre. It's desirable here to start and finish hikes early, since apart from the heat and the strength of the sun, we often have thunderstorms in the early afternoon. In the end I made it to within 25 miles or so of Lake City, when I saw a sign for a camp ground off to the right on CO 149 (Blue Mesa Cutaway - something like that? I can't find it on any map), decided I'd pushed it enough for the day, and turned off. It was a little site by the river, which left it up to visitors to fill in the paperwork and put their five dollar payment in the box, and which I suspect was filled with people like me who had had enough of driving for the day. I ended up there the next night too, when I found I didn't have enough energy to drive to Ridgway as I'd planned.

It's a miracle I made it out of Denver at all that afternoon. The lessons I learned were: never leave the middle of town with an almost empty fuel tank, assuming that you will find multiple gas stations as you head towards the edge of the city; and, don't rely on Google Maps to direct you out of town. Their route directions are very helpful later on, but really it can't be necessary to drive on three major highways or interstates just to leave Denver. They sent me along I-25, US-6, and I-70 all in quick succession, theoretically saving me about twenty minutes (I see from checking now), but in fact costing me much more than that in stress as I looked hopelessly around for a gas station and watched the fuel gauge, wondering whether I was going to have to call the AAA to come and save me before even leaving the environs of Denver, and then costing me time too as I turned round and headed back to an exit for Golden and, thankfully, found a gas station and could turn round again and leave properly. Some of the most terrible driving of my two year career in those few anxious and distracted minutes, so the pot-holed cliff-edge trail roads I came to later in the trip seemed much safer by comparison.

My journey out involved taking US-285, then US-50 through Gunnison, and finally turning across the Blue Mesa Reservoir and following CO-149. I record these details not because I think they'll mean much to anyone else, but rather because I want to remember myself. Each of the roads has a particular flavor, and since I haven't done much driving outside Boulder/Denver yet, it's still quite exciting, especially since I'm never sure my car is going to manage the unreasonable things I'm asking of it. Of this route, I think the most impressive bit was around Monarch Pass, on the Continental Divide - if it's the bit I remember, it was about 7 p.m. and there was hardly anyone else around on a long road winding steeply down under red cliffs.

Uncompahgre Peak

Marmot guarding the path...

On Sunday morning I got up, so I thought, as the dawn light was beginning to shine through my tent. Once I got outside the tent I discovered that it was bright moonlight, not dawn at all - but it was 4:45, just 15 minutes before I'd set my alarm, so I packed up my tent and by the time I was ready to leave it really was beginning to get light. By the time I'd driven to Lake City, on up the long dirt road to the Matterhorn Creek Trailhead, and got myself ready for the long hike ahead, it was already 7:45. A few minutes later I set off again, having got just a little way and remembered I'd left my woolly gloves and warm hat behind (late July - but you never know). The hike is 14 miles roundtrip, and described in the book that everyone uses for these things (Gerry Roach, Colorado's Fourteeners, 2nd Edition) as an easy route. I know his classifications refer to mountaineering difficulty (this is marked as Class 2. Class 3 involves something more in the way of climbing or scrambling, and not something I'd be likely to launch myself into on my own just yet. At least, not deliberately), and so the description is accurate - but it felt far from easy that day. There are days when you have great reserves of energy, and days when you don't. In this case it's a long and largely quite level walk, and then suddenly all the steepness gets packed in at the end. On the way back there was a point on a gently upward sloping pass where I sat down and wondered if I could possibly go on. I didn't drink enough water early enough in the day, I think, and so was fighting to rehydrate through faint nausea and a throbbing head. Got there eventually, though... and worked out that it's a good idea to drink a good amount of water before even leaving the car.


On the way I didn't see anyone until I joined the shorter and more popular East Slopes trail (shorter only if you have a 4-wheel drive to get you to the trailhead, which is why I chose the less popular route) except for one man who was on his way to climb Wetterhorn Peak, and who had lost his dog the day before after getting back from climbing Uncompahgre. I hope it had run downwards towards the town, because if not there's a good chance of it having ended up as mountain lion food, as he said. Lots of people in that last zig-zag uphill stretch, though, and on the summit too. The mountain is sixth in the list of 14ers by height, 14,309 ft, and the highest in the San Juan Range. It's not a pointy mountain, though - looks more like a rocky wedding cake, and the summit is large and flat. The nicest thing about it is the view of the scenery around, though - expanses of mountains in browns and shades of green, and retaining patches of snow, so that the whole thing looked like the bark on certain Eucalyptus trees where it peels off to leave patches of different colours.

En route:


And from the summit:


I made it to the summit around midday, and got back to my car in the middle of the afternoon. I drove back down the dirt road - a road into which water has eaten some large ditches, so that in spite of my best efforts I scraped the front and back of my car excruciatingly at several points, and I had to keep getting out and checking I hadn't knocked anything vital off - and then knew I couldn't deal with the drive to Ridgway, 90 miles away around the other side of the mountains. I decided it would be good to stop in Lake City for the night, maybe have a shower if I could find a camp site with good facilities, and go out and get a good meal instead of my packaged camping food. I was sure there must be a good campsite in town (a small and scenic place), or at least on the edges of it, so I went to ask at the visitor centre. The man behind the counter, though, was somehow gnome-like - not in stature or looks, necessarily, but in the way he seemed to be living in some slightly different reality, and he had some difficulties understanding what I was looking for. At some point he remarked that he didn't know much about it because he wasn't a camper - a strange comment, I thought, from someone working in a visitor center. He gave me some information on campsites out of town, a short drive south - but I knew I had to drive north in the morning and didn't really want to go in the wrong direction, and I also didn't want to have to drive back into town to eat. I wanted to get out of my car and leave it. I've noticed that this isn't a concept most of America understands very well. I soon discovered when I was first looking for somewhere to rent in Denver that if an advert says, for instance, "ten minutes from downtown," they mean ten minutes drive. In any case, this effort at communication at the end of a long day proved too much for me, and before I got out of the visitor center I knew that I was going to get in my car and drive back north to the place I'd camped the night before, if there was a space, and was going to cook packaged rice and beans on my little stove, stay smelly and unshowered, and not have to try and talk to anyone else. It was much the best thing to do.

Montrose, Ridgway State Park

Cactus and yucca in Ridgway.

On Monday morning I got up and drove to Montrose, where I had a disappointing breakfast in a bakery on Main Street. I had a student from Montrose a couple of years ago, and whenever she mentioned it I would think of Montrose, Scotland. For the past few days I've been thinking, if it's named after that Montrose, it's certainly outgrown it - but then I'd think of York / New York, on another scale entirely. I've just worked out today, though, that for all this time I've been mistaking Moffat (Dumfries and Galloway) for Montrose (Angus). I see we have a tiny Moffat, CO down near there too, though, as well as a Moffat County in the northwest. It's funny driving through these landscapes - on the one hand so big and so sparsely populated that it couldn't be more different from driving through the parts of the UK I'm familiar with; and on the other hand dotted with evocative names like this. On the way home on Thursday I chose a road that would take me through a town called Somerset - the name of the county I was born and spent the first three years of my life in. I finally visited that Somerset four years ago now, on a tour of the south of England, and was disappointed by Taunton (where I was born) and the grimy hotel I stayed in, and by the ugliness of Bridgwater (the market town nearest us), with its brown mud-banked river and closed-down looking town centre. Weston Zoyland, on the other hand - the village I spent those first three years in - turned out to be lovely. Somerset, Colorado, was like a mixture of these - a little coal mining town dominated by its industrial machinery, but on the banks of a pleasant river, and with some nice little houses.

To return to Moffat, I've been in Colorado for three years now, but I've never been sure of whether there is much in the way of real places beyond Denver. When you fly into Denver and look out of the window of the plane, it always looks as if a few glass and concrete shards have been dropped accidentally from the pocket of a giant taking his first step into the mountains, and have stuck there in the ground in the middle of nowhere, with nothing else around as far as the eye can see. I know there is Fort Collins to the north, and Colorado Springs to the south, but never having visited either of them I have little idea of just how big they are, so I tend to assume that they're something like Boulder. On my trip a couple of weeks ago I only skirted the side of Fort Collins, and apart from that all of the towns I passed seemed insubstantial little places catering mostly to people passing through, or to small farming communities, perhaps. It doesn't help that these little Western towns tend to be gatherings of more or less ramshackle wooden buildings in a dusty landscape, places that look as if one tornado would sweep them off entirely. On this trip, though, Gunnison and Montrose both managed to look like real and substantial places, places where people would live and work in a variety of jobs, places you wouldn't have to drive away from every time you wanted something like a new jacket or a pair of shoes. It may be the result of growing up in a small town and then leaving for the city, but no matter how much I enjoy driving through little towns, I always get caught up in wondering nervously why anyone would choose to stay there. I know that lots of people from my own small town either never left, or left and then went back - but I can't begin to understand why.


I got to Ridgway State Park at around 10:3o in the morning. I went straight to the visitor center to get a camp site, wanting one of the walk-in tent sites on the edge of their Elk Ridge campground ("walk-in" here meaning that you leave your car just beside this section, close enough to keep all of your stuff in it and walk back and forth to, but far enough away to make it feel a little less like the rest of the campground with its camper vans and RVs). It was a Monday morning, but to my surprise it seemed at first as if there wouldn't be a walk-in site available. They radioed back and forth, and while I was there it was discovered that someone had left early, so I got a place after all, for the three nights I wanted. It's a good place - the park is centered around a reservoir, very pretty amidst the hills, and with the San Juans visible in the background. The reservoir can be used for boating and fishing, and also has a small swimming section which I used on the first afternoon, but unfortunately not on the second and third because of thunderstorms. There are also restrooms all over the campgrounds, and central facilities blocks in each one, with a laundry and pay showers. The showers were very welcome - much easier to last five nights in a tent if you get to wash somewhere along the way. Contact lenses are a bit of a challenge, too, if you don't have a good sink and mirror. Easy to fill your eyes with grime.

Mule deer at Ridgway.

Apart from swimming on that day, I took some easy walks around the side of the reservoir, and went around the little self-guided nature trail they have. The latter isn't terribly exciting, but it did at least give me the names of a couple of the trees and plants I'm looking at all the time. The forests are a lot greener at that end of the state than in the ski areas near here or up north. That is, the lodgepole pine forests in these areas are being fairly effectively devastated by bark beetles, so that everywhere you go you see large numbers of dead or dying brown trees, but there wasn't any evidence of this near Ridgway. The trees down there are mostly Juniper and piñon pine. I'm not clear on whether the beetles don't attack the piñon, or whether they just haven't got there yet.

Mount Sneffels


On Tuesday I set off early in the morning to go to climb Sneffels. You can see it from the park - a mountain shaped like a jagged lower canine sticking out above the rest of its range (14,150 ft, highest in Ouray County but only 28 on the list of 55). The road to the Yankee Boy Basin trailhead was pretty scary - a narrow road with a sheer drop at the side for quite a bit of the way, and then at one point with a huge rock shelf hanging over it too. I got my car to the bottom of the 4-wheel drive road again, but it was an effort. As I tried to start my car to leave later the engine died three times, and I thought I was going to have to hitch down and call the AAA after all. Brave little car got me out of there eventually, though. On the way down I gave a lift to a couple who had given up and left their own car just below the rock shelf, probably more sensibly.

The climb went a bit beyond the sensible too, that day. It's only a seven mile trip there and back (the South Slopes II route in the book, with its supposedly safer variation 30.1V), but a lot more challenging than the Uncompahgre route. Roach classes it as 2+, but I think I accidentally upgraded myself to Class 3 at a couple of points along the way. After hiking up the 4-wheel drive road, you cross a fairly level scree path and then go straight up a very steep and slippy talus and scree slope. Once up that, you have a short distance left up a couloir, then a short scramble to the top. Only, as Roach points out, the couloir may still be filled with snow until early summer (or midsummer, in this case), so if you don't have an ice pick and crampons you might want to take the exit crack further down the couloir, clear of snow much earlier... or not. Half way up the talus slope, in fact, I'd met a man coming down who told me he hadn't made it to the top because of the snow. He said he'd tried climbing out to the side, but got himself into some bits that made him wonder if he'd be able to get down again, and had given up. Hearing that I thought I wouldn't make it either, but I went on anyway to take a look. Indeed, the exit crack too was still filled with snow. There were other people around who were better equipped, and who headed up the main couloir. I tried digging my boots into the snow in the exit crack, but it soon became almost vertical, and one experience of slipping backwards towards the loose rock below was offputting enough for me. So, I climbed up the rock to the side, wondering all the time if I wasn't doing something very stupid (it wouldn't have been a long fall down to the snow at all, but then I'd have slipped even faster towards the loose rock. I probably wouldn't have hurt myself too much, but it didn't seem like it would be much fun, and I was alarmed at the thought of perhaps knocking rock onto people below). Actually, once I was over that edge it was easy. I got to the top and found none of the people from the couloir there yet. A small pointy summit in this case, all my own for the next fifteen minutes or so. The views were astonishing, as was the fact that I'd got there at all.

Top of the scree slope looking down.

And looking up at the couloir.

The view from the summit.

Getting down is often harder than getting up, though. I thought that all I had to do to get down would be to find my way back to the same exit crack and then try and lower myself into it a little further down, so that I wouldn't slide down the snow. In the event, I somehow ended up one crag further over, climbing down a rock face that didn't look too terrible from above. Half way down it, I looked down and decided that I couldn't possibly get to the bottom safely. There didn't seem to be enough good hand and footholds for me, since I'm not a climber. It's not that it was such a big drop, but it looked big enough to perhaps break an ankle or two if I landed awkwardly, and there wasn't enough room to jump clear. Then I looked up, and realised that I didn't want to go back up either, since all I'd be doing is increasing the distance I could fall. So, down it was. I was fine, but once I got to the bottom of it and looked back, I couldn't believe it had ever seemed like a good idea. Dead easy if you know what you're doing, I'm sure... Sneffels was the most exhilarating climb I've done yet, though. Nothing like a bit of fear to add to the feeling of achievement.

Hindsight.

My knees complained their way back down the scree slope, at the bottom of which I saw and heard pika popping up and down between the rocks. I got back to my car, finally got it back down the road, and then stopped in Ouray for lunch. Another old Western town, very pretty and with an impressive backdrop, but now definitely geared towards the tourist trade. I had a just passable sandwich and cup of coffee there, walked up and down for a bit, and then went back to the Park.

Ridgway


On Wednesday I walked from the Park to the town of Ridgway, about two hours along a trail first along the side of the reservoir, then beside the road and river. I didn't expect much of the town, but it was wonderful. I stopped for coffee in a little café with a courtyard to sit in, Kate's Place on Clinton (there only are about four streets in the town, so it wouldn't be hard to find again). Once I was sitting down I decided I might as well eat too. A good decision - it was a one of the best breakfasts I've had. I took the "Sneffels skillet" - named to sell it effectively to people like me, presumably - which was herb-crusted potatoes, spinach, tomatoes, garlic, with scrambled eggs and toast on top. It was huge, of course, and after I'd eaten the whole of it I had to walk the two hours back with a heavy and swollen stomach. I also went to a small shop that sold tea and herbs. The woman had bought the place fairly recently, and perhaps didn't yet know much about tea - but she was very nice, and there was some good stuff in there.

Kate's Place

It was quite an effort to get back to the Park, especially under the beating sun, but I made it just in time for a huge thunderstorm to roll in. It went on for a good part of the afternoon, and the rain went on until after nine o'clock at night. My tent didn't get washed away, but water began to get in through the floor. I spent the early part of the afternoon sheltering under the eaves of the restroom block and in the facilities block, then once the lightning had passed I spent the late afternoon and early evening sitting in my car, reading, snacking, and sipping illicit wine (you're not allowed to drink anything stronger than 3.2% alcohol in the state parks). It's lucky I'd had such an enormous brunch, because it was too wet and miserable to contemplate unpacking my stove and standing outside long enough to heat anything. Later in the evening as I lay snuggled up in my sleeping bag and trying not to fall off the side of my air mattress and into the puddles on the floor, I thought: this is what it must be like camping in Britain all the time. How awful.

Ridgway to Denver

On Thursday morning I got up at 5:30, stuffed my still dripping tent into my car, and set off back to Denver. It was just under 300 miles, and I got back around 3 p.m. with just a couple of stops along the way. I took US-55o back through Montrose, where I stopped for coffee and a bagel, and on to Delta by US-50. From Delta I headed across the mountains to join I-70 at Glenwood Springs (CO-92, 133, 82). CO-92 and the beginning of 133 were pretty horrible - narrow roads with a lot of traffic coming in the other direction, including a lot of big trucks. There seems to be a lot of industrial stuff, mining or otherwise, around that area. The later part of CO-133 was great, though - hardly any other traffic, and a very scenic route by lakes and up and down mountains. I swore to my car that if she could just get me over the McClure Pass, I wouldn't ask anything else unreasonable of her for a while. Of course, I'd forgotten we still had to get over the Vail Pass on I-70, but she managed to struggle through both tasks in the end.

Somewhere along CO-133 I saw a man sitting on a quad bike at the side of the road waving his cap up and down. I kept looking at him and wondering why he was waving, until I eventually turned my attention back to the road and had to brake quickly for sheep. I stopped and waited, and eventually pulled off the road and got out of my car for a bit - needed a rest, anyway. I saw other people drive through slowly, and at first I thought that they were overly impatient and a bit foolish. But they evidently knew more than me. This isn't Scotland, and the sheep kept coming until it seemed more like an exodus than a flock. At the end of the exodus came a man with a couple of horses and a bunch of dogs - two focused border collie types, and then a number of less focused young dogs, perhaps a cross between Great Pyrenees and something shorter haired. One of them got interested in me instead of the sheep, and came round and started jumping up on me with very long and sharp claws, then the rest started to come to have a look as well and I had to take shelter into my car to avoid being overwhelmed by their friendly attentions.

State Forest State Park 2

On my first evening at my campsite, I was surprised by how many mosquitos there were, and by the enormous size of them. I battled through them to heat up and eat my dinner, and then fled into my tent. You can cover yourself in mosquito repellant and for the most part stop them biting you, but it doesn't stop them trying: you still have them buzzing constantly around your face and in your ears. I also discovered that these ones are big enough to be pretty good at getting at you through a layer of clothing. I was as well covered as I could be in the mornings and evenings - I didn't have long trousers with me, unfortunately, but I had socks pulled up to meet the cropped ones I'd put in as an afterthought (and in which I ended up spending three days and nights in my attempt to stay both unbitten and warm enough at night - they looked pretty nasty by the time I came home), and I had a long-sleeved t-shirt, but I still ended up with a good crop of itchy bites, mostly where they'd got at my ankles through my socks. We have West Nile virus here, so you're supposed to try to avoid this happening. I don't seem to be going down with anything yet, though.

I foolishly thought that everything would be better in the morning, but when I got up and tried to make my morning coffee there seemed to be just as many active mosquitos, and also large numbers of enormous stripy-eyed flies buzzing around. I stood there swatting things away from my face and thought - this is supposed to be fun. People do this for pleasure. I thought - if the whole of Colorado is like this in summer, then my camping career is going to be very short-lived. I've been assured since that it's not, though. I'm glad to hear it, because I've lived in some pretty mosquito-infested places in my life and I've never seen anything like this. The rangers at the visitor center, which I went back to that morning, told me that they were having a particularly bad year for them because it had been unusually wet (and it seems quite a wet place, by Colorado standards - a lot of lakes, rivers and streams, a lot of moist willowy places at the bottom of the park which are presumably what makes it so good as a moose habitat - see photo below) . In the whole time I was there, in fact, the only times I was free of the mosquitos were when I was on high open hillside at the top of one of my hikes, and when I got up at 5:30 on the third morning.

The mosquitos, and the cold at night in my new 30˚F sleeping bag (it didn't get anywhere near so cold, but I woke up freezing every night), were the downsides of the trip. There was much good stuff to make up for it, though. At dusk on my first night, as I sat sheltering in my tent, I heard the strange trilling-trumpeting sounds of elk moving through the woods. Then, I heard the howling of a coyote in the distance. In the whole time I was there the moose eluded me as usual, but I saw lots of deer, a marmot or two, multiple chipmunks. On my second morning, I heard a snorting sound in my clearing and unzipped my tent to see what might have been an elk (or might also have been another deer) bounding off into the trees.

The morning and early afternoon of the second day were taken up with driving down to the visitor center, sorting out payment for the next nights, and with generally organizing myself for camping at my site - in my desperation to get out of Denver the previous day, I'd finally shoved anything I could think of fairly randomly into bags, and shoved those bags into my car any way they would fit. In the late afternoon, though, I hiked to Ruby Jewel Lake. It's a fairly short hike - three miles from the trail head, though I added a bit by hiking from my camp site. I did it fast, to make sure I was back well before dark. This is the lake:

And the kind of scenery you're climbing through to get to it:

The next day I went on a more adventurous hike, to Kelly Lake. At the visitor center they'd told me that there was still a lot of snow covering the route, but the ranger I ran into on the road as I started walking that morning (I was intending heading somewhere else entirely) told me that the Hidden Valley path that you follow to Kelly Lake from that side was one of his favorites, and that I probably wouldn't encounter much snow.

It was a lovely hike, in fact. You follow the Ruby Jewel trail again, and then break off near the top and go over into Hidden Valley, first on a path down through woodland to a small river, which you follow for some time upstream before coming out onto open hillside. Very alpine looking throughout, with lots of wildflowers. Finally, you pass over the saddle and find Kelly Lake spread out below you. Very beautiful, and a nice sensation of crossing into a new world.

The whole hike - I followed the trail down to the other end of the lake before I headed back - took me about eight hours. The only large stretch of snow was on this saddle. I was hiking this day in my Keene's sandals with thick socks, having given my ill-fitting hiking boots their very last chance the day before. It might have been less stable than I'd like, but at least it didn't hurt at every step, and though my feet got very wet in the snow and in some of the more marshy patches, they also dried out again in a way they never did in those boots.

This is the view from the other end of the lake, back to the snowy saddle:

There were some people camping at the far end of the lake, who must have hiked up to get there. The lake was very clear, with lots of large fish (rainbow trout?) suspended lazily in the shallows.

Most of the trail for this hike is well defined, though in places it peters out and you have to rely on cairns to find your way. You move to the next cairn, look around for another one, move off again... there were a couple of places along the way, though, where I just couldn't find the next one (some are large piles of stone; some are two or three flat stones piled on top of a rock; some just don't seem to be there at all), and had to guess. I'd stumble back onto the path eventually each time. Once you're in the more rocky places it's especially interesting. You sweep your eyes round and just see rock, more rock, all the same grey-brown rock. And then on one sweep, suddenly something catches your eye and a little part of that grey rock suddenly transforms itself into a signal. It's like looking at a cluster of fat mushrooms and suddenly, as if a veil has been swept away from your eyes, seeing that after all it is a huddle of dwarves. They're very friendly things, cairns.

On my last morning I got up early to try to see a moose before I left. I drove along the road by the river, supposed to be a good place for seeing them, but only saw deer. I thought that if I went and sat around somewhere patiently for a while, I might see one - but it was cold that morning, and I was a little impatient to get started on my return journey too. There was a moose viewing platform at one point, and I stopped there and talked to a man who said he'd been sitting there for thirty or forty minutes. He hadn't seen any either, so I felt better, as if it was me who'd sat there for that time and could now leave with a clear conscience of having made the effort.

I didn't go home by the roads I'd come by - instead, I continued along CO 14 to Walden, then down through Granby, over the Berthoud Pass by Winter Park, and home along I-70 (a much more scenic interstate than I-25, at least around here). In Granby I stopped for a very bad breakfast. My "plain" breakfast burrito arrived covered in green chile with huge chunks of pork in it - and then when I scraped this off and cut into the burrito, it turned out to be full of meat too, so that I had to send it back and get them to do it again. Second time round, eggs and potatoes wrapped in a somewhat stale tortilla, with packeted grated cheese on top, and no salsa or anything to replace the chile... all this along with weak, weak coffee. When I remarked sometime here that breakfast is the one food thing that non-coastal America does really well, I should have said that it isn't infallible in this respect.

There was something a bit cursed about that morning, perhaps. When I'd just left Walden, I found myself on a long and quiet country road between fields or scrub. As I began driving it, I noticed that there seemed to be an unusual amount of roadkill. A few minutes later (this was before coffee), it sank in that this meant I was probably going to have to be very careful if I wasn't to add to it myself. And indeed, just a few minutes later I saw my first ground squirrel at the side of the road, then all the way along unbelievable numbers of them running their mad dashes across the road in front of my car. At some points the road was dotted with them basking in the morning sun, too. Because there were few other cars on the road at that time, I could drive somewhat under the speed limit, brake for the more slow-witted and indecisive of them, and swerve a bit for those in their mad dashes. But then, when I was a little behind another car that had just passed me, one chased another out onto the road just in front of me, curving round into my path... two ground squirrels to avoid at once! I tried to go between them, but failed. I heard and felt the one in front being completely flattened by my wheel. A nasty experience - I've never killed anything bigger than a cockroach - but at the same time a relief that it was so definite, that there was certainly no possibility of having left it twitching in a drawn-out death. I suppose I fairly decisively settled whatever dispute they were having, too.

I fear one of the later ones may have been less fortunate. It ran out in front of me, and I thought I'd managed to miss it - but when I looked in my mirror I could see it jumping strangely around in the road. I drove on a bit, and then felt too bad about the thought of it dying slowly, and turned round and started driving back - all the way asking myself: just what is it you think you're going to do if you find it? Get out and try and decide whether it's necessary to run it over again? What if it just looks like it has a broken leg or damaged tail - are you going to take it home? Luckily, I didn't come across it so I didn't have to make these decisions, and can hope that it limped home and recovered. Or that I didn't hit it at all.

Among the things I managed not to kill that morning (and I should perhaps be reassuring myself with thoughts of the numbers of ground squirrels that I avoided) was a large jackrabbit, which hopped across the road in front of me, sat at the side for a bit to let me admire it, and then hopped off again into the scrub. Beautiful ears.

State Forest State Park

This week I went on my first real camping trip. That is, I remember taking a Christmas trip with some friends to Kending, in the south of Taiwan, when I was 18, and staying in a tent - but I don't remember much about it, other than that no stoves or sleeping bags or such equipment were involved. I remember taking a blanket, I remember swimming in the sea on Christmas Day, climbing a rocky hill, and walking nervously through a large field of cows, and the delight of chewing sugar cane for the first time, but I can't remember anything about the camping itself. I suppose we ate in nearby restaurants. Other than that, I can remember only two occasions I've slept in a tent: when I went with friends to the Traquair Fair in the Borders, and when I went with another friend by motorbike to the campsite his parents were taking care of on the northeast coast of England (Spittal, Berwick-upon-Tweed?). Both of these must be about fifteen years ago. It's taken me a little while to get back to it, evidently.

On Wednesday afternoon I drove up to State Forest State Park, which is in the north part of Colorado, about 70 miles west of Fort Collins on CO-14, a very winding road through the mountains (and it is a great relief to get to the mountains, after ugly Interstate 25 from Denver). I stayed there for three nights, in the end. I might have stayed away for a little longer, and gone a bit further afield, but it became clear that my kit needs a little bit of rethinking so that I don't freeze, break an ankle, or get sucked dry by mosquitos. And, though I was more comfortable than I expected with being unwashed and covered in dirt and various sticky layers of sunscreen and mosquito repellant, I wasn't unhappy to get back and get into the shower yesterday afternoon either.

It took me much longer than I expected to get along CO-14, and I managed to arrive at the State Park eight minutes after they closed the visitor center on the main road. It meant that I couldn't get advice on campsites, and had to work it out on my own from the signs at the entrance to the park (when I eventually found the entrance, which was cleverly disguised by a KOA campsite). In this park they have both multiple-site campgrounds with some facilities, and "dispersed sites" around the park which are first-come-first-served, usually without anything there except a fire pit. They charge $14 per night for the campgrounds, $8 for the dispersed sites (also $6 per day for the basic daily park pass, but I have an annual pass). If you arrive outside booth hours at the entrance to the park, you fill in your information on a little envelope, put your money into it, post it in their little box, and take with you the detachable permit to put in the site marker for the site you end up at. Of course, if you arrive with no idea of how popular such places are or what sites are available, no firm idea of how many nights you're going to stay, and only enough small bills in your wallet to pay for one night anyway, you can end up doing some more trips than you would like up and down those long dirt roads.

Before I set out from Denver, I thought I was going to find myself a place in one of the campgrounds so that I'd be around people, since I'm inexperienced in camping, and also imagined being a bit frightened in the middle of nowhere on my own in the middle of the night. Somewhere on that long, winding road, though, it became clear to me that being around other people was actually the last thing I wanted, and that I was quite happy at the thought of being off on my own. This was confirmed when I got to the first campground in the park, at the North Michigan Reservoir. The reservoir shore was densely populated with people who seemed to have brought their houses with them. Somehow motor-homes, enormous canopies, and fully equipped outdoor kitchens don't fit with my idea of what camping should be. (As an aside, though, I'd note that the motor-homes here really were fairly modest, the kind familiar in Britain, and not the RVs that are so common in this country: monstrous bus-like things the size of small Scottish towns. I passed one parked at the side of a road yesterday that seemed to have a sun porch attached to the side).

I drove on, without much idea of where I was going, followed a sign up a horrendous rocky and pot-holey road (and I'm so impressed at my little car for getting me through this whole trip without trouble) to one of the dispersed sites that just didn't look very nice, turned back, went up the next road (Francisco Road) passing a site with a motor-home in it at the bottom, then much much further at the top of the road, found the site that became my own. I forgot to ever take a picture of it, but you can see it on the Park's camping page if you scroll down to the dispersed sites and click on no. 440. On my last night there I heard people arrive at a site around the corner, but otherwise there was no-one there but for the odd car passing in the evening.

(I'm going to have to do this in installments, evidently - ran out of time today.)

Kyoto

I came back from Kyoto the day before yesterday. Yesterday I was amazed to make it to evening without sleeping, and went to bed at a good and reasonable time congratulating myself on somehow having escaped jet-lag, or perhaps just never having adapted properly in the short time I was away. But no, I was glad too soon. Here I am at two in the morning, having for the moment given up on the night. I have my alarm set for 5:30 in the morning, to go for a hike - but I don't think that's going to happen after all.

Kyoto: I only had five full days there. The conference started with registration and a welcome party on the afternoon and evening of the second day, then papers for the next two and a half days, and a group outing and sayonara party on the afternoon of the third day. I left again at lunchtime on the day following that.

The picture above was taken during the outing, in a brief ten minute bid for freedom. That is, after spending nine hours a day for two days sitting in a large and hot conference room battling my sleepiness and understanding scarcely anything, I was happy on the outing just to find a brief space when no-one would notice if I walked off on my own. We were at Arashiyama, with a few minutes free before dinner. As everyone stood on the bridge, I walked under the trees down the side of the river, and just at the point that the path ran out, I found this night heron. They're not an uncommon bird in Japan - there are so many water courses even in the middle of the city that you can see lots of herons, night herons, and egrets. The night before, in fact, I'd taken a short walk down by the river in the centre of town between Shijo and Sanjo. It's a stretch with lots of little restaurants overlooking it, romantic, lantern-lit, and popular with couples (and schoolgroups too, at this time of year). Between two sets of couples sitting on the bank, I saw a tall heron standing with a large fish dangling from its mouth. It's not usual to see them quite so close to people - evidently the herons of Kyoto are more sociable than most. It's the night herons like the one in the picture that I love, though. Such a nice shape.

The conference was interesting, in that I met for the first time a large group of people who share an interest in the author I've worked on. However, I was the only one of twenty-two or so presenters (and yes, we almost all sat through every paper - this wasn't the standard pick-and-choose kind of conference where you can slip out for a few hours and do something more fun) who elected to do it in English. I'd sat down to try and work on it in Japanese, but translating from the English of my thesis is a task well beyond my capabilities, and writing it all over again from scratch was more than I could face in the time I had available. Anyway, once there I was also reminded forcibly that my listening skills are also not up to scratch. I can concentrate on spoken Japanese for about half an hour a day, it turns out, before I have to spend the rest of the day just sitting gazing blankly at the speakers and schooling myself in patience. To be honest, I'm pretty terrible at concentrating on these things in English, too, but at least with English I can drift in and out now and then and pick up the main points.

It wasn't all bad, though. There was a handful of us who had come in from other countries, all staying in the Kyoto Royal Hotel. I didn't spend as much time with them as I would have liked - in the evenings they went out, but I was felled early each night by the jet-lag. I was with them enough, though, to be able to say that they were the nicest group of people I've ever met at a conference.

The outing and sayonara parties were also good in many ways, even if I was feeling so worn out that I didn't appreciate them as much as I could have done. I was just getting back into speaking in Japanese by that time, though, and so breaking through the feelings of hopeless inadequacy that I'd been beset by in the conference room, into the more optimistic frame of mind that sees a point in keeping working at this. My language skills do get rusty very quickly, even if I think I'm maintaining them through teaching and reading for classes. I actually need to sit down and learn and relearn vocabulary, and to make a habit of watching some Japanese TV programs or news streaming.

We went to a temple in the Western hills, Yoshimine-dera, that I'd never heard of. It's a very large complex on the side of a hill, with a path to climb up past all the main sites and then back down again.


It was all densely green, of course, something quite remarkable after Colorado. It's quite different to Scottish greenery too, which is much more about grassy hills. Japanese greenery is luxuriant in a way that is almost threatening - turn your back for a moment, and it'll take over entirely. The mountains are covered in impenetrable woods, all types of trees vying together.

Yoshimine-dera also had a display of ajisai - hydrangeas - on a little hillside of their own that you could climb up and down. They were quite gaudy and unreal looking, but what could be better in a Buddhist temple than something that looks like a representation of the illusion of life?

It had the obligatory fish-pond with ugly koi, too.

Afterwards we went to a quiet little temple, Jizō-in, where we sat for a while and looked over the shady garden and fed some mosquitoes. Then to the sayonara dinner. This was in traditional Japanese style - a large tatami room with two rows of little tables on the floor, distantly facing each other, so that I felt as if I was in the funeral scene of the film Ikiru, and also as if I was viewing a representation of the Last Supper on the other side of the room. Women in light green kimonos came in and out, kneeling in front of us to give us a series of small dishes, and to keep the beer flowing. I gave up on vegetarianism for the few days I was there and ate fish, for the sake of ease - and lucky I did, because it was of course central to this meal. Good, too. Whenever I do eat fish, I wish it wasn't so good.

One thing I'd like to have had more time to do is to take photos of signs - street signs, shop signs, those little instructions on trains to tell you not to stick your fingers in the electric doors, those kinds of things. When I'm teaching, I often want to show students how you encounter words in Japan - what makes Japan Japan, for me, in fact, is always this visual aspect, all the words around me, along with the particular ways of expressing things (like the men who stand in the street at roadworks and wave flags all day to warn and direct the traffic - now they actually have electronic screens with representations of men standing and waving flags, and bowing their apologies). I took a few such pictures while we were on the outing, but I need to go back soon and make a project of it.

City of No Sidewalks

Or Place of No Pavements, if you're British.

I arrived in Kyoto yesterday evening. Fell into bed around 6 p.m. and was awake and ready for coffee and a new day at 1:30 a.m. Right now I'm trying to stave off a second such night. If I can just stay awake for another hour or so, maybe...

I spent much of the day struggling with my conference paper, as usual (no - even more than usual) until this evening I reached the point of despair and cut and pasted a large section of my Ph.D. thesis, changing it absolutely minimally. Why didn't I do that days ago? Then I went out for a walk in the direction of Higashiyama, and I was reminded of the problems of having a city of streets so narrow that only one car can pass along them, and no sidewalks. It's a much more risky business walking around if you are unsteady with jet-lag.

Becoming Coloradan

A month has gone by, half of it in the final uphill struggle to the end of the academic year, the final exams, and the grading. I've been free for the last couple of weeks. Or semi-free - I have a paper to write by this time next week, when I'm leaving for a brief trip to Japan. It's hard to care right now.

Recently I've begun to hike, sometimes on my own - fear of mountain lions made me reluctant before, but it seems on reflection that in this country one has a much higher chance of being killed in a traffic accident or being gunned down in some random shooting incident than of being one of the handful of people mauled by predators each year. If I do get eaten, well, so be it. Better than sitting at home and bemoaning the downtown heat.


This Friday I hiked by myself up Bear Peak - one of those overlooking Boulder - by way of Shadow Canyon. Unusually green at the moment, and as with this whole stretch of the Front Range filled with interesting rock formations, as seen in the photo above. This is where the mountains begin, just west of Denver and Boulder. If you turn the other way, it's all flat.

Then on Saturday, I did my first 14er, like the budding Coloradan I am. These are our 14,000+ ft mountains, of which we apparently have 54 or so. People like to work their way through them. I should point out that we're a mile high in Denver before you even start driving into the mountains, so this isn't as impossible as it sounds. The hike I did this weekend was from Guenella Pass (11669 ft, as far as I can see) to the top of Mount Evans (14,264 ft). This time I went with a friend, which is lucky because it turned into a ten and a half hour hike all told, including a climb to the top of the neighboring Spalding in each direction, and I think I might have given up in despair in the willows that awaited us at the end if I'd been on my own.

I'd glanced at the book my friend has before we went, and seen mention of these willows as something that caused people to give up at the beginning of the hike. I didn't see why at the time, since to me willows meant beautiful supple trees that would be a pleasure to walk through. Giving up in a fresh green wood? Surely not. Here, however, it turns out to mean waist or head-high scrub-like stuff that is hellish to get through - thin and springy willow branches without the trunks, so that it is like navigating through a spiteful whippy maze. We did OK on the way up, but on the way down we were already exhausted, and the ground was running with water that had been solid mud or snow earlier in the day, and we couldn't find the main trail anywhere. Well, we got out in the end, obviously.

The hike up was a lot of fun - after the willows, bare mountain side, then snowy areas on top of Spalding, then a rocky ascent at the end. You come out to find everyone else already there - Mount Evans has a parking lot at the top. Here is the view from the top of Spalding, as we're about to sweep round towards Evans.


And here is the view one way from the top:


And the other way...


But the highlight of the day was my first mountain goat sighting. I've been scanning any mountain I've been to in the last four years hoping to see one of these, and so of course the first one I see turns out to be wandering by the roadside just beneath the summit of Evans.


Actually, we did see some looking more scenic on the crest of a rocky outcrop later, but this one was the First Goat and has a special place in my heart.

Iritis

I had a day off work sick today - I think the first I've taken in four years, and very welcome, especially by two in the afternoon when I should have been starting my upper-level class but was instead free to doze off. I was feeling much better by then, or I wouldn't have appreciated it so much.

I remember a little discomfort when I put my contact lenses in yesterday, but by the time I took them out in the evening my right eye had become quite red. It proceeded to get more red and sore through the night, and this morning I found that looking at my computer screen, glancing towards my still-curtained windows, looking at the screen of my cellphone, and anything else involving light caused me pain. I rang my medical provider. It's a very irritating system: you phone their central line, they ask you what is wrong and who you want to see, and then they take your number and tell you that the clinic will phone you. Last year I had a friend who had more than one serious medical emergency, and I experienced the frightening inefficiency of this system. This morning I sat around for an hour waiting for the clinic of my "family doctor" to phone me back, and then I gave up and phoned ophthalmology direct. They saw me half an hour later, so not everything is broken. They were also friendly and efficient. It's just that first bit of the process that frustrates me every time. I hope I don't have to deal with such a system at the end of my life. In the past couple of days I've been watching a Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in which the aging and lonely Lazarescu is taken from hospital to hospital through a long night, slipping towards death as he goes because no-one except the ambulance woman will take responsibility for him. It's not like that here once you get into the system (at least if you have insurance), but actually getting into it sometimes seems quite difficult.

In any case, I learned that I was suffering from iritis, one of those things you never hear of until you have it. It seems to me it should be called irisitis, since iritis sounds like a kind of chronic uncontrollable anger. It really means, of course, that my iris is inflamed. Coming home on my bike in the bright Colorado sunshine was quite unpleasant - it developed into the head/brow-ache they'd told me people usually complained of. But, here is the wonder of modern medecine: three doses of the hourly eye-drops later and everything felt much better - redness fading, sensitivity decreasing. I was a little worried that I was going to go back to work tomorrow looking so entirely well that no-one would believe there had been anything wrong. However, I also have eye-drops to use twice a day to dilate the pupil in that eye, so actually I'm going to be looking a bit strange for the next few days.

The weather in Colorado.

Having been up to my knees in fresh powder on Friday, Monday turned out to be very warm and sunny. Our building got somewhat overheated, so that even my deathly cold office was suddenly uncomfortably warm instead. Then yesterday, Tuesday, it reached 27°C. I had to drive around a lot in the afternoon, and sweltered unpleasantly in my un-air-conditioned little car up and down the Interstate. This morning I looked out at the bright sunshine and realised that though I had been rather slow and reluctant to accept it, it was time to switch to summer clothing. I went to work in a light shirt - no sweater or jacket - and so naturally it was snowing by evening.