Summer coming to an end

Animal Band Mural

What’s this ? The City of Glenwood Springs has, for the last year or so, embarked on a beautification program. Part of the project includes painting scenes on building walls and overpasses. This whimsical work or art is actually on a railroad support which is part of a span over the Roaring Fork River. Most of the panels are more true-to-life, depicting outdoor scenes, horses, and other western-themed icons. This particular panel can only be seen from the walking path along the river, a path I often take on lunch time walks. I like the walks and the mural.

It has been a busy summer, but the first freeze has come and gone and there is more snow on the mountain tops. Fall colors are at their peak. Summer has ended, fall is here, and winter will be here before we know it.

This is, in many ways, my favorite time of the year. The autumn-blue skies with the vivid aspen colors contrasting against deep-green pine backgrounds makes for great views. (The leaf-peepers are out in full force.)  The aspen on our lot are beginning to change colors but are not yet at their peak color; that will probably happen this week. A trip over is planned for this upcomming weekend.

I did make a solo trip to Sanderling over the weekend of September 28 – 29. Three more loads to the burn pit and another load of wood brought home, plus turned the furnace on in the trailer to keep it from freezing up at night. Weekly forcast shows a warming trend – cold came early this year – and we hope to have another month before we have to winterize the RV.  Winterizing will mean pulling the trailer over to the dump station, draining all the holding tanks including the fresh water supply, removing all the food and bathroom items that might freeze, and making sure all the water lines are blown dry. Process will take several hours.

In my previous post I had a video clip of the morning sunrise on a cloudy day. This time, for comparison, I took a clip of a sunrise on a clear day.

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Ebony’s kittens opened their eyes this past week. All black except for a few stray white hairs here and there, they will be harder to adopt – distinctive kittens go more quickly – so Pam has decided to give them extra socializing attention in hopes they will be so adorable their color won’t hold them back.

Speaking of kittens, in addition to Ebony’s four, Pam has two kittens from the shelter, both on meds, in our “cat” room. Another neighbor who fosters kitten had to be gone for the weekend so we had three of her kittens with us. Total of nine kittens in the house for the last few days. Good thing we had stocked up on cat liter. The five older kittens are all very social and like to be held and petted and are pretty attractive cats. Add to this total our seven and Ebony and we had seventeen cats in the house over the weekend. That’s a full house. Mix in the three dogs and you have a menagerie.

Our County animal control officer, Aimee, calls Pam “The Crazy Cat Lady.” This may be true, but Pam hopes, as most rescue and foster care people do, that some day this work won’t be needed. However, as long as people don’t spay/neuter their animals and then dump them when they become inconvenient there will be cats running loose. Four litters this year were from two domesticated cats who were dumped. Pam was able to rescue two of the four litters but just one of the non-rescued litters added four more cats to the outside population. (The mom cats Pam has rescued have been or will be spayed before being released to the outside world again.) Not ideal, but we do what we can to provide food and shelter and medical care to these outside cats.  Pam will try to trap the four kittens over the winter and have the vet spay/neuter them.

If there is an entrance exam to get into Heaven I suspect one question would be “How did you treat your pets?” I believe a number of people would flunk the quiz based on their answer.  At least from De Beque…

I’ll end this post with a few photos from my last ATV trip into the Colorado mountains.

Lake City side of Engineer Pass

Bull Moose along Cuba Gulch

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!

Pam’s Two Cents Worth:

Wanted to give a shout out to Tabitha’s mother who apparently  reads this blog regularly.  She no doubt wonders why two old folks would buy land at over 9,000 feet elevation.  Or why anyone would have seventeen cats in the house over the weekend.  Then again, being Tabitha’s mom, she might understand about the cats.

Happy trails.