Music and minerals

Cold today. We all slept late, then enjoyed a delicious hot breakfast, thanks to Chris! The morning’s highlight was a jam session in the living room, listening to a recording of “How the Elephant Got Its Trunk” by Jack Nicholson and Bobbie McFerrin. Cailan was playing along with the songs by using his mallets on the ground, I was playing the wood block, and Chris was playing belly drums and mouth clicks in true McFerrin style. For some reason, Cailan didn’t want to listen to track 6 of this CD and almost cried because of it, but Chris assured him we could skip that song.


After lunch, we took a hike on the Mica Mine trail, which is west of town and south of the Colorado Monument. To get there, we drove on Little Park Road, where Chris had taken a long and tiring road bike ride a few days previously. The hike was fairly short, following a dry creek bed up a small canyon. I’m looking forward to doing some of these hikes in the spring when there is actually water in the creeks – I think Utah will prefer that as well. I wore a jacket, jeans, and gloves and still felt chilly for most of the hike, in complete contrast to our hot hike at Flume Canyon just a few weeks ago. As usual, we saw interesting rock formations which Cailan helped us name: Mushroom Rock, Engine Rock, Caboose Rock, and Doghead Rock.


We hiked up to the Mica Mine, where we saw big quartz rock faces with these spiraling patterns of exposed mica. We showed Cailan how the mica flaked off in thin transparent sheets; he also liked the the sparkly white and pink quartz. There were sections of the trail that were so covered with small cubes of white quartz that it was like walking through a field of salt, or of snow.


In the evening, we went to a dinner party, hosted by one of the pianists who accompanies Chris’s students at their lessons. Despite a slight mixup about the starting time that had us arriving an hour later than the other guests, we had a lovely time. It was mostly an older crowd, so we got to hear some stories about the college “way back when,” when there was only one building on campus, when the controversial faculty debate was over whether or not to allow female students to wear slacks. Cailan ate his specially-prepared mac’n’cheese very tidily, devoured all his asparagus, was overjoyed about apple pie and ice cream, and then very politely asked if he could play the piano, which he was allowed to do. Later, he played with a fire truck while Chris and another voice teacher sang for their supper.