Lunch loop

Ever since we moved to GJ, Chris has been biking at Lunch Loops, a small network of technical trails less than 3 miles from our house. He goes about twice a week, a short but intense ride sandwiched between dropping off Cailan at daycare and teaching voice lessons.

Today we decided to try an actual 'lunch loop' during my lunch break. Chris loaded our single bikes and our dog into the truck, then picked me up at my office. It didn't take long to get there and the parking lot was nearly empty. We started out on the trail, Utah running ahead as usual at his fast but seemingly effortless, ear-flapping lope. It was a hard trail for me. There are rocks scattered around everywhere, like the Legos in Cailan's room after a busy afternoon of playing. It seemed like I was always riding over a low rock, or dodging around a knee-high rock that jutted into a trail, or spinning out on loose rocks, or hopping off my bike to haul it over a rock... Then there was a smooth section, but it was just a narrow ledge of a trail worn into the side of a ridge of bentonite clay. The left side of the trail just kind of rolled off onto an earthen slope; it made me nervous and wary of a wrong move.

After we had climbed to the top of the ridge, it got a bit easier for me. More riding and less pushing and swearing. There were terrific views of the city, the 10,000-foot Grand Mesa to the east, the brown barren Bookcliffs to the north, the striking red rocks of the Colorado Monument in the west. There were some sketchy descents and some switchbacks that I couldn't ride, but there were some really fun stretches, too, even a few bits of slickrock.

It was only the third time I've been off-road on my single since we moved here; after all the tandem riding we've been doing I was finding it a challenge to keep the front wheel going where I wanted it to. The ability to look ahead on the trail, plan a route over and around an obstacle, figure out when to apply the necessary burst of leg strength, all of that was eluding me today. Hopefully it will come back.

I had a great time, enjoying the sunshine, the time with Chris, the exertion. All in all, we did about an hour of riding; with travel time and bike loading I was gone for nearly an hour and a half. Not the kind of lunch break I can take every day - I'll be eating lunch at my desk tomorrow - but it will be nice to get out every now and then while this beautiful weather lasts.

Rough Canyon

Today we went for a hike at Rough Canyon, which is right next door to the Mica Mine trail we hiked a couple weeks ago. True to its name, this was the roughest hike by far that we've been on since we moved here. The trail started off - like many canyon hikes do - following along the side of a dry creek bed. Often it was simpler to just hike in the creek bed. Then we got to a point where the creek bed narrowed to a chute with several big dropoffs, and here the trail headed up on to the rocky wall of the canyon. I'll admit that it did make me a bit nervous, walking along this narrow bit of trail.

Soon we descended again to the canyon floor - in some places, rocky steps had been carefully placed to make the descent easy. In others, we had to clamber from one boulder to the next. Sometimes Utah was a bit hesitant about the boulder-hopping, but if we went first, he could always find his way down.



Progress was pretty slow, what with all the route-finding, and the big rocks, and being very careful of Cailan on my back. He seemed to enjoy it, actually, and learned to tuck his head in close to my back when I said "duck!" as we went under a tree branch or through a rock tunnel. I had Chris monitoring from the front or behind, to make sure I ducked far enough to clear Cailan's head as well as my own. According to our Garmin, we had only hiked for 1.1 miles when we stopped for a snack break. This was right before the canyon really opened up into a big view.


Cailan had four snacks, which he enumerated to us several times: goldfish crackers, a piece of a chocolate Clif Bar, a strawberry cereal bar, and more goldfish crackers. After our snack, we decided to head back up the canyon. We switched Cailan to Chris's back for the return trip, since one carrier with a 30-pound kid is lighter than one backpack holding water and snacks. We found some nooks in the canyon walls to make echos. Cailan learned that Daddy's voice is better at making echos than mommy's voice.


In the picture above, Chris and Cailan are getting ready to make the traverse across the canyon wall; it's the same spot that Cailan and I are in the second picture but seen from the other side. Below, Chris and Cailan have climbed down into one of the narrow chutes we passed near the beginning of the hike.

Spooktacular

It had been several weeks since Chris and I got out for a mountain bike ride, so we were excited when, midweek, the weather forecast for the weekend looked really pleasant. We arranged a babysitter for Saturday morning and went to ride Mary's loop - I was a little afraid that our start time of 9 AM would make it uncomfortable cold but it was perfect. We rode a bit further than our usual route at Mary's loop, connecting with Steve's loop to make a total of 18 miles. We rode over several rocky obstacles that we hadn't cleared before on the tandem, and we had no pinch flats.

It was beautiful: a completely clear, crisp blue sky, the ponderous gray-green Colorado beneath red canyon walls and sage green hillside, lined with brilliant yellow cottonwoods. The trail was starting to get busy as we were finishing up, so our early start worked out well all around.

In the evening, we took a family bike ride on the blue tandem + Chariot to go to Spooktacular, a Halloween event downtown. Main Street was closed to car traffic, and most of the shops on Main were giving out candy to trick-or-treaters. There were kids in costumes all up and down the sidewalks. Cailan didn't really trick-or-treat last year and he still was not that interested in it. What was most fun to him was when we went in to the instrument store and played pianos and drums.

Trip to New Mexico

This weekend we went to New Mexico to visit Grandma Bobbie. She is stuck in Raton for several weeks while undergoing a course of IV antibiotics, so since Mohammed could not come to the mountain we took the mountain to Mohammed. Here is the mountain, helping me pack for the trip:



Cailan's contributions to my suitcase are on the right side of the picture. For some reason, he seemed to think I was going to need A LOT of socks.

We had a nice weekend visiting Bobbie. It had been several years since we had been to her house, so we enjoyed seeing how her yard has come along - she has some really beautiful wildflowers that are still blooming. She had a couple of big metal butterfly sculptures that Cailan played like steel drums, and there were many real butterflies in the flowers. We also got to see the fabulous new space that the Raton history museum is moving into - it's a big 2-story building downtown that they are restoring with gorgeous woodwork, including some display cases donated by a jewelry store, and a stamped tin ceiling. Cailan played an antique piano and a harp there. We had a short hike at Sugarite canyon on a pleasant but windy day. By that point, Cailan was pretty exhausted from all the intense playing with Grandma, so he spent most of the hike riding on Chris's shoulders or my back.

Mostly, we hung around Bobbie's house while Cailan and Grandma played. She dug up the toys that have survived Chris and his cousins: cars and dinosaurs and playing cards and miniature houses and a Wonderful Waterworks ring toss game that was a huge hit.


For our own reference, on the way there, we took highway 50 to Pueblo and then headed south on I-25. The route took us just over 8 hours, including our stop for dinner. On the way home, we took the cutoff through Walsenburg and Westcliff which shaved off at least 40 miles. Although Google maps predicted this shorter route would actually take longer, the return trip including dinner was only 7 hours.

Imagine that

Cailan's imagination has burst wide open. Right now this shows most in his play with stuffed animals. A couple days ago, they were all going on a hike at a place he called "Western Canyon". They also hiked to the top of a mountain. Yesterday, they hiked to "Eastern Canyon."

He has been naming all his animals. The first one to get a name was the guinea pig that Keri gave him for Christmas. He told me one evening that its name was Bannelcap, except that he didn't enunciate it all that clearly so I wasn't quite sure what the name was. I asked him to repeat it several times and still I couldn't tell exactly what he was saying. Finally, I asked him to spell it (why I asked this of a 2 and a half year old remains a mystery) and he said "B..A..N..L..C..P". Sure, he left out most of the vowels, but he had enough of the consonants that I could finally understand the name.

The next animal to get a name was his stuffed elephant, seen here snacking on a blue frog:


He told me that the elephant was named Genes, and he specifically said that it starts with a G. I think in Cailan's mind it is equivalent to the word "jeans", which actually sounds as though it should start with a G.

Next, he named the small teddy bear "Overalls" - this is what tells me that the elephant is also named for a garment. His blue bird that is his one and only happy meal toy is named "Bunge" and his soft yellow duck is named "Doh".

Finally, he has started naming himself. He made up a clown fish called "Apples" and now he pretends that he is "Apples."

Winter already

Monday morning. We wake up to find that it is only 55 degrees inside the house. Brrrr. Guess we'll have to figure out if our furnace works. It was 27 degrees when I rode my bike to work, and I haven't yet unpacked most of my warm clothes. Time to winterize.

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.

Bike race

Our college was hosting a mountain bike race, so Chris and I volunteered to help out with registration for the event. We figured that we could go as a family and have one of us sit at the registration table while the other walked around with Cailan and looked at all the bikes. We were supposed to be at the race course at 7 am, which meant leaving the house at 6:30 – you’d think this might be early for a toddler but as usual he was awake by 6:00. I was the one who was bleary eyed and stumbling. The weather forecast had predicted a cold morning, so we prepared by layering ourselves and Cailan with lots of warm clothes. What we hadn’t gleaned from the forecast was just how incredibly windy it would be on the exposed ridge where the race started. At the registration table, the wind tried to rip the sign-in sheets off my clipboard. It was impossible to even set a pen down on the table – the wind would swoosh it right off. More than once, a $20 bill was torn from my hands as a racer tried to give me the registration fee. Cailan had no interest in being outside in this wind, so unfortunately he and Chris spent most of the morning in the back of the Subaru eating banana muffins and making big numbers on the calculator.

We had parked so that the start of the race was visible from the car, and the first event of the morning was a race that did several laps of a short course, so Chris was at least able to watch some of the biking. It was interesting to see the wide range in the abilities of the riders and the value of their bikes; it was also interesting to see the variation in the amount of support given by the different colleges to their cycling team. One school has a big trailer just for their bike team, all shiny and painted in the school colors. That school also paid the registration fee for all its riders, something that not every school did, and from the conversations I overhead, many of the riders from that school also race on sponsored teams.

We got home in time for lunch and for Cailan to nap. In the afternoon, we went shopping and picked up, among other things, a new lamp for Cailan’s room:

He chose the lamp, specifically requesting the one that was pink, and since it was on clearance for $9.99 we agreed. In the parking lot of the shopping center, we watched a very strange dust storm that was filling the valley. The brown haze completely obscured the view of the Colorado National Monument; it felt eerie to not be able to see our surroundings, in a place where the sky is usually so clear and blue.

Da's days out: Turkey Flats

So on another day I (Da) went about 40 min up the road past Lunch Loops to a trail called Turkey Flats which was reputed to have great fall aspens. I really love aspens and the prospect of a good Fall ride within an hour of our house was too much to resist. Since I had never been on the trail before I chose not to bring our beloved out-of-control dog. Also the minor problems of bears and hunting season came to mind. Somehow I suspect that Utah's antler shaped running harness would do hom no favors out here.

From the parking area, I could tell that this was the right time of year to ride this.


The total loop is about 9.5 miles, and honestly if it weren't for the aspen, it wouldn't be a great ride. the trail surface was often loose, soft sand with many sections too steep to ride. But there was a bunch of this as well...


About halfway into the ride, I came out onto a forest road of packed damp sand. Since one of my truly geeky hobbies is identifying bike tracks by tire brand, I was looking down and saw this:

While I didn't recognize the brand, I was glad Utah was safe in his crate at home. I don't know how a black bear/Utah interaction would go, but I don't think any good could come of it. I made several stops to soak in the beautiful Fall day and take some artsy photos.


The aspen were in full change and had just started dropping leaves creating some very cool yellow ornaments for the outdoor xmas trees.


Heres the trail winding between some aspen and pines. The temp in GJ that day was about 85, but this ride started at about 8200 feet so it was actually kind of chilly. The air was clear in that amazing sort of way that happens in Autumn. Everything seems to be extra clear and crisp.


The aspen covered trail was both beautiful and deceptive. I almost plowed straight into this pond/puddle without ever seeing it. Heather's question was "How deep was it?" I am only glad I didn't unintentionally find out.



We had hoped to take the Tandem up there that weekend, but some cold rain got in the way. If was cold and wet in GJ, it would have been really cold there. Overall, it was a beautiful experience on a moderate ride. The best part was that I was home by noon!

Da's days out

One of the recent changes in our lives has been my (Da) move to part-time work. This gives me a couple of somewhat guilty-feeling free mornings. I have been using them (under the flimsy guise of exercising Utah)to go out biking. As I mentioned, there is a certain amount of guilt here, but Heather assures me that I am more sane and bearable if I get out. So I get to go out and explore areas for future family trips.


This is the "lunch loops" area, a really unusual geologic ride through rocks, dirt, sand, and bentonite clay. The photos from this day are unusually clody, but visually cool as a result.


Here's some of the bentonite trail section. Utah and I usually go for about five miles or 60 minutes.


A quick look back from about halfway up the climb. We've been here since August and I've probably been on this trail 15-20 times. Sadly, my lovely bride is working to support us and hasn't even been here once. (We are out on bigger trails and hikes on the weekends).


Here's about the only shot I got of Utah. Now that he knows the trails here, hebolts out of the truck and I only catch glimpses of him racing out through the desert. When he wants water he condescends to slow to my human pace.

Overall, I have to say that it's great having these trails 10 minutes from our house. The downside is that now Utah thinks that every car ride goes to a trail that he can run madly on...

Seussical

Today Cailan went to his first live theatre performance. We saw Seussical on campus! Chris and I were a little unsure how it would go - given how frightened Cailan gets by loud noises, we thought that the singing or the applause might send him over the edge. We also didn't expect that he could sit still and quietly for nearly two hours. We were lucky to have gotten some free tickets and our seats were near the back of the theatre on the aisle, so we figured if it proved to be too much for Cailan, we could sneak out quickly and it wouldn't be a big deal.

But Cailan did great! He was mesmerized by the action on stage - I don't know if it was the brightly colored costumes, or the constant movement, or the music that really captivated him, but he sat on Chris's lap and focused on the show for the entire first act. His attention lagged a bit during a slow song just before intermission, but then again, most of the audience lost focus at that point. We ran around the hallways during intermission, got lots of water from the drinking fountain, then went back in the hall to get a close-up look at the stage. Cailan stayed attentive for the whole second act. We met some of the actors, still in costume, after the show and Cailan was very cute waving 'hi' to them. All in all, it went much better than we expected. Cailan talked about the show when we got home and at dinner - so interesting to hear what he noticed about it.

Prognostication

We have a piece of surgical tubing that's been laying around the house for several years, left over from some exercises a physical therapist prescribed. It has always been a favorite plaything of Cailan's. When he was a baby, he liked to chew on it, gumming it with his big, slobbery, toothless mouth. As he got a little older, he liked to flail it around, letting the loose end smack against the floor. But once he started recognizing letters, his favorite way to play with it became dropping on the floor and seeing what shape or letter it formed. To us, it looks like he's practicing some form of prognostication, like tossing I Ching sticks or reading tea leaves, the letter created by the tube imparts some special meaning to him.

Here are some pictures of him in action. I wonder what he learned about the future.

O-V-E-R-H-E-A-R-D

Cailan is now listening attentively to conversations between Chris and me, or when one of us is on the phone, or mumbling to ourselves, or talking to the animals. We are having to spell more and more things out, like S-N-A-C-K or P-A-R-K or G-R-A-N-D-M-A or E-L-E-P-H-A-N-T, though I don’t think the spelling will confound him much longer. He already refers to getting in the tub and splashing around in the water as a B-A-T-H. As he’s listening, and comprehending more and more of what we’re saying when we’re not talking directly to him, he’s starting to ask for clarification of things he doesn’t understand.

Yesterday, Utah was in the back yard barking at – oh, I don’t know, a dog going for a walk three blocks away, or diapers flapping on the clothesline, or a cricket daring to hop across the patio - anyway, I went to the back porch and yelled “Utah, that’s enough. Knock it off!” Cailan, who was shadowing me, asked “What did Utah knock off?”

When we were all in the kitchen getting dinner ready, Chris and I were discussing whether or not Cailan had napped at daycare and what that meant for his bedtime. Chris said that he had forgotten to ask the teachers if Cailan had slept. I said, “I asked Cailan if he had a rest, but that was a fruitless line of inquiry.” Cailan said, “What were those fruit flies doing?”

The elephant in the room

When we lived in Tacoma, Cailan and I went to Kindermusik class and he loved it, especially all the different instruments he got to play. We had planned on taking him to Kindermusik in Grand Junction, but there are not many classes offered and the one class that was at a time that worked well for us got cancelled because not enough kids signed up for it. So yesterday morning, Chris took Cailan to a similar-sounding class called “Music and Movement” at the local recreation center. It wasn’t really like Kindermusik at all; there were no instruments for the kids to play and not really any singing. It was mostly listening to songs from a CD and dancing or bouncing balls or balancing bean bags on your head (I really should have had Chris write this instead of me; since I wasn’t there I’m sure that I’ve got some of the details wrong).

Cailan was having a great time running around and dancing and following the teacher’s movements. Then a song came on with animal sounds and Cailan came and stood by Chris, his lips trembling and his face crumpling into tears. The elephant sound on the recording brought him to outright wailing. Eventually the teacher stopped that song and moved on to the next one, but Cailan was already very upset. He couldn’t talk about anything else for the next 2 hours:

“What sound scared me? What number on the CD had the elephant sound? What song scared me? I don’t want to listen to any elephants on the TV. What sound scared me? There aren’t any noisy elephants. What song had the elephant sound?” And on and on and on.

Poor kid. When he is scared or worried about something, he has such a hard time letting go of it. It's hard for us, also, to know how to respond when he gets so anxious.