Tag Archives: high desert

Please Close Gate

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PLEASE CLOSE the GATE.  (Another boring high-desert ramble Wif Da Dorgz)

I don’t know what they’re keeping out, or in.  Perhaps they just want to make all the motor-idiots slow down, even stop, while going from one side to the other.  This gate nor fence wouldn’t deter the bighorns, below …

The Nine-Mile Hill bighorn sheep herd, part of which is pictured above, hadn’t been very visible these past few months.  Today, they’re out grazing, in their full glory for all the nearby highway traffic to view.

Meanwhile, back at “the gate” Rocksea, Sleven, and Dually engage in a pre-hike sniffaroony.

We stop on a ridgetop just south of what I call East Pass to Cactus Park.  View is to northwest — with snow-covered Pinyon Mesa on the horizon, and the red desert sandstone cliffs along Unaweep Canyon beyond the relatively flat Cactus Park.  What would be impressively visible just a couple miles further west — unseen from this vantage point — are the massive pre-cambrian granite cliffs which displace and replace the reddish sandstone.

Turning 120-degrees to the east, we look to the shaley steep slopes of theBookcliffs.  What you can’t see is that my house, along with a few thousand others, is on the valley floor before the Bookcliffs.

Gibbler Mountain, the primary west-edge landmark of Cactus Park.  A pleasant breezy cloudily-scattered-cloudy day.

Dool pauses alongside an inuk-thingy in the trees.

Rocksea peers down …

The truck is just off the “road” towards the left.

We get home.  The kitten is prostrate at the foot of the Lithograph of the Cat-Saint Bearing Fish.

… we’re in trouble.

ah luvvs thissshitt

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We’ll get to the “luvs this” — but last weekend the unlikely duo of Walter and Bruce were, well, just hangin’.

Dee ‘n me had a friend passin’ thru.  He’s of Anglo ethnocentricity, but identifies heavily with Western Hemisphere aboriginal.  He posited that perhaps these two entities shared a bond way beyond the obvious.  Mates (as in Crocodile Dundee, mate) in passed life times?  Kindred spirits, none-the-less, it certainly seems.

Betty and her son, and his best friend pose on the sidewalk in downtown Palisade, also last weekend.

Beauty.  And the beast.

Today (early this passed evening) the dorgzeneye (thassaKollektive) went to the Horse Mountain 36-Road trail head.  Although within 20 miles of our house, this was our first time there.  YOU KNOW how things look in veiled, filtered, indirect light.  This was EAST Orchard Mesa, the Palisade side of the area.  “Ah luvs thisshit” ah sed tew meeself.

It’s … azzyoo kintell, orchard-y.  Bucolic.  Tranquil.  (i hope it’s NOT deceptively tranquil)

The edge of the irrigated lush orchard aggie zone abruptly meets the ‘high’ desert.

We’re nearing the trailhead, down a last lane thru’ the orchards.

The eastern Grand Valley anchor of the Bookcliffs.  The Bookcliffs are the north boundary of the Valley but we’re hiking south, into the Horse Mountain area.

THAT’s Mount Garfield, the pre-eminent landmark to the north of the Valley, just outside of Palisade.  Things are hazy (the light is muted) ’cause of forest fires in the states to the west of us.  Usually the aspect would be direct, unrelenting, soul-sucking, sunlight.

Sleven and Rocksea are Dogs Of The High Desert.

We wander further south, and Garfield recedes — not only with distance, but with haze.  I think the haze and other not-so-obvious influences enable extradimensional portals to, ever so slightly perhaps, exert influences, gradually at first …

DON’T step in the ooombah!

Appealing, iddn’t it?  I definitely plan on comin’ back, mebbe with a mountain bike, or, heck, run as far as I can (when it’s cooler!).  View is to the south, southeast — with “the world’s largest (and highest?) flat-topped mountain” — the Grand Mesa (10,000 ft. high) on the horizon.

Darned oil- (and gas) field pipelyings!

RockSea on the mesa-top.

As the sun sinks into the haze …

NOTHING says End-of-the-Whirled Apocalyptic Doom like a Black Dawg on a bleak high-desert cactus/land-scape with the Red Sun of Futility overhead.  Seriously, a coyote was yelling at us.  I (gu)estimate ‘yote was about 200 yards away.  To their credit, the dawgs did not give chase…

Sleven and Rocksea pause.  The straight lying just above R’s head is “B & 1/2 Road” — the way back to my house, about 20 miles away.