I have just returned from a delightful trip to Colorado to visit my daughter Sara and her family. The official rationale for the trip was to see my grandson Ian perform in their high school play, “Clue”. However, the beautiful weather there encouraged Sara to take me into the mountains and soak up the magnificent scenery.
The first day we drove up Poudre Canyon. When Jim and Sara first came to Colorado, they lived in La Porte, a small town a few miles northwest of Fort Collins while they attended Colorado State University. La Porte is close to the point where the Cache la Poudre River exits Poudre Canyon in the Colorado Foothills.
Cache la Poudre is French for “a storage place for powder”. Apparently the name stems back to the very early days when French fur traders were common in this area. The river begins near the Continental Divide at an elevation of 9,000 feet, then flows eastward about eighty miles to La Porte dropping over 4,000 feet. It then proceeds through Fort Collins to Greeley where it joins the South Platte River.
Every trip west into the Rockies is a geology lesson. Fifty or sixty million years ago tectonic plates in the Pacific subducted (slid under) the North American Plate, lifting the western half of the continent significantly. The mountain building process produced a north/south fault line running through central Colorado.
A few miles east of the fault line is the Dakota Hogback. Deposited about one hundred million years ago, the distinctive layer of Dakota Sandstone was tilted upward to the west until it fractured, leaving a distinctive outcropping that runs from Wyoming to New Mexico.
West of the fault line is the mass of gneiss and schist that was uplifted by the Orogeny and thrust thousands of feet upward, forming the foothills. These metamorphic rocks are over one and a half billion years old. Here the river has carved a cathedral-like “Narrows” with majestic steep walls well over a thousand feet high.
Farther west the rocks are granite, a few hundred million years younger than the gneiss and schists and characterized by rounded boulders and peaks. At places the valley is wider, as the river seems to relax a little in its relentless attack on the landscape. The Cache la Poudre has been designated, properly, a “wild and scenic” river and is a popular attraction for the contradictory sports of trout fishing and whitewater rafting. I was content to restrict myself to sightseeing.
The river itself is small, with perhaps half the average flow rate of Chartiers Creek. It is hard to believe that it has been able to carve out such a large canyon. However, it has had fifty million years to find all the fractures and soft places in the Pre Cambrian rocks. This time we have a lesson in patience and persistence.
The next day we drove south to Loveland and then west up Big Thompson Canyon. It has similar geology to Poudre Canyon, and is even more spectacular in several areas. Unlike Poudre, Big Thompson is lined with homes and vacation cottages. In 1976 twelve inches of rainfall in several days produced a flood in the narrow canyon that took 144 lives.
Seeing this small stream (flow rate of seventy-five cubic feet per second) today it is hard to visualize it causing so much damage. Realizing its flow rate reached 35,000 cubic feet per second in that flood (three times the highest flow rate ever for Chartiers Creek) gives one a different perspective. It is hard to imagine anything surviving that amount of water in such a narrow canyon.
At the west end of the canyon, 7,500 feet above sea level, is the delightful town of Estes Park. Famed as the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, it is a tourist magnet, filled with shops and restaurants. The Stanley Hotel, famed for its role in Stephen King’s novel, “The Shining” and the television miniseries based on it is a feature attraction in Estes Park.
When we stopped at the toll booth entering the Park, the attendant noticed that I was perusing “Roadside Geology of Colorado” and announced that it was his favorite reference. Once again I was impressed with the National Park Service, this time in the person of an humble toll-taker. Whenever I complain about some aspect of our federal government, I remind myself that the Park Service does an outstanding job.
We drove into a lovely valley called Moraine Park. Surrounded by mountains in every direction, including the dominating Long’s Peak, the valley is the site of Sara’s family’s favorite campground. It is also home to a large herd of elk – there must have been 150 of them the day we were there. We took a short hike onto a small granite hill covered with Ponderosa Pines in the middle of the valley.
This part of the park takes its name from the large lateral moraine forming its southern boundary and the series of recessional moraines at its western end. Lateral moraines are made up of debris carried along the side of a glacier and left behind. Recessional moraines leave debris behind each time a glacier pauses during its retreat. Another powerful geology lesson!
We then drove north to Horseshoe Valley and the Alluvial Fan, a large area where mountain floods have deposited massive boulders over a large area in a pattern that, in a satellite photograph, looks remarkably similar to the delta of the Mississippi River where it meets the Gulf of Mexico. Our return drive to Estes Park on a different highway took us across three terminal moraines, each marking the farthest advance of a different glacier.
Back in civilization we had the pleasure of watching Ian play the part of Colonel Mustard in “Clue”. The play, of course, is based on the movie of the same name, which itself was based on a popular board game of my youth called “Clue”. It is a “tongue-in-cheek” version of a classical mystery story; the role of Colonel Mustard is probably the best from a comedic perspective.
Ian played the part well; numerous folks in the audience told him they thought he was their favorite character. Directions for the play describe the Colonel as “a puffy, pompous, dense blowhard of a military man”; Ian exploited the “dense” characteristic, probably because the script gave him numerous opportunities in that direction.
His performance was rewarded by custody of the “gypsy robe”. There is a Broadway tradition that, at the opening of a new musical, a member of the chorus wearing a robe decorated by mementoes from previous shows circle the stage three times in a counterclockwise direction, providing each member of the cast to touch the robe for good luck.
The local school district began its own version of this tradition in 2007; their robe is covered with patches from dozens of performances. Ian’s family now has the responsibility of producing a patch representative of “Clue” and finding a place to sew it on. It is a fitting honor for Ian’s final show; his ninth in a series of community and high school theater productions.
Nora is now a ninth grader at Rocky Mountain High. Next weekend she and her mother are going to St. Louis with her soccer team for a season ending, high level tournament in St. Charles. Her next challenge is the tryouts for the high school basketball team. In between, she is busy with the Student Council planning a special Halloween event at the school for young children as an alternative to trick-or-treating.
Claire is now in sixth grade at Webber Middle School. Her soccer season has ended and she is now concentrating on the middle school choir. The past two summers she has attended a creative writing workshop, with impressive results. Sara had me read Claire’s essay on the whale watching cruise we took at Maui last December. It was remarkably well done, would have been acceptable at the college level.
Despite a significant snow storm on Sunday I was able to get home comfortably the next day, full of gratitude that, despite my advanced years, I am still capable of traveling thirteen hundred miles to visit Sara and her wonderful family.