The First Day Of Fall

Today is the first day of fall, and this past Sunday afternoon I decided to drive up the Mount Evans Scenic Bypass to Echo Lake, located about an hour west of Denver, to see if the colors had started to change yet. And as you can see in the photo on the left, they definitely have. It seems pretty early for the color change, but the weather people say that it is due to the severe drought conditions.  Plus, Echo Lake is located at an elevation of 10,600 feet, which also has a lot to do with it. It was even jacket weather up there, although once I started hiking the Echo Lake trail, I got pretty warm pretty fast.

On the way back down the mountain, I stopped and took the photograph on the right, which shows that the colors were changing at lower altitudes, too. Heading back to Idaho Springs and the interstate back to Denver, I took notice of all the houses and cabins that lined the road after leaving the national forest. All were pretty modest. Some looked nice, and some not so much, many of them places that I would not enjoy spending the winter. Since there was a "private property" sign on the fence seen in the photo, I decided to skip driving down the road to take a look at their house. Years ago, I took this same drive with my mother Mary. I thought I was giving her a treat, but after a while she asked me when we were finally going to get out of all this horrible wilderness. Coming from Chicago, I think she much preferred cities and sidewalks to the great outdoors. As my father Nelson once said during a trip to Colorado, "if you've seen one mountain, you've seen them all."