When I first moved to the Denver area eleven years ago, an endurance hike was thirty miles. Now it's ten. This leg of the trip up Cherry Creek was around five miles according to Google Maps but I noticed about a mile into it that I had left my wallet at home and walked another mile to retrieve it. With a one and a half mile hike to and from the train station, that adds up to about ten miles. I was pretty whipped at the end but I still had enough energy to wash the supper dishes, so I'm not completely debilitated yet.
This section of Cherry Creek is not the most scenic, as it flows mainly through residential and industrial areas, carving its way through deep sandy sediment. Being an active flood plane, this soil is geologically very recent.
It's a popular stretch of trail near Greenwood Village so the traffic is heavy with bicyclists, walkers, and hikers. The plants are a mix of indigenous and introduced species. I didn't see any big predator or prey animals but I've seen reports of both deer, Coyote, and bear in the area. The creek and Greenway provides a natural corridor for wildlife coming up from the less inhabited canyons and Palmer Divide to the South.
The deep layers of sediment laid down by past flooding shows a typical soil profile. The layer of humus at the top is thin. Past vegetation on the plains (this is the beginning of the Great plains) is sparse and gets washed off regularly. Beneath is a thin layer of leached soil. The clayey layer below tends to hold darker ionic materials that are drained into it from above and that darker layer is thick and goes down to the bedrock that fills the Denver basin....eroded materials washed out of the Rocky Mountains. You can faintly see layering where different floods deposited various materials and hollowed out softer sediments.
Cherry Creek has been around long enough to have developed some decent meanders.
Sage (Artemisia tridentata) is so common out here that it's become indelibly a part of the spirit of the West. How many western bands have had "Sage" in their name. It's a typically scrubby plant. A lot of the plants on the plains are low and tough. They have to be to withstand the winds and sharp, and often brutal, shifts in weather. Despite the fact that this plant lives next to a watercourse, unless it's actually in the creek, it's in a very dry environment. It rains a good bit, but the air is so dry that anything wet will soon be dry again and the soil is loose and sandy and drains rapidly.
Big plants (trees) that are indigenous to this area have to be able to manage their water well. They usually live right next to a stream and there aren't many - mostly cottonwood and willow. Most of the trees you see in these photos were introduced and cultivated to become part of our urban forest.
This pretty little ground cover always catches my eye. I can never remember the name so I use Google Lens to look it up.
Oh, yeah. "Silver mound". It's another Artemisia. It's pretty common out here.
Looking north, back the way I came, that cloud sorta bothered me. It was talking. Weather closer to the mountains, about twenty miles west where I live, doesn't worry me.....even the occasional hurricane force winds and hail. But even here I'm on the plains. They get tornados and the lightning is considerably more dangerous.
I have rain gear in my pack (always) but, even so, a downpour would be inconvenient. Luckily, it passed by to the north.
The Rockies, to the West, are an ever present sight here.
Gaillardia Pulchella is a common wildflower here. Also called Fire wheel Daisy or Indian Blanket, it really stands out in the landscape.
Ants are less common here than they are in the Southern United States but they are here.
It's still autumn here and we've had a nice display of fall colors this year thanks to more rain than usual.
This squirrel was curious, but not enough to come completely out of hiding.
The Highline canal crosses Cherry Creek here through a syphon.
The diversity of cactuses increases in the mountains (the state cactus is the Claret cup) but the plains still see the wide spread prickly pear. Best I can tell, those are all over the coterminous United States. We had them growing both wild and in gardens in Alabama. Although the modified stems (the "mouse ears") and leaves (the spines) aren't very showy, the big yellows blooms are gorgeous and the "pears" are edible. My housemates were waxing nostalgic about eating prickly pears the other day.
We have a lot of corvids in the Denver area, crows, ravens, a variety of jays, but magpies are most common in the South Denver Metro Area. In other places in the US, they can be a rather obnoxious bird but around here they are, across the board, a friendly creature unless you get too near a nest. A friend calls them "tuxedo crows".
About two-thirds of the way from Monaco and the end of my hike, I begin to see my destination, the large dam that impounds Cherry Creek Reservoir.
This massive earth embankment plays a major part in the next section of my journey up Cherry Creek, so I will hold off discussing it for now.
Keeping with tradition for the Denver area, Aurora (the largest eastern area of the Denver Metro Region) has plenty of public art scattered around. John King's 16 foot high kinetic structure was awaiting me where I exited Cherry Creek trail at South Havana Street. Here, I had to do a little road work to get to the light rail station.
Nine Mile Station is a little daunting with its labyrinth of tunnels leading to train and bus terminals, parking garages, and passing under heavily trafficked highways and rails to the area under the dam. In the center courtyard is this minimalistic, abstract clock tower. It's a train station.....people need to know what time it is. (Of course, in the band, Chicago's opinion, "Does anybody really care?")
Nine Mile Station, like the Four Mile House Historic Park is situated near a pioneer way station. It was at the nine mile mark outside Denver on the Smoky Hill Trail.
Unlike Four Mile Station (best I can tell) there's nothing left of the historic site of Nine Mile house.
The Smoky Hill Trail was named for the Smoky Hill River that paralleled most of its way. It developed from a Native American trail through prime huntng range. It started in Atchison, Kansas and continued to the Kansas River, along the Smoky Hills River and Cherry Creek, to Denver.
The site of the Nine Mile House is today on the other side of the dam, under water.
The Nine Mile Station platform provides some great views of Cherry Creek Reservoir and the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop to the Denver Tech Center and the surrounding area. To the south is the familiar profile of Pike's Peak.
And Pike's Peak.....
From here, it's a short train ride back to Arapahoe Station and the mile and a half hike back home.
These hikes are scratching my itch to follow a way (in this case, Cherry Creek) from one end to the other. On the next link of my journey I'm going to skip the unremarkable trail along the base of Cherry Creek Reservoir dam to the next light rail station to the west and take it up at Dayton Station. See you there.
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