The seasons, they are a changin'. I walked through my first cloud of midges of the year. Maybe there will be some wildflowers soon, but there's still room for another snow, even a deep snowfall.
The mouse conservation continues on the South side of Lincoln Road. I still haven't seen one (and probably won't since these little fellows are very shy and have a lot of grass to hide in) but I can at least read about them. (Expand the photo above and learn about the little mouse that jumps )
In these Southern segments, the flood plain is broad and allows Cherry Creek to spread out a lot. Here, it's a braided stream. Although it's not obvious in the photographs, in many places, the stream is higher than the surrounding flood plain because a platform of sediment has built up and the stream has cut channels into it.
Not only sediments, but remnants of culture travel on streams. I had to stare long and hard to figure this one out (I wasn't set up for wading). It was a plastic posey. Maybe there was a wedding somewhere upstream
I used to look at junk in streams and just shake my head at the thoughtlessness of the humans in the area until I hosted a campout in northwestern Alabama. You can't walk 200 feet without encountering a waterfall in many places and this one area was dense with them.
One particular waterfall looked to be almost unknown. It was right by the road but effectively hidden in the landscape. The only reason I found it was that we were on foot and I heard it. It was a big three tiered fall and the several times we camped there, we ended up cleaning junk out of the lower splash pool.
It occurred to me that the laundry detergent bottles and other assorted garbage must have come from far upstream. It's not the kind of stuff people usually leave at a picnic site.
The weather is warming up and algae is beginning to grow in quieter areas of the streams.
When I was in high school, living things were divided into two Kingdoms: Plantae and Animalia. There were weird things like fungi, algae, bacteria, and some very primitive extremophiles that were.......problems, but, for instance, bacteria were grouped with plants because they generally had a tough cell wall. Protozoa were usually more pliable and had phospholipid cell walls like animals, so.....animals
Since then, the division has broken living things up into five or six Kingdoms. The algae have maintained their position in the plant kingdom. The ones shown above are colonies of single celled individuals that stay put except when they're moved by water currents. Others have flagellum or cilium that help them move around. They're all eukaryotes, having well defined cell nuclei containing genetic material. The cyanobacterium, also photosynthetic, single celled, colonial beings are prokaryotes (no nucleus, the DNA is scattered through the cytoplasm) so they're usually not classified as algae or plants.
Another catch is that algae can be multicellular like plants although they don't have the complex structures like roots and true leaves and there are algae that have no pigmentation or something different than chlorophyll. Sea weeds are algae.
These little creatures place a significant amount of oxygen into the atmosphere and are good for larger aquatic organisms. When we dump too much phosphate fertilizer into the streams they grow like crazy and clog up streams and waterworks. Nothing else can compete in an algae bloom so everything else dies. Then water purification operations can't keep up and your tap water gets yucky.
This stretch of the Cherry Creek trail affords some nice views of both Pike's Peak to the South and the Front Range to the north all the way to Long's Peak which is the signature mountain of the Rocky Mountain National Park.
Salisbury Equestrian Park is right off Parker Road in the Salisbury Heights neighborhood. It's not an "ecological park" like many of the areas around Cherry Creek so the stream here is nicely landscaped. There aren't many places where the creek is this straight and the banks are this sharp.
Hess Road is the southernmost point on my hike but my bus connection is back north on Parker Road and I need to do some shopping, so I turn around and backtrack a mile.
This section of the trail is lined with numerous memorials to members of local families who have died. The above memorial to local children is near Salisbury Park. The low wall is tiled with memorials and children's drawings.
I needed to pick up something from the local Walmart, so I backtracked about a mile to Sulphur Gulch Trail that leads into Parker. I have no idea why "sulphur". I neither saw nor smelled sulfur in the area .
The "gulch" like the many other gulches in the Denver area is there to catch rain and transport it to a natural stream, in this case, Cherry Creek. It's usually dry in the summer but fills up with snow melt and storm water in the spring.
Denver is 744 miles from the Pacific ocean. What are these sea gulls doing here?
Actually, ring-billed gulls prefer inland areas and many are native to Colorado. Of course, that doesn't explain the pelican I saw in Great Falls.
I was with a church group on a construction ministry to a small church in Great Falls. It had been built over an underground river which was washing it's foundation away, so we replaced it with a floating foundation. During the week, we did some sightseeing. The falls were breathtaking. They would have been more impressive without the huge hydroelectric dam built across them but, I guess, progress.....
On a rock in the middle of the Missouri River below the dam was a pelican. A man next to us opined that it was plastic. That became a buzz line for the rest of the trip.....
That's not a real cliff..... it's plastic.
That's not a real glacier ..... it's plastic.
That's not a real tree..... it's plastic
That otter......yep, plastic.
Just to remind folks that I'm still hiking on the prairie....
