The desert is blooming

 A special blog to dispell the idea that the desert is a dead place.

Ridgegate to Sky Ridge Station: A new line

The rail from Lincoln Station in the southern Denver Metro area to Ridgegate Parkway Station is not only a new stop for me (Actually I was here for the terminus hikes) but it's a new line for the Regional Transportation District. When I first visited this area to see an opthalmologist in Parker, the line stopped at Lincoln Station. That was around five years ago.

The explosive development in the Lone Tree area prompted the addition of the three new stations 

As usual, I started my hike with a short walk to Arapahoe Station. The day was cloudy and promised rain. The Rockies are usually clearly visible from this point on Arapahoe Road but not on this day. I was thankful for the cooler temperatures but expected to get some use from my rain gear.

A primary geological feature of the Lone Tree area is The Bluffs and, since I had lost many of my past photographs of the area, I wanted to replace them.

Mesas are flat topped hills. They can be formed in different ways. The two Table Mountains in Golden are ancient lava flows that protected the underlying soft sedimentary rock from erosion. The Bluffs were simply carved by wind and water.

This area is the northern border of the Palmer Divide, a ridge that separates the drainage lands of the South Platte and Arkansas Rivers. It was literally formed by fire and rain.

The uplift that formed the Rocky Mountains was a fairly quiet affair but around 25 to 40 million years ago something happened that geologists don't quite understand. Something touched off an intense period of volcanic activity in what is today Colorado and New Mexico. Called the Ingimbrite Flare-up, one of the last acts produced an explosion like none since. Mount Guffey blew it's top and covered the land to the east with lehars (volcanic mud flows) and pyroclastic flows hundreds of feet thick over 50 miles to the east.

Soon (geologically speaking, and maybe even in human terms) there were huge floods in the area. Although the volcanic material didn't extend as far east as the area crossed by I-25 today, the floods piled materials against tuff laid down by the volcano far out onto the plains. Now, how do I know all that happened?

Well, what's left of Mount Guffey is still up there near the Florrisant Fossil beds and the layers of tuff is still buried under the Rockies. Tuff is a rock formed when a pyroclastic flow settles down. The fine particles of volcanic debris ejected from the volcano weld together to form a tough (see what I did there?) material.

So, how do I know about the floods?. The record is up on top of the Bluffs and I'll address that later.

There is a good bit of development going on around Ridgegate Parkway Station...there has been for some time and I'm not sure what's holding it up. Wait until you see Lone Tree City Center 

Like most of the train stations, Ridgegate has it's art.

It would be quite reasonable for a visitor to say, "What's all this?" so there's a plaque.

It's interesting that local ranches were brought into the process of developing this art piece. Do you recognize any of the coding symbols?

This area is a land of vistas. The plains stretch to the east but I was still in the Piedmont. This long shot isn't the plains proper but the wide valley of Cherry Creek.

Interstate 25, as it runs through the Denver area, is called the Valley Highway, which is appropriate since it runs along a high ridge dividing the valleys of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. This is certainly a land of divides.

Walking into Lone Tree, I was treated to a profusion of wildflowers.

Yellow toadflax

Blue flax

Penstemon (beardtongue)

Just past the Interstate, the first thing you see in Lone Tree is the Cabala store with it's guardian buck. The stairs climb up to a parking lot.

The parking lot provides a sweeping view of the Sky Ridge Medical Center. The main attractions of Lone Tree area Cabela, Sky Ridge, the Bluffs, and high end apartments.

This one caught my attention with it's seemingly thrown-together-at-random decor.

The approach trails to The Bluffs Regional Park from the east and north are through residential neighborhoods and parks. I chose Belvedere Park and Sky Prairie Park. They follow the newly sprung Willow Creek. Since I might be looking at Cherry Creek on the next series of hikes, I think I will be following Willow Creek as it turns west away from the light rail to Arapahoe Road. There are some interesting developments there.

The ascent follows a series of switchbacks up a cut formed by water flowing down to Willow Creek. The day was rainy so the otherwise breathtaking scenery was subdued. Normally the Denver skylines (including the Denver Tech Center), the plains, and the Rockies from Long's Peak to Pikes Peak are clearly visible.

I did get a change to see the geological profile while scaling the muddy trial. The Bluffs are a four layer cake. The layers are poorly consolidated conglomerates, thus the mud. Three, we've talked about several times before because they're the formations that underlie the Denver Metro area.

Willow Creek emerges from the lowest level, the Denver formation. It's a wetter aquifer so it has more flow generally than Little Dry Creek, which primarily springs from the upper Dawson aquifer and runoff from the Arapahoe and Yosemite Roads. Both the Arapahoe and Dawson formations are also present here as the next two layers.

The top layer is the interesting one. The Castle Rock conglomerate overlays most of Palmer Divide. The cobbles that make it up tend to be larger and more diverse. There is dark volcanic material from the tuff to the west, local sandstone and mudstone cobble, and that odd blue quartzite shown above. It's not from around here.

In fact, the only place that could have provided the blue quartzite to the mix is an area around Boulder near Eldorado Canyon. That's the only place it occurs as solid rock in the Front Range. Eldorado is almost fifty miles away. Something washed cobbles to boulder sized chucks of rock from the Eldorado Canyon area to Lone Tree, and that's how I know that a humongous flood hit the area soon after the Ingimbrite Flare-up. This stuff is found as a caprock all over Palmer Divide 

The high point of the Bluffs is Tepe Point. At 6380 feet elevation, it provides stunning views of the area. There's a stone marker (shown above) pointing out the major peaks visible from there. Here are some other photos of the area.

The stone ring at Tepe Overlook is a nice place to rest and maybe have a bite to eat before continuing an exploration of The Bluffs.

Back down in Lone Tree, I made my way along the streets to Sky Ridge Station. Nearby was a small park that afforded some nice views to the north. I don't know the name of the park but it's what we called down South a "peace park".

Off to the north, I could see this curious piece of art.

I used Google Lens to look it up and found that it is a product of Thornton Tomasetti engineering, who did a lot of the work on the Ball Arena. It's the Lincoln Avenue pedestrian bridge that provides safe passage across busy Lincoln Avenue (something to check out on my next few station-to-station hikes.) 

As usual, Sky Ridge Station has an art piece...

called "Willow", by Curtis Pittman, it is intended to evoke the spirit of the surrounding land, the prairie grasses and the mountain Aspen  I would imagine that Willow Creek figured into that, too.

The station serves Lone Tree and especially the Sky Ridge Medical Center, which is right at it's steps. Some of the images promote the area as a place of many possibilities.

Many of the developers' dreams don't seem to be working out. There's an ongoing battle to develop properties on the Bluffs and we'll look at the oddly named, and strangely empty, Lone Tree City Center next time.

Making it back to my neighborhood, I noticed that the recent rains had fattened Little Dry Creek 

The Bluffs get a lot of visitors but, compared to many of the sites around Denver, they're pretty much overlooked. Still, their beautiful vistas and fascinating geology make them a hidden gem. Are there any surprises waiting for you in your area?

Garrison Station to Lakewood-Wadsworth Station

Names are important.

If you are passionate about stamps and coins, you know that they aren't just pretty pieces of art. The images they bear are commemorations. They convey history.

The same is true of place names. There have been many (many!) books published about place names in different localities. And street aren't just named at random. Neighborhoods in Denver often have themes. One area has streets named for different US colleges (the pattern extends throughout Colorado...the Collegiate Range is composed of mountains named after universities). Another neighborhood has streets named after US states.

Kipling Street is named after Rudyard Kipling, the British author. Wadsworth Boulevard is not named after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American author, or William Wadsworth, the American pioneer. The honor goes to Benjamin Franklin Wadsworth, fellow Coloradoan and founder of Arvada, through which the north-south thoroughfare prominently passes.

Many of the place names in the area were named after individuals who historically committed atrocities against various American cultures. For instance, a major figure in Denver (and Colorado) history, governor John Evans, has many things named in his honor, including the third tallest mountain in the Front Range, Mount Evans. But things are changing and Mr. Evans' association with the horrific and rather embarrassing Sand Hill Massacre has caused folks to re-evaluate his "honor". Mount Evans is now Mount Blue Sky, a name suggested by local Native Americans.

With that out of the way, I began the hike of 6/19/22 at Garrison Station, where I ended my last station-to-station hike.

Weeeell, actually I took the train all the way to the end of the line in Golden, as I usually do on these W Line hikes because I know there are bathrooms there and Denver isn't that reliable for bathrooms.

That gave me the opportunity to photograph Golden's huge digital clock at the light rail station. It's remarkable but I haven't noticed that it's very useful. The digit sections actually do change to keep time but you have to look at them just right...and maybe squint a little.

They're made to tell the time by casting a shadow of the time on the pavement below. I wouldn't be able to vouch for that because the sun has never been out at the right time or in the right place for me to see the phenomenon.

So, back to Garrison Station...I took Garrison Street south to a little neighborhood park, Holbrook Park, which provides a big lawn, two ponds, a playground, and an interesting aqueduct.

It's not as pretty as the old Roman aqueducts. From a distance, I thought it was a footbridge, but as I approached, I saw what it was. I have a soft spot for places where one stream crosses another. There are many such places in the Denver area and, if you search this blog for "aqueduct" you'll see others. Denver has a lot of gulches, and ditches, and canals. You'd think there isn't enough water to feed it all, but that's sorta the point. As little water as we have, we've built a system to effectively use it and put it where we want it.

As I got closer I thought that it was made of halves of metal barrels welded together but, thumping on the side, I found that it was halved pipeline sections.

Many of the parks in Denver are educational and have informative displays like this.

You can enlarge the picture and read about how landscaping makes an environmental difference, and how to tell the difference between sedges, rushes, grasses, and willows. Before we civilized the plains, that was just about all we had out here, and the willows (and a few cottonwood trees) only grew around the streams. Now, in Denver, we have "urban forests".

I rambled around the residential area until I came to Carr Street. Here is a photo of the gulch where it passes under.

My destination was Lakewood-Wadsworth station, so I knew I needed to turn back east to find Wadsworth Boulevard. I did that at Tenth Avenue.

Denver likes murals and the Jefferson County Open School is no exception. It has this giant building size mural.

The Open School is an alternative K through 12 school in the Jefferson County school system. It is also right at Wadsworth, so I knew I was close to my destination.

Wadsworth Boulevard is a major north-south thoroughfare through the Denver metro area. It begins in Broomfield (that's where the Butterfly Pavilion is) and ends in Littleton at the Lockheed Martin plant very near Watertown Canyon. It is also Colorado State Highway 121.

The Lakewood-Wadsworth light rail station is located on a bridge over the highway with the bus stations underneath.

Elevators and stairs at each end of the pier allow access between the street and the station.

Just after turning onto Wadsworth, I ran into an old friend.

The first sketch I made in my field journal after moving to Colorado was that of a prickly poppy. One of my favorite wildflowers, this one and my other favorite, milkweed, illustrates how showy a weed can be.

Green Mountain is still clearly visible from the platform of Lakewood-Wadsworth Station. Pike's Peak is also visible to the south but there's a screen along the bridge so I couldn't get a good shot.

As with all the light rail stations and large bus stops, and even some of the smaller bus stops, there is art.

Suspended over the stairwell at the eastern end of the station, Rain and Sun, by John Rogers, combines glass and metallic streamers to recall the unpredictable weather patterns of Colorado.

Metallic streamers are a repeated element in these station art pieces. You'll see them again when I get to Sheridan Station.

Next up is Lamar Station and this one will be very urban. I have the options of walking back south to skirt a golf course that the Lakewood Gulch runs through, follow a residential street that parallels the light rail, or go north and take Colfax east. For several reasons, I choose Colfax.