Cherry Creek: Lincoln Road to Hess Road

 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....

--- Pride of Place: Living Memorials ---

We have just celebrated All Saints' Day and Dia de los muertos - the day of the dead. Almost every culture has had some kind of recognition of the dead - of ancestors and powerful figures of the past. Why?

Why not let "auld acquaintance be forgot?"

The last two sections of Pride of Place: Huwerl Thornton, Junior's "Living Memorials: Honoring Your Family" and Kristin Wetmore's "The Amistad Story: Commemorating a Local Narrative" are explorations of co-memoration - the remembering together of past peoples and events.

I am first a sociologist. My primary trainings and interests are peoples and cultures and you will see in this blog many pointers to events and peoples that are important and salient to whatever culture I encounter.

There are many elements of strong, healthy cultures and two are folkways and history. These things can be toxic. Remember (always remember) the character of Nazi Germany, endued in a pervasive and overwhelming folk tradition invented for political purposes - murderous in intent, and remember (always remember) that we have often allowed the same poison into the United State's psyche.

But cultures need anchors in the universe and the greatest anchors are the sense of belonging in time and place.

We remember our past in gravestones, statues, murals, street and place names, and buildings.

The Browns were intimately connected with Denver so when you see "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" or "Titanic" you can think about our Avoca and Brown Palace (even though the Brown palace was another Brown, Molly did stay there a week after the Titanic disaster.)

We remember our ancestors because they provide personal connections in time and place. We remember local and national heroes because they anchor us in the world. We remember events of the past, both good and bad, because they are the stuff that sews us into the fabric of the universe. Our existence may be the product of spirit or the Higgs field, but what we are is the product of our histories.

Can you reconstruct where you came from and where your community came from in the memorials that exist and are publicly visible in your community? Even if you and your family are not originally from where you now live, can you see traces of your culture in your new home?

My family has produced politicians, actors, directors, inventors, and ballerinas. I am connected through them to the churning washing machine (Nicholas Van Zandt invented it in 1809), Citizen Kane (Philip Van Zandt played Mr. Rawlston), and the opera Lakme (Leo Delibes composed it specifically for Marie Van Zandt). I am connected to VanZandt county Texas which once tried to secede from the state of Texas but decided to have a party instead, and I am connected by ancestry to the national hero of Germany, Arminius, who trashed a third of the Roman military machine with a few hundred German woodsmen and secured a lasting freedom for his people. Arguably, he's the reason that Martin Luther was able to escape the clutches of another world power, the Holy Roman Catholic Church. My mother's ancestors, the Forehands and Fordhams, were law men of renown and friends of the Younger gang, who were either lawless or heroes according to who you talk to. The Saint James Hotel, where I lived in Selma, was named after Jesse and was a reminder of this anchor I have in time and place. My great grandfather was a lawyer. He was known by his initials: J. J. Forehand. "J. J." of course, stood for "Jesse James".

You are established in the past by your own history. We hold our pasts in us. We are living memorials.