Moominmama's Adventures

  Wherein Moominmama takes her foldable kayak out for its 2023 inaugural outing and leaves you with a pictorial story... Life in all its manifestations. Happy start of summer my friends!

In which Moominmama reaches the foot of the Rocky Mountains, experiencing the beautiful highs, and one big low... Moominmama is in a verdant green valley near Steamboat Springs, with the Rockies at my back. It's been surprisingly challenging to get out hiking because so much water is flowing down from the mountains that many roads and trails are off limits. In one case, I added a couple miles to my hike because I had to park a distance from the trailhead due to a washed out road. In another, the trail was closed at a bridge in danger of being undermined by heavy flows. But when I do get out, the views and the wildflowers are spectacular. Look at this beauty here! There are also daffodil yellow flowers called Trout Lilies whose petals curl back into delicate rings, revealing the hanging stamens. I've not gotten all that high into the mountains, where snow is still melting at a furious pace, but I did try a trail with an unpromising name (Uranium Mine Trail) that turned out to of...

  Wherein Moominmama returns to a familiar part of Colorado and learns more about the Ute people who call this area home... The Ute people consider themselves a mountain people. Given Colorado was the center of their territory, they had to be! But they made intelligent use of the varied ecosystems that evolved with wildly differing altitudes in the mountains and valleys. The Ute were early adopters of the horse (traded or stolen from the Spanish), and they traveled from place to place to take maximum advantage of pleasant temperatures and bountiful resources.  "If you couldn't move in 10 minutes, you had too much stuff," one elder is quoted at the Southern Ute Cultural Center and Museum. While Moominmama has seriously downsized, she can't quite meet that standard!  Among the interesting facts I learned: the Ute people harvested the cambium of the common Ponderosa pines in early spring when it provided a sweet sap, a surprising amount of calcium and other nutrients at ...

  In which Moominmama learns about the fossil record of Fruita, Colorado, and what a difference a little elevation can make... The town of Fruita, Colorado, is home to a unique collection of dinosaur and other Jurassic era fossils. So much so that the small city has selected a "town dinosaur" (Ceratosaurus), and several other species are named in its honor: Fruitadens, Fruitachampsa (related to crocodiles) and Fruitafossor (a small rodent-like mammal.) Still a region of active research by paleontologists, Fruita is home to the Fruita Paleo Area, a one-half square mile spot of rock, once a river bed, where an astonishing number of finds were uncovered in the 1970s, including the chicken-sized Fruitadens, modeled at left, dating back roughly 152 million years.  Other finds include, but are not limited to: footprints, eggshells and burrows, 10 types of early mammals, a pterosaur flying reptile, two theropod dinosaurs (Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus), two sauropod dinosaurs (Apatosa...