The Annual Great Escape

After a hot May we've had a rare cool June to date. Cool being a relative term as it has been well into the 90's just about every day -- still a great relief from the triple digits that are our June normal. We are forcast to be approaching 110 this time next week, as excessively hot as we've been deliciously moderate through mid-June. It appears we are escaping just in time.

There is a strategy to desert life for most of us. Some folks just plain LOVE the heat and stay here, uncomplainingly, year round. Then you have your snow birds, arriving in the fall from somewhere up north about the time they'd need to turn on their furnace, reveling in sending Christmas cards with photos of them in shorts and t-shirts on the golf course to their pals stuck in the deep freeze, packing up and heading home the first time it approaches 85 degrees. And then there are those of us who simply do our best to get a serious break from the heat come late June, that interminable period after the serious heat sets in with months since the last rain and before the relief of the monsoon arrives.

We head to Colorado where we have a place up at 8600 feet in the Rockies. It's family land on my husband's side, and up until seven years ago there was a cabin he'd helped his Dad build as a teenager forty years before. The Hayman fire took the cabin the first year we were together. I never got to see it, but it was clear how much the place meant to him. A few years later he took me on a Colorado road trip, the last stop being his five acres adjacent to Pike National Forest. The fire spared most of his trees -- ponderosas, spruce, Douglas firs, quaking aspens -- and the views were still spectacular. I could see he needed to be able to keep this, his favorite place on earth, active in his life. We bought a 33 foot Airstream and parked it permanently where the cabin had stood up against a wall of red decomposing granite. A 12x24 foot deck along side gives us wonderful outdoor living space. We have several choice spots to hang our hammock and read. Or nap. Thank goodness the fire didn't take the outhouse.



My husband's old Peace Corps pal comes every year from Cleveland to house and dog sit for us while we eek out the better part of three weeks in that cooler mountain pine-scented air. We bird watch different birds, keep our eyes peeled for deer and elk, do a little fishing in the stocked lake down the hill, try to identify the rampant wildflowers, and hike the surrounding wilderness. The stars are so bright and seem so low that you almost feel you need to duck your head on those middle of the night runs to the outhouse. It's a glorious time and a cool respite from the cruelest heat of the desert.

If I can "borrow" some WiFi somewhere (no Internet connection, no TV, no phone, cell or otherwise) I'll next post from the middle of nowhere, but somewhere wonderful, during our Colorado summer sojourn.