Being home for the week brought views of mountains, blue skies, avalanches, feet of snow, and warmth. Though my instinct was to run to Red Mountain, the site of my last home phenology blog, I chose to snowshoe in a new area and immerse myself in a new environment. Sunlight Ski Resort, the ski mountain in my town has an area near it for backcountry skiing and hiking so I chose to investigate that area more. Millions of years ago, glaciers moved through the Roaring Fork Valley cutting through the Rocky Mountains. These glaciers cut through granite and gneiss formed during the Precambrian Era. This in addition to the presence of molten rock and volcanoes in the area, has laid the foundation for the soils now supporting Colorado Blue Spruce, Aspen, and Douglas Fir up in the ski area. The Rocky Mountains hold such a rich geologic history that one hill could hold a completely different bedrock than its neighbor. As I walked through the forest and snow, I took note of the plethora of Service-Berry bushes in the understory surely providing food and sustenance for the Grizzly Bears who graze in that area, as well as the trails of Snowshoe Hare tracks breaking the untouched fallen snow. Because it is still early in the Spring Season, and there has been such intense snowfall in the past month, I did not see many birds. I did, however, sight a Lark Bunting perched in an Aspen: a reminder of home and its ways.
It is interesting looking at the biological makeup of Colorado in comparison to the Burlington area, and specifically Centennial Woods because some aspects are incredibly similar while others are completely different. The presence of Birch is replaced with their doppelganger, the Aspen, and Eastern White Pines are replaced with Colorado Blue Spruce. Also, because the Roaring Fork Valley is much higher in elevation the diveristy within the forests is much more limited and specialized to adapt to extreme exposure and weather, unlike the more Hardwood, woodland makeup of Centennial Woods.