The Field:

It was a massive day with three destinations! First, Red Rocks Park, where we visited the amphitheater and then hiked a 1.5 mile trading post loop trail around Frog, Sinking Ship, Gog, Magog, and all the other rocks whose names I can't recall. It was a glorious day, sunny and mild, and the views of the plains were made dramatic by the striped red rocks jutting up at odd angles. Even to someone who knows next to nothing about geology, it's obvious that there's a lot of geologic fun to be had in this area, with the weathered stones' many layers -- and their sharp angle -- hinting at ages past and the forces that have shaped the landscape. It's a place to consider the concept of Deep Time. Some of those layers now exposed remember before the age of grass and other flowering plants that now surround them, before even the conifers that cling to opportune cracks in the rock and further split it with their roots, to a time when forests of scaly, two-headed Lepidodendron trees mantled the flanks of the Ancestral Rockies, before water and wind and roots eroded them to dust. We saw a few pretty blue birds at the bird feeders, which weren't necessarily "blue birds" per se; they might have been mountain blue birds, or western scrub jays. They weren't the dark, iridescent blue of a Steller's jay, but a softer, sky blue.

We had left the house about thirty minutes later than planned and had a lot of ground to cover, so we hurried on to Dinosaur Ridge. I learned that this very site, only a few miles from home, was the place many of the coolest and most commonly known dinosaurs were discovered, including Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and one of my personal favorites, Allosaurus. We didn't have much time to spend, so we just hung out at the very cool visitor's center/gift shop with the big, imaginatively painted stegosaurs, and stopped at several points of interest along the road. One spot, once a flat bed of mud, now a rock wall tilted at a high angle, displays dozens of fossilized dinosaur tracks, with foot-wide, three-toed tracks left by an Iguanodon or something similar, and smaller, bird-like tracks of a carnivorous dinosaur. The Interior Seaway that once drowned much of North America left ripples on the sand of its shores, where tube-shaped trace fossils from the tunneling of worms and other small animals can also be seen, and at another site Apatosaur-like tracks can be viewed from the bottom, as bulges in the rock left when the heavy dinosaur stepped above, deforming the mud layers below. In Deep Time, a mountain range rose and weathered away, a great sea rolled in and receded, and a new mountain range grew up. This place has been a steamy jungle, a coastline, and now a shrubland on a ridge. In this time scale, the lives of individual species -- forget individual organisms -- are too brief to be remembered, except for those lucky few who become rocks themselves. And then humans came and built roads and a big amphitheater nearby. Weird.

Finally, we continued on the road up to the town of Evergreen and Evergreen Lake for ice skating, which was fun if a little scary at first. And awkward. And somewhat hard on the ankles. The temperature dropped as the sky darkened and we skated by stadium lights on the shore. Pushing each other around in the chair was the most fun. Do we do strenuous outdoor activities in the dead of winter just to put our bodies and minds in the proper condition to receive hot chocolate with whipped cream afterwards, like some sort of purification before a sacrament? Maybe not, but that is a definite plus. I managed to get us home without falling asleep at the wheel, but only just.

I've always been struck by how much of our civilization can at once appear to be new and well maintained and completely abandoned. My fiancé and I went for a walk today down the hill along Walnut Creek, where there is a hodgepodge of open space, golf course, and office buildings that appear to have been dropped randomly on an otherwise untamed landscape. It was cold, and the wind made it frigid. The scarf my love made for me for Christmas performed admirably, but even its powers could not contend with the wind forever. Nonetheless, it was a good walk, and we managed to get through half of it before the sun went down and the cold became unbearable. We walked west on the path from the Westview recreation center past scenes of native grasses and golf course greens and the occasional cottonwood, with the sun in our eyes. Despite the sun, it was a little hazy and the slightest wind was freezing, in true January style. But for the occasional private plane overhead and cars in the distance, it was quiet, the plants dormant, the animals absent.

Then we came to the end of the open space and the trail at Simms Street and crossed over to a place I've often driven past but never actually been. To the left there was a stand of trees in shallow, frozen water with many small birds in them, the first sign of any animals we'd seen. And to the right, an empty parking lot and an office building. Two Subaru's parked near the front were the only sign of any human presence. There was a pristine sidewalk between the parking lot and the overly manicured bluegrass that surrounded the facility. I could easily believe that we were the first to ever bother walking on it. Also adjacent to the sidewalk were several small buildings of mysterious purpose. My mate and I both have often wondered just what goes on inside office buildings, but never wanted to find out firsthand. Just then, the distinct feeling was that nothing went on inside this building. These places are like ruins, built long ago by a strange people possessed of unknowable motives. Built, and then mysteriously deserted, left to be watered by automatic sprinklers and guarded by silent robotic security cameras. Just as confounding as and no more lively than an ancient monolith, kept in impeccable condition for reasons beyond comprehension. There were obviously people here once, but why did they build this place, and why did they just as soon abandon it? We knew that on any given weekday you would likely find the parking lot full of cars, yet even then I'd wager you could scan the landscape and not see a single human. The place could have been dropped on the ground by a passing spaceship.

We made our way around the building, picking our way over the unnecessary lawn, which obviously served only to attract geese and store their feces. Behind the building were -- guess what -- stone monoliths! They presided over an eerily empty park-like area for employees. Beyond it the road ended in a useless little circle. A barbed wire fence formed the boundary of the premises. We found a spot where the fence's bottom wire was missing, and slipped under. The creek and an expanse of short-cropped grass stretched ahead, toward grassy hills and the mountains. Ahead and to the right was a building of even more mysterious purpose, which sits shrouded from view by a screen of pine trees planted when it was constructed several years ago. We probably weren't technically supposed to be walking back there, but we didn't see any no trespassing signs. We walked across the field and rejoined the creek, which now had a two-track road running parallel to it that appeared to still be in use. On the creek were more animal signs -- tracks in the snow. The tracks were a few inches across and had five toes -- a raccoon, or a badger perhaps, I'm not sure. The road there made a handsome trail, offering great views of the rolling grassland and mountains as it ran along the creek and passed through a stand of cottonwoods before turning up a hill. I wish it were an official trail open to the public. By the time we reached the bend where the road left the creek the sun was down and the cold was getting more bothersome, but I felt obligated to follow it as far as the top of the small hill, so we briefly went up for a look. Nice view. There were coyote, or maybe fox tracks in the hard patches of snow persisting on the road.

We hurried back, trudging through the biting wind. It was painfully cold. From the back, the office building vaguely resembled a ziggurat, adding to its air of mystery and desolation. I think I've always had a sense of this quality, but I first identified it outside the Standley Lake water treatment plant a few years ago. It can be seen in office buildings, railroad tracks, industrial sites, the empty streets of a suburban neighborhood (especially new ones) and in the deserted and artificial environs of many a video game. I've never known what to make of it.