Dakota hogback

Red Rocks natural amphitheater. Later, I'll take my camera up there. A person that I know redesigned the whole place. He was head architect for the project. I was against messing with it. They could only hurt what I love about it. 

How wrong I was. 

Personally very nice but politically the architect is an annoying and simplistic partisan hack. Utterly unreasonable sanctimonious and uncompromising. And he cannot take a compliment with ease. This goes to show, it proves actually, people are top conservatives in the thing that they know and liberal with things that they do not understand, like other people's money. The guy really knows architecture. He completely redid the whole place and it looks like nothing happened. Scooped out underneath the entire thing and build a world down there. An interesting and beautiful and engaging world. It's perfect. I could cry. He read my emotion and had to cut it off. He couldn't take the full compliment. On everything else that I see, he's a dumbass.

The original thing that I loved is ruined, but not because of the re-design. That turned out very nice. Incredibly conservative. I'll show it later.  It had to happen. So many people. New rules. No more climbing around. The place is locked out for concerts a lot more than before and tons more rules. 

Inside the park the first rock formation you see is this, and the excitement of climbing around on them, through them, under them, begins to build. Dogs in the car get excited.

Coming closer you can park, used to, and take a path to the back of this formation. It is an upheaval of sandstone. Evidence of real dinosaurs are all over the place in here. pressed into the layers. 

This is my photo. The second Belgian behind this first formation. The back is more interesting and more fun than the front. Smaller than most female Belgians. Daintier than most. A little princess, actually. She did not like climbing the rocks. This is as far as she'd go.

The main slab seen from the front is eaten away at the top in the back forming a rim, a kind of weak roof and bats live under right behind where the dog is standing. A wall goes straight up quite high and intersects the red wall shown at near 45 degree angle.

Barry, my older brother could wedge his body inside the crack between the two upright slabs and use pressure applied against both walls to climb up the crack. More like a spider than crawling up. More like a wine opener that looks like a jumping jack. Bending both arms then straightening them, both legs then straightening them he'd work his way up the crack, taught me how to pull that amazing feat, and we'd all end up victoriously on top. Glorious. Except for the dog who remained on the bottom and barked its head off unable to bear the separation and unwilling to join us. On that one.

But I want to tell you what is outside the park. We'll just skirt around this formation and slip out of the park. I'll talk about that later because it's beautiful and it's fun. Maybe when I take some hummingbird feeders up there and shame them for ignoring their incredible hummingbird population up there. Certainly a draw for visitors, don't you think? Their visitor center has one feeder but it was empty when I looked. The new restaurant has the perfect situation, and I mean perfect, but they choose not to care. 

Leaving the park, bottom right, a road crosses another road that connects Morrison with I-70 well west of the city. The road coming out of Red Rocks park crosses that connector and joins another road that crosses over a ridgeback outrageously sticking right up, with all sorts of amazing things on it, places to rock climb, explore, picnic, find bonsai trees growing out of rocks, desert plants, and evidence of dinosaurs.

It's tricky, the road is. You have to know where you are going. And these days, who knows, they might even have this most fun thing of all closed off to special appointments, or perhaps special people.

You curve out of the park, cross the confusing intersection, avoid the connector highway and take the smaller road nearest the hill 

Ack!

Far right.

Clear sailing up the hill while the other wider road goes to Morrison.

Up, up, up, the hill, here's the fun part.

It's like a hairpin. You turn and now heading back the direction you came, down, the other side of the ridgeback. The entire plaines opens up to view.

The flip. The top. This is a great place to park and explore the tippy top of the ridge. You can look both ways back to the park, and onto Jefferson County and it looks for all the world like dinosaur territory, it is so very easy to imagine them grazing across the whole horizon. The view is incredible. 

But we are not minding that. Our attention is on the ridgeback itself. On the flip side going down the edge is exposed loose shale.

My parents house is a couple miles from here. This was our main way home. The long winding goof around non-highway not straight line route home. Each time I would insist we stop to knack shale in search of troglodytes and ferns and such. At least fifty times. Okay fine! Forty times. 

We kept tools specifically for this in the trunk. Barry was not interested in any of that. His tolerance was not lasting. He was fine for stoping, climbing around sliding down the shale like surfing, exploring the ridge, but not interested in examining shale, loosening it, splitting it. 

I never did find anything. 

I was certain I would. 

Certain! 

Years. But I never did.

Now things have changed. The high influx of visitors demanded it. Further exploration by people who know what they're doing, know what to look for, know how to find things, how to remove layers exposing things I never could with my meager if persistent attempts.

They removed entire layers of shale in the area I played to expose an older layer where giant footprints are found

This is right where I kept knacking and knacking and knacking my buns off and not discovering anything.

Now it's fenced off.

I was actually sitting on top of a giant dinosaur footprint knacking shale looking for evidence of prehistoric life. And now my spot is fenced off. A set of extremely large footprings, with tracks of smaller footprints, like chicken footprints but bigger, crossing back and forth.

You cannot even drive the switchback anymore, I don't think. The most fun thing of all, cut off and now just looks doled out miserly. 

You take a new highway out there and park at the edge and hike up to the place where we played. What a bummer.

All the fun is gone.

[This post will have one edit and that's it.]