Monday, January 12, 2015

The Mozaic Restaurant, Palmer Lake and environs of Castle Rock

Mixing a good cocktail is a work of art. 

I still cannot make my favorite drink, Cuba Libre. Not as well as the guy did in Mexico nor as well as the guy at Ship's Tavern here in Denver. I have no idea what they are doing that is different, and I asked. Same with Bloody Mary. One person I know makes them better tasting than anybody else and when you ask him he says nothing special.

This is the the Bloody Mary at Mozaic. It is reliably excellent. I notice a lot of celery seed floating around in there with black pepper. 


Joe drove us down Palmer Lake from Denver. Past the outlet mall, past Ikea, past Castle Rock, then an offramp earlier than the previous times. It seems this ramp goes into Palmer Lake obliquely, from the north not from the east, parallel with the highway the length of the foothills. I was anticipating a shot of the whole town at once to capture the sense of a multitude of small churches that impressed me before with only a few cars at each church on a Sunday, with houses sprinkled around and the most amazing rock formations in their back yards and nearly so many cars as the churches.  

But that did not happen. We slid in past the bars clipping the edge. And it appears the whole lake is drained.

What happened to the fish in the lake? Were they treated humanely and transferred? Surely the lake had fish, or else what would be the point? Now I saw excavating trucks along the edges. Trucks that look like they're built for terraforming. Seemed impossible. The place is named after the Lake. Take that away and then what? Palmer dry Ravine? Palmer Lost the Water Dispute? Palmer Garigue. That's a word I learned from Principles of Gardening. It means a dry harsh limestone area and the type plants therein where climate in hot and harsh even though it might be near the Mediterranean. Some are formed by degrading marquis communities, another type that tends to form along valleys. 

I did not take any pictures on the way in because nothing fit my sense of composition. Nothing would work. But I did take photos on the way out passing by the same building that for some reason seemed more photogenic in the opposite direction. All those photos are taken from the car either though a windshield or through a side window. The weather turned cold. The sun seemed to withdraw behind a smothering carpet of cloud. We are in the cloud. All the photos are muted with atmosphere that is usually absent. It was a most unusual day of pure gray sky with us right there in the clouds. 

I got out of the car early to walk up to Mozaic and snap photos as a train passed through the valley, and show what it looks like out there by itself with nothing around it but nature. On any other day the photos will be different and even on a day gray as can be I was stunned all over again with beauty.


Palmer Lake is at the bottom. Coming straight home via Family Circus style circuitous desultory meandering through residential areas, the patches of green, reveals homes and properties for sale with the most incredible formations right there on their acreage. Impressive custom homes built for the location. Every corner you turn, every curve you follow is stunning.






The day before this, the hairdresser and I hit it off instantly. Gordy is the most gregarious barber I've ever encountered. I struck the right chord with his first cuing note.

"How are you today?"

"I feel lucky."

"Why?

"Because I got you." 

"Thank you. But why lucky for getting me?"

"Because that means I didn't get 'Cold Fingers'." 

"Who's Cold Fingers?"

Bink, bink bink, concealed finger signal pointing to the woman at the chair next to him. He tightened with suppressed laughter. There's nothing like dissing on somebody's co-worker by way of icebreaker. We are instant confederates. 

We talked about everything in haste because they were busy and our time will be short. We talked about everything including "black brunches" in the news. We talked about everything including omelets. I said, "I make the best omelets that I've eaten so those off the menu for brunches. Nobody can match them. So they are always a disappointment." He said. "I never order omelets either because nobody makes them as will as I do. I used to work at a restaurant that did best brunch ever" We each knew we found a kindred spirit.

I should never have scrambled eggs outside of home either for the same reason. I make mine as a fast failed sauce and they are wet as I choose to have them. Everywhere else, and I mean everywhere, scrambled eggs will be dry. Reliably dry. Its a thing. Omelets and scrambled eggs, once you are expert, then nobody can touch your own. It is a problem that comes with excellence.

They just cannot. 




This is on the way back from Mozaic Restaurant.



Some of the photos are blurred but I like them that way. The whole thing is about privacy anyway. The car was moving. We can stop any time we want, but there is so much to take in, we'd be stopping every minute.

s

I like this one a lot.


Too fast for you, BooBoo, now shoo.






Now that's a garden. Imagine a garden so splendid that your little home is the gnome-decoration to it, and your little home is a palace. 


People living amidst geological splendor, their landscaping carefully chosen.







I could keep going like this forever. There are hundreds of such photos, all taken on a single drive in short distance west of Castle Rock away from the highway and nestled into the foothills.  It is the January 11th 2015, the dead of winter, and I am blown away by the beauty in holding. 



On an earlier trip down by these parts between Denver and Colorado Springs around Castle Rock, my dog showed signs of the car getting to her. She would start to make foamy saliva and that told me her stomach was feeling uneasy, so I pulled over and opened the door. She flew out in the right direction, the woods, not the highway. From her point of view that emergency stop is our destination so I resigned myself to play awhile with the dog.

Beavers backed up a rivulet and created a swamp in a fold of the land with a very broad margin around it of dampened soil and slick black mud. My dog took off so fast through the mud she slipped on her back and slid with her paws swimming the air frantically trying to twist her body for foothold, but she slid the full length mud covering her body with mud and I laughed so hard at that dog I nearly split my sides open, and so cheerfully amused with my laugher and joy of being out of the car, she circled back up the hill and took another run and another slide just to keep me laughing at her. She discovered a new game. That guaranteed a very long side-trip getting the dog cleaned up enough to get back in the car and on to our real destination.





The view goes on and on like this endlessly. You imagine all the wildlife in there. 

South of all this, in line with Palmer and with this, is Monument Colorado. You can imagine why it is named such. And further still is USAF Academy, and then Colorado Springs. The whole length between the two cities is being built up incredibly fast. Throughout all this area we see property being divided for development. There is still a chance to get a piece of all this.

There are some 173 or so photos here in slideshow form, here in Photobucket's storybook form. (adblock must be off for it to work)

Those photos are all optimized for internet use, reduced to 800 width for fast loading.

The full-size photos of some 3,000+ Width , 177 larger photos here that you can choose slide show or storybook if you like. 

22 comments:

Synova said...

Beautiful. Thanks!

chickelit said...

Celery seed would be a nice addition to my faux bloody mary. I already add ground pepper. Thanks for the idea.

I never much cared for the whole look of red rocks in the southern Front Range (Red Rocks Amphitheater is an exception). I believe that the state was named for those peculiar rocks by the early Spanish). I prefer the look of the Flat Irons and Longs Peak. Also, there is a very spectacular rock formation north of Fort Collins. It's on private property and not associated with any park. It's a layered sedimentary slab tilted upwards by the foothills. It always looked to me like the very edge of the Great Plains heaved upwards by the beginning of the Rockies.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

The question after the game was will Payton come back for another shot at the championship.

virgil xenophon said...

Totally agree with your distaste for dry scrambled eggs/omelets, Chip. Do you use milk or soda water?

Do you use a tall glass for your Cuba Libres? (the sort bars use, relatively small in diameter compared to a water glass) Might make the difference, although lately I've been using some slightly larger round ones from Mexico with square bottoms and taste seems the same.. If I feel like splurging I much prefer the Jamaican rum Appleton White Using cheaper rums is not necessarily bad for use in coke, but each islands product does impart a different taste. Rums seem to vary more in taste than any other spirit, imho.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Claim: #JeSuisCharlie Most popular hashtag ever in @twitter history http://dlvr.it/83ZG4W

chickelit said...

Rums seem to vary more in taste than any other spirit, imho.

Do you find this true comparing white rums or more so the aged ones?

chickelit said...

Lem said...Claim: #JeSuisCharlie Most popular hashtag ever

In the future, all next big things will boast "We're bigger than #JeSuisCharlie now"...

Aridog said...

Thank you Chip Ahoy for showing me the Colorado of my youth. Good job. I've moved north in my affection these days (Montana) but the basic imagery is the same. Natural formations that amaze. Simple as that. My photos do not rival yours, so there's that. :-)

Aridog said...

Rum is probably the only strong spirit that I have not tried to the extent of evaluation one from the other. I am pretty sure that is a good thing. Now that I'm back to non-drinking I need no further temptation :-)

Chip Ahoy said...

Now that I've been through this photoset of 180 pictures a number of times it suddenly occurred what the formations look like, just sitting there like giant pieces of sculpture, with trees between them and dry wheat-length weeds and brush in large clumps. Each one looks positively like a contrived painting. They do. They remind me of Takashi Amano style aquariums. Each one is a vignette of "Central large piece of interest, background, mid ground, foreground. I see each one of these in an aquarium. (I could photoshop them and put little fish all around, it would look exactly like an Takashi Amano aquarium.

Chip Ahoy said...

Joe brought a grocery bag of oranges that grow in his back yard in Phoenix. They are the best oranges I've ever eaten.

He said he's losing interest in the trees. They're a pain in the butt. I think has the whole thing flooded twice a year and after that the trees are on their own.

I wonder why he doesn't go all Edward Sissorhands on them but I just have to accept some people are not into gardening even when they happen to come by owning something extraordinary like that. Letting it go to its natural state invites animals including hummingbirds and snakes and vermin, raccoons and owls and what have you so it's not 100% bad.

Unknown said...

Very Nice. Your photos make our bleak winter look tolerable.
I have to report to Jury Duty in Longmont today. No red rocks on the way - but a lovely view of Longs.

ricpic said...

Re: the views from the restaurant. Mountains are magic. A mountain outside a window and I'm happy.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

"In the future, all next big things will boast "We're bigger than #JeSuisCharlie now"..."

Doh!

Calypso Facto said...

Love your appreciation of beauty, Chip. Thanks for sharing!

Beware building your "gnome-decoration" under the rocks.

Chip Ahoy said...

I spelled beavers "bevers."

Joe corrected a mispronunciation and I told Joe that I learned English puh-honically. He folded in laughter at the stupidest joke and that just encourages. I said that I found a book Hooked on Puh-honics but I didn't find the cd that goes with it.

And it's true. To an extent. I feel that way. I was always the worst for receiving fingerspelling due to sounding it in chunks as it goes. By hearing the little pieces causing me to get stuck on the stupidest easiest thing, like "Phoenix" or abbreviations for "saint" and "street," that sounds like "st" when you see it so that "stbernard" doesn't make any sense and neither does "bernardst." Receiving phonetically really is the way to go but you must have some small degree of flexibility and apparently I didn't because I kept getting stuck on the same stupid things.

If I was with somebody else who can hear and said what I saw they have it figured out before I do. Their answers back are faster than I am and make more sense than mine and all that is inflexible phonetic reception.

One day in the car I started talking to my brother that way, vocalize every silent letter as if it is an ordinary word, like "pass me a keh-nife." Or, "Before it gets dark and turns nyg-het." And do that for every sentence speaking phonetically. Making ourselves sound retarded but assertively so as if unaware we're so wrong. I'm impressed how fast my younger brother goes along with my nonsense and devises his own explicit phonetic rendering. And then how fast my dad caught onto our game and changed his manner of speech to accommodate turning everything spoken funny. That's how it sounds in your head when receiving fingerspelling phonetically.

Chip Ahoy said...

There is a thing I would like to point out in some of the pictures. This is lower altitude, as you go higher behind all this up into the mountains what I'm talking about gets more intense. And I noticed it one time on private property. That is, on some of the rock formations pine trees are growing. They're smaller than trees at ground level. That is the beginning of bonsai trees as found in nature, right there, bonsai trees in nature.

Once you climb up there you see more little ones. And once you go higher you see more and more extreme examples.

And you realize the roots are extensive. They follow the cracks in the rocks and dig in. They take sharp corners and send threads into every patch of packed dirt, they explore every crack where they landed and grew. Getting even a small tree off the cliff is a massive undertaking with extensive damage to roots. Bonsai tree hunters actually do this. They bring the tree back and wrap the surviving roots around rock or bring some of the rock with them, wire the roots around rock packed similarly with soil, trim the tree to match the roots removed, and keep the tree alive similar to its state when found except now cared for inside a shallow tray. One time on private property I saw a dozen such trees around me. The wind was such blowing up the mountain, the ridge folded and channelled the wind through trees struggling for life growing outwardly then bending straight up, a treasure in bonsais right there, but forget about getting them off the rocks.

"So how do you take care of your bonsai pine trees?"

"I create an incessant howling continuously tormenting freezing cold wind to blow past them with their trays attached sideways on its edge. And occasionally spray water through it. Just like I found them."

Trooper York said...

Great post Chip.

I love the photos.

I expect to see Captain Brittles and Sgt. Quincannon riding by.

Amartel said...

Starkly beautiful countryside. I've only driven through Colorado once, many years ago on a road trip. Came in from Wyoming and stayed at Steamboat Springs, then on to Vail, Boulder, and then around Denver and down 285 (gorgeous) toward Taos. I need to go back and see more of the western part of the state.

Aridog said...

Chip ... have you ever been to Yellowstone Park and seen the HooDoos?

Aridog said...

More HooDoos

Aridog said...

Dang it...to see the first HooDoo image, right click then click on open in new tab line. Somebody doesn't like hot linking :-(