Hanging On

In my Sunday hike in the Bluffs (Palmer Park) I noticed a lot of erosion. It’s been a wet winter, but one erosion channel was very disturbing. It was as wide as a one lane road.

I think what happened was a flash flood tore through there, upended a very large dead tree and the space held by the roots of that tree opened up the channel. The roots were amazing.

It doesn’t seem to take a lot for a tree to make it in the semi-arid land of the high plains of Colorado. The juniper that is “my tree” seems to have nothing to grow by, just looking at its roots, yet it’s been hanging on like that as long as I’ve known it and that’s 50 years. The branch that comes out from the top is three times larger than it was when I first met my tree. As a model for how to live life, I cannot imagine anyone better.