May | June 2006 Volume 80 Issue 3 |
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My Colorado “Colorado doesn't have a real spring,” my friend from Illinois griped while boasting of his gradually greening parks, gentle rains, and the burst of color that comes every April. “Everything here is snowy one day and green the next. You don't have a real spring. It goes straight from winter to summer.” I had to protest; he'd never spent enough time to savor a real Colorado spring—the kind that lasts for months. My annual spring ritual begins in February, playing hide and seek with tiny crocus poking through a thin blanket of snow in Front Range gardens. Their hardy purple snow-capped petals foretell the arrival of warmer weather and longer days. But spring in Colorado is not a gentle affair. Like our mountains and plains, it is rugged—savage in its beauty, capable of drowning rains, instant blizzards snowing us in for days, Chinook winds devouring the drifts just as quickly, and streets filled with rivers of running water. Eventually the snow recedes and trees blossom, spring creeping up the hills. That is the real magic of a Colorado spring—if we recognize spring by the receding of winter snow, then we can follow it up the mountains all through June. Mountainsides flow with waves of fresh snowmelt in a delicious mix of freezing mud and alpine flowers soaking in icy baths. We can escape mid-summer heat in the shadowed recesses of our stony fourteeners where spring might arrive for a brief week, just in time to herald the oncoming winter. For six months in Colorado, spring is only a short car trip away. If only my friend were so lucky!
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