Crazy Monkey Ranch

With the driveway officially staked out and well trodden upon, our major goal for this visit was complete.  So we decided to return to Falcon a bit early.  Plus the forecast said today was going to be cold, and I’m colded out for a bit.

The weather these last couple days was not really bad. Last night was windy until midnight or so, then was calm the rest of the night.  I actually got a decent night’s sleep for once.  Well about as good as I can in a tent, lying on the ground.  I’m getting old.

This morning I went around and tried to be artistic, for the first time since we started visiting the property back in November.  This trip I took my Kiev medium format film camera, which always forces me to at least try to be artistic, rather than just snap shooting.  I walked around briefly and found 11 scenes (one I exposed wrong and had to take again) that looked pretty and captured their soul forever.  I may try to develop the film tonight, but I probably won’t have time to make prints for a couple days.  There is so much beauty on the ranch that I’m sure I will get some more art photos over the years to come.

When we haven’t just spent an hour and a half driving down and then have to spend another hour and a half driving home in the same day, the ranch is surprisingly easy to just casually walk around. I didn’t even bother putting on the combat boots when I went for my photo stroll.

When we were leaving today I decided to explore the surrounding roads a bit more than we had before.  We stumbled upon one of the best 4×4 jeep trails I have ever been on.  It had huge mud ruts, hills, curves, large rocks, washouts, everything that makes offroading fun.  This jeep trail is inappropriately dubbed County Road 651. 651 would be the road we would reach if we drove out via our west easement.  As fun as the road is to drive, I suspect it would get old pretty quick, especially since we don’t own a 4×4 vehicle. So, we will stick with working on grading the north easement instead.  At least at first.

Then we tried to get to Rye via CR 652, which Google says is possible.  We came to a dead end at a guy’s house where he was skinning some creature..  He told us there was no way to Rye other than the freeway, so we turned around and headed back to the freeway and toward Falcon.

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Dog shown for scale.

Today’s chore has been to de-cactus and grade the driveway, so we’ll have an easier time of getting into and out of the property on our return visits. The dog has a new nickname, now. “Cactus Foot.” It’s also a “medical condition” because we keep asking her if she HAS cactus foot. She seems to be adapting, although she does look at us like we’re crazy for walking back and forth and back and forth all the time.

After a short nap (3 or so hours), we awoke to look at the sky. I’ve never seen as many stars in the sky, even in a planetarium. I can’t wait until there’s some sort of cool celestial event that we can watch from our front yard, in the deep black night sky.

We have driven down to the ranch again today and plan to stay for almost a week.  Until Saturday or Sunday.  We took Nulla along with us, and it will be interesting to see how she deals with sleeping in a tent with lots of howling wind around.  We stopped by the lumber yard in Walsenburg and picked up some stakes and flagging so I can try to stake out where the driveway and easements go, and we went shopping for groceries at the Walsenburg Safeway.

We hadn’t been to the Safeway before and were fairly pleased.  It is small and old but it was clean and well stocked, it should be a good place to pick up standard groceries.  If we need larger quantities of anything we can always go to Pueblo or the Springs and buy in bulk.

This afternoon is windy as can be again, weather.com says around 22mph.  Hopefully the wind will dye down for the night, but we have weathered worse.  At least today is nice and warm.

Plus the internet is working nicely today.  We haven’t broken the modem yet (again), and we are getting 2 bars of highspeed access using the antenna.  So expect updates once a day or so.  I did forget to buy an inverter so battery life is aat a premium untill we go back into town to get one, which will probably be tomorrow or Friday.

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