April 7, 2016 Arrival in Denver, sunshine and warmth!.

April 7 at the Airport

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 This is us at the Ottawa airport when we met up.  Pretty happy birders!!

Teddy has been quite glum since yesterday when my suitcase came out and I started packing.  He was velcroed to me all evening and this morning and when I was leaving he was standing up and leaning on me and in his eyes I saw “don’t go, take me with you” look.  He will be fine with Norm, they are best buddies when I leave home.  When I get back home, I get the cold shoulder from Teddy as he sits on Norm’s lap.  I have to build up my Teddy brownie points with treats it takes a day usually and it takes a lot of talking and scratching to get back in Teddy's favour. 

Finally this is the time, one sits down and mentally goes through what was packed and realizes what one has forgotten.  I  have close to 90 pounds of stuff with me and that is not including my self .  My STUFF includes all the electronics you can think of, including two walkie talkies in my hand luggage which security did not even ask me about.  Who would get on a plane with walkie talkies in this day and age.  Who would I be walkie talkie’ing up in the sky?  With the flying rules all the batteries must be in the hand luggage.    I expected to be asked but no, they swabbed my hands and my computer and my freshly cleaned quilted vest – go figure.   The walkie talkies are necessary for our Colorado trip since our birding group will have two cars.  If birders in one car are looking at a rare bird, then the others in the other car must know about it quickly!!   Only other birders would understand this.   I felt I had to explain the need for walkie talkies, I am not losing it yet.

I should call this trip the Ptarmigan Adventure in Colorado as Ptarmigan (any one of them, there are several subspecies), would be great to see.   In Alberta was the last time I tried for a Ptarmigan.  While on a work trip I left several days earlier so I could bird with the Calgary Field Naturalist birding group.  I got advice from a retired gent as to where I could find a Ptarmigan.  The next day I drove my rental car west into the mountains.  I hiked to an Alpine Meadow, at Peter Lougheed Provincial Park on the Alberta/British Columbia border.  This park is the highest spot where one can drive to in Alberta.  I hiked up to the Alpine meadow with several groups of people.  I searched every corner of this alpine environment for the Ptarmigan and I did not notice everyone had left and had hiked down.   This trail is called Ptarmigan Trail and it is at a high elevation.  While going down I sang ditties and clapped my hands as I hiked down by myself.  I got to my parked rental car and I turned around to look up to where I had come from.  I at first thought it was a far mountain sheep's but that I was looking up at in the lower meadow which I had just hiked through two minutes earlier.  When the animal turned around, it was a Grizzly bear.  I had checked in with the ranger at the park gate and they never said anything about bears near where I was going and I had told them that I was alone.  When I was looking up at the bear, a fellow came up to the only other car left in the parking lot and I pointed out the Grizzly bear to him and he said wow so close!!   He said he had hiked 11 km to get a long distance glimpse of one and here was one just above the parking lot.  I learned from this fellow that one is only to go hiking in groups of four as Grizzlies have attacked groups of three but never groups of four. OK so I used up a one of my nine lives...

Really funny, one can’t help laughing, Jane and I are sitting here at the airport waiting for Connie to show up and are discussing what we left behind and we will have to go shopping when we arrive in Colorado.   We have to buy some peanut butter, one of the important items.  We are waiting for the Toronto flight and we go through Customs there and then fly to Denver arriving in the evening.  We found Connie, or she found us and we got on the packed plane to Toronto.  The flight was good and then we had a couple of hours before we boarded the plane for Denver.  This flight was really quick.  

We arrived for the sunset and it was a beautiful plains view with mountains in the distance.  I am writing this without my glasses, so excuse the typos.   Our rental vehicle is a behemoth of a SUV.  I mean one of those long swelled up ones.  We will be going through mountain passes and along canyon rims and there will be snow and heat.  Jane and I will share the driving.  We thought we would be fine with a larger vehicle for this portion of the trip.  I know what is in the back of Jane's mind here and mine too.  The last Texas trip for Jane and myself we had a mid-sized car and we went up roads that were not roads but cow paths and up hills one could only see the view and not the road, there was none.  We hit bottom on that car a couple of times and it was a tough go in some places.  We did not want to have to worry about clearance on this trip.  I pretty well have to climb into this vehicle holding on to the inside grip handle but the view from inside is pretty nice.  I think this will be a real gas guzzler.

Now we are three in our hotel room and it is fun, always discussing the trip and the birds and we really have not started yet.  We did the Walmart and Dollar store runs already and have food for tomorrow.  It was 10 degrees here this evening.  We are all tired by the sitting so much today, and glad to be here.  No special birds seen yet, just regulars like Starling, Robins, and Connie saw a Vulture of some kind. The first bird was a House Sparrow.  

Sorry if the photo is upside down, I can't figure how this happens.