After a thorough search of all the obvious and not so obvious places I thought the cord for my camera’s battery charger might be; and several weeks of waiting in hopes that it would turn up on its own – I’ve decided to face the harsh reality that I am and will continue to be cameraless until I can afford to replace my point-and shoot camera with a DSLR set-up. (I won’t bore you with my reasons for not buying a new battery charger, but trust me, I know it’s an option and I’ve decided not to opt for it). Knowing that I cannot capture the spectacle of the Colorado Rockies in the Fall on film (or pixels as it would be) I will have to fall back on the time-honored tradition of words to tell their beauty. After all, writing is an art. For weeks, the mountainsides have been taunting me with their intricate color-blocks – daring me to blogg about them without a camera to back me up. Today, I’m taking the challenge.

The mountains always have an assortment of color on display if you know where to look for it. Aspens’ bright green leaves and long, lean trunks of off-white bark splice the dense hunter green boughs of the evergreens. An occasional blue spruce adds yet another hue. Further down, the rough reddish brown bark of pinon pines add yet another variation in color as their branches display their own hue of green needles – sparser than the evergreens further up the slope – they spread their needles in thin dangling clumps off their long branches so that patches of grey granite and the lighter greens of the mountains’ shrubs peak through. Closer to the forest floor, the flora are greatly varied from grasses to shrubs to those precious flowers that remain sparse but present until the harsh frosts set in- purple Columbines, red Indian Paint-Brush, blue and white Western Blue Flag. In all but the spring season, the color these small plants add to the mountain are a gift for those eyes who venture into the forest and walk under the trees. From mid-summer to early Fall the granite caps of these great mountains touch the sun emitting a steel-grey appearance or are lost in the white and grey of passing clouds. Iron-rich cross-cuts of rocks sliced by the glaciers of the ice-age, tower above tree line adding their own mark of color to the mountain. The rest of the year, these peaks on down to their basins are a bright white. But again, these colors are seen only when you look for them.

In the fall, the mountains put their colorful quilts on display; hanging blocks of yellow, red, orange, and green on their great slopes. It starts slowly – a patch of green turning to gold on a single Aspen branch, a scrub-oak exchanging its water conscious green leaves for the efficiency of orange and red. Then suddenly, the mountainsides catch on fire – gold, orange, and red dominate but they cannot subdue the dark green patches of the evergreens who hold their ground. A single tree or shrub stitches an array of color to make its block on the grand display. Patches of snow begin to fill-in rocky grey peaks. And slowly, the sun rises later and sets earlier, the air becomes more temperate but with a chill, and brown begins to take the place of color in all but the evergreens.