Sometimes you don’t find what you’re looking for, but that’s not always a bad thing.
In late April, following a bird-watching suggestion in Colorado Sunday, we went looking for turkey vultures at Castlewood Canyon State Park, south of Franktown in the Black Forest region. It was a multigenerational gathering, including my 75-year-old mother, who was visiting from California.
I had never seen a real, live turkey vulture despite having visited Kernville, Calif., one of the turkey vulture capitals of the world. Last fall, volunteers counted 17,792 vultures as they passed through the Kern River Valley en route to Mexico.
Like the Kern Valley, the Front Range boasts a lot of different bioregions. And Franktown is diagonally across the metropolitan area, 49 miles by car from where we live in Arvada, so we gassed up the car and loaded a backpack with gear.
My mother, who grew up in New York, is a self-proclaimed city girl. A lot of the things our family does as a matter of course bewilder her in the extreme. She watched as we went through the standard day-trip ritual: snacks and water, binoculars and a camera, a packet of tissues, lip balm, sunscreen and bug spray, and then a warm layer, a dry layer and a hat for everybody.
“Where exactly are we going?” she said. The look on her face told me that she would not have been surprised had I said, “Mars.”
Instead, I showed her the directions and map I had printed off the Colorado State Parks website.
“Is this from the Internet?” she said. Any information that comes from the Internet is immediately suspect. In my mother’s world, maps come from gas stations.
“No,” I said, “I read about it in the paper.” This made it OK, and off we went.
The history
Castlewood Canyon was formed as Cherry Creek cut through shortgrass prairie on its way northwest to meet the South Platte River. At the east end of the 2,302-acre park, off Colorado 83, a visitors center offers exhibits and a video about the history of the canyon, which was dammed as part of a land development scheme in 1890. The dam burst in 1933 and sent a wall of water rushing down the creek, one of the worst floods in Denver history.
The wilder west side of the park may be reached by taking Castlewood Canyon Road south from Colorado 86 just west of Franktown. And that, we found out later, was where the turkey vultures were hanging out that day, where you can walk down into the deepest parts of the canyon, look for dippers (water ouzels) walking in the creek, and explore the remains of the dam and the Lucas Homestead, with its ruined concrete house.
The east side of the park is a floodplain created by runoff from the Rocky Mountains. Dotted with ponderosa pine, scrub oak and prickly pear, the 1.2-mile, paved Canyon Nature Trail winds along the rim of the canyon.
We’ve learned that a wildlife walk with children is often a good walk but rarely a fast one. We do a lot of sauntering and backtracking and “Hey! Look at this!” when somebody spots some tracks or a chipmunk scooting around in the brush. Little kids love every minute of it, but even our middle-schooler gets caught up in scanning the horizon with the binoculars for pronghorn.
We read all the signs and stopped to check out all the overlooks. The Castlewood rangers will lend you a guidebook to the interpretive trail for $2, and Sara stopped us at every guidepost and read out loud about how to tell where animals might be: They leave bits of fur, bite marks, tracks and poop. (If it’s shiny, Sara learned at Girl Scout camp, the animal visited recently.)
Everybody was OK with that until the wind came up and it looked like rain, and Sara read the part of the book that mentioned rattlesnakes.
In the details
If you walk fast, you get a good workout, but you miss the tiny pasqueflowers, fuzzy and purple, scratching out an existence in the meager soil at the edge of the canyon. You might not see the holes in trees that tell you a Northern flicker has been there, or miss the tiny frogs that hatch in puddles after a rain.
You might not look over the edge and notice the beaver dam far below. You might not stay in one spot long enough to see a great blue heron come in for a landing atop a p0nderosa pine on the far side of the canyon.
Not a single turkey vulture, though, unless you count the stuffed one in the visitors center. No pronghorn, either. No fence lizards, no snakes.
Afraid the trip had been a bust, I asked Sara what she liked best about the day. She said “the trees that porcupines gnawed,” then thought for a second and added, “the chipmunks and the beaver dam.”
My mother liked the geology – the steep conglomerate walls and caprock rim, looking as if giant stones had been piled in a heap, with trees and scrub growing randomly out of the cracks.
As for me, I liked the great blue heron that sat and allowed itself to be viewed, flapping its wide wings at the top of its tree and stretching its long neck toward the sun, as if daring us to find anything more beautiful.
Lisa Everitt is a freelance writer who lives in Arvada.
