Signs of Summer 7: Hall Ranch Open Space!

Canyon at Hall Ranch. Photo by D. Sillman

Click for audio version of this blog: Hall Ranch Open Space

It is funny how much habit rather than choice or need or even desire controls what we do. For example, in our old home town back in Pennsylvania, in the summer the local swimming pool was absolutely packed with people starting on Memorial Day continuing through the first cool snap of the summer. Everyone was in the habit of going to the pool in the afternoon. There was no thinking about it, you just did it and there was little deviation in the behavior!

Once that week in July came, though, when temperatures dipped down into 60’s for a few days, the habit of going to the pool was suddenly and irrevocably broken! For the rest of the summer, even on those days in August that were hot and stultifyingly humid, very few people went to the pool!

So what does this have to do with 2021 in Northern Colorado? Well, when we moved here last summer one of the very compelling attractions was the nearby Rocky Mountains! Mountain trails in general and that gem of the Rockies, Rocky Mountain National Park, were only an hour away from our new home! The expectation was that we would frequently be going up into the mountains for hikes, picnics or just to see the sights, after all we had come out here several times in previous years from Pennsylvania by plane, by car and even by train just to be in the Rockies!

But we were wrong!

Hiking at Hall Ranch. Photo by D. Sillman

Last summer and fall under the hammer of a severe drought and very hot temperatures, record setting wildfires burned all across the high country of Colorado. The air was full of smoke and ash, and for several days in the late summer there were orange-red skies that looked like something from Mars! So we stayed down on the flatlands and walked and biked along the local streams and stayed away from the mountains. A habit was being formed and reinforced!

Then the winter came and the snow covered the high country (the mountains in the distance were glowing white and beautiful!). Fortunately, the thick blanket of snow put out all of the fires! But, we didn’t put chains on our vehicles or snowshoes on our feet to climb up into and walk around in the snow covered passes. Again, a habit was being etched into our behavior!

Come spring there was a strong tendency not to go west to the mountains when we wanted  a morning or afternoon off! We went to Denver to the south, or to the Pawnee Grasslands off to the east or to the nearby Poudre River Trail. We were in an unconscious rut and needed a big activation energy expenditure or some social-acting enzyme to break us out of it.

The “enzyme” was simply our daughter, Marian, saying, “let’s go up to the mountains this weekend!” and, “I’ll find a place!”

And we were off!

Yucca in bloom. Photo by D. Sillman

Hall Ranch Open Space is a 3000 + acre plot of land located in between the foothills and the mountains near the St. Vrain River. The Space is one mile west from the town of Lyons, nine miles west of Longmont and twelve miles north of Boulder. Trails run through the Space over rocky shrubland up to ridges lined with Ponderosa pines. Red, sandstone buttes surround and delineate the space, and the trails are actively used by hikers, mountain bikers and horseback riders.

The Space has been used by humans for as long as humans have lived in what is now Northern Colorado. There is evidence of prehistoric people inhabiting the rocky terrain, and historical records of modern Native American tribes (especially the Arapahoe and Cheyenne) living here. In 1880 the first European settlers entered the Space and quickly drove the Native Americans out. Twenty different, Anglo families lived in or around the space over the next 100+ years making their living by farming, ranching, logging and quarrying the underlying sandstone. The Space was acquired by Boulder County in the mid-1990’s and was added to the North Hills Open Space tract.

We parked in the Antelope Trail parking area after waiting for several minutes for a parking space to open up. We didn’t want to be to snarky about this but agreed that the trail should be called the “Pronghorn Trail” since there are no “antelopes” in North America! (see Signs of Summer 3, June 17, 2021).

Mariposa lily. Photo by D. Sillman

There was a good crowd on the trail that day, and it looked as though everyone was there to mountain bike (almost all of the vehicles in the parking area had bike racks). In fact, we spent a great portion of our two hour hike standing still off to the side of the narrow trail letting small groups of bikers pass. You could not see very far on the twisting trail and, so, had to listen carefully for approaching bikes (especially for the gravity-assisted bikers flying down from the top of the ridge). Everyone was very friendly and polite, but it was hard to lose yourself to the natural surroundings with the specter of more and more bikes tearing down the trail!

The Antelope Trail is on the northwest side of a shallow canyon that runs about 500 feet up to a wooded ridge. The surface of the trail is very rocky and frequently quite constricted by protruding boulders. I heard a number of bike pedals gnashing across or getting stuck behind large, immobile chunks of sandstone. The riders had to hit the narrow spots on the trail just right in order to get through unscathed.

Ari on the trail. Photo by D. Sillman

To the southeast of the trail there was a flattening of terrain and the hint of a small stream well hidden by vegetation. At one point on the trail, the view to the southeast opened up and a small pond or wide spot in the stream came into view. The water in the pond was bright orange probably from iron leaching out of the surrounding red sandstone. Intermittent, short choruses of trilling frogs rose up from the pond. Matching the song with an on-line frog song library suggested that the frogs were boreal chorus frogs (Pseudoacris maculata). They were near the end of their seasonal (mating) calling and sounded pretty exhausted!

The most noteworthy feature of this trail, though, had to be the dense vegetation! We have had a fairly wet May this year and have also had a few significant rains in June, but most of the surrounding countryside is relatively arid looking (extensive bare soil around small clumps of plants dominated by sagebrush and rabbitbrush). This canyon, though, was a wildflower paradise! Deborah generated a list of plants in flower along the trail (her pictures are scattered through this entire blog), and the plants were growing in an almost continuous vegetative cover.

Fritillary on thistle flower. Photo by D. Sillman

When I went to Peru in 2009, I saw a similar phenomenon in the arid Andes Mountains. Little canyons, oriented just so to the sun to give them some shade, had soils that were protected from both wind and sunlight and retained significantly more moisture than the surrounding open spaces. The result was that these small canyons were lush with trees and dense understories of vegetation while the areas around them were dry and almost totally lacking in plants. Moisture is the key limiting factor in ecosystems like this! Anything that you do to help water persist in the system even slightly longer will have a large impact on the system’s vegetation!

Photo by D. Sillman

Plants observed on the Antelope Trail (very incomplete list!):  plains prickly pear, soapweed yucca, bristle thistle, wild blue flax, Mariposa lily, hairly false goldenaster, mountain mahogany, Rocky Mountain juniper, pineywoods geranium, a penstemon (sidebells penstemon?), rocket larkspur, Parry’s bellflower, sulfur flower, blanket flower, Ponderosa pine, salsify, field bindweed.

It was fun breaking into a new behavior pattern! I hope I get to write about more mountain trails soon!