Autumn is in the air! Woke up this morning to what seemed a very chilly house. We left the windows open and it turned out the low got down to 36 degrees for our first frost of 2014. Signs of autumn are all around, as the high peaks have gotten snow on them, aspens and ferns are tinging yellow and the elk are appearing in the meadows. The frost is a bit early this year, so I have a feeling that the peak of colors will be earlier as well. We really didn’t get the full color display last year, as the rains and flood interrupted the changing of colors, so am excited to see the our golden Aspen hillsides return this year. We are blessed to have some enormous groves of Aspen very close to our home, and when they peak in color, it is so spectacular, that people literally stop their cars in the middle of the road.
Fall is a time of transition and change — changing colors, animals preparing for the winter by migrating, eating, or caching food, and of course here in the Rockies, changing weather. Bears and hummingbirds go into a feeding frenzy as they try to pack on weight before winter sets in — bears to have that extra layer of fat for winter denning, hummingbirds so that they will have energy reserves to make the long, solo migration to South America. At one point, our Rufous Hummingbirds will have to fly 14 hours straight to cross over the Gulf of Mexico! To conserve energy, they fly as close to the tree tops and water as possible, so they will endure less of a head wind. It’s also not unusual here in Colorado to get big snowstorms on the order of 2 feet sometime in Fall, usually in the month of October. It’s exciting to watch all the changes that Autumn in the Rockies brings each day — what will tomorrow bring?
