The Beauty of Colorado

"I heard in my infancy only the siren song of the mountains. An alpine meadow was my front yard, across which scuttled, instead of chipmunks and squirrels, conies and marmots that pierced the thin air with their shrill whistles before they ducked into holes they had burrowed into the tundra. On July afternoons, I looled among the primrose and forget-me-nots, caressed by the sun whose thermonuculear secrets my father probed with his coronagraph.  Safe in my bed, I listened to the tormented howls of timber wolves at dawn, over on Ceresco Ridge.  In the morning, I would stare at the sharp summit of 14,142-foot Mount Democrat, impossibly far away, its north face still choked with winter snowfields and wonder. What is it like up there? What can you see?"

-- "On the Ridge Between Life and Death" by David Roberts