Tonight I’m perched on a comfy bed in a hotel room on the south edge of the Denver Metro area, looking out at a view of suburbs disappearing into a hazy horizon of low gray clouds and pouring rain. It’s springtime in the Rockies, and the weather has gone from gorgeously sunny (yesterday) to blizzard warnings (the forecast for tomorrow). Since I’ve got two events to promote Walking Nature Home scheduled in Denver this weekend, and since the weather forecast called for a spring snowstorm to move in tomorrow, Richard and I headed over the mountains this afternoon, hoping to get to Denver ahead of the weather. (It is just no fun crossing South Park, average elevation 9,500 feet above sea level, in a snowstorm. There’s nothing to stop the wind, and the snow blows across the highway in blinding clouds, making the road a sheet of ice and the visibility worse than poor.)
We left Salida in sunshine and 55 degrees, and wondered if we were doing the right thing. But after we drove through a snowstorm on the north side Kenosha Pass (over 10,000 feet elevation) and then drove into fog and rain, we decided that the Weather Bureau was probably right. Now the winter storm forecast is so dire that my Saturday event, an author festival at a library in Firestone, a town on the Plains north of Denver, may be cancelled. So we might be stuck in Denver unable to get home, even though my event could be cancelled. Must be springtime in the Rockies, when, as they say, if you don’t like the weather just wait a minute.
So I’m sitting here with my feet up watching rain pour down and hoping that our dry-as-dust valley, 160 miles south and west, will get some of this lovely spring moisture too. I’ve got plenty of work to do, and as long as I have a comfy place to be out of the weather (the definition of comfy in my mind including a place I can have my feet up and a cup of cocoa near by) and a high-speed internet connection, and my honey’s company, life’s not bad at all.
Oh, and here’s some great news: Colorado Scenic Byways: Taking the Other Road, my collaboration with Steamboat Springs photographer Jim Steinberg, was just named a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards. That makes this two-volume set that Jim and I call our “love poem to Colorado,” and which one reviewer described as “lavish” and “essential to knowing the state” a double finalist: Colorado Scenic Byways is also a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards. Yahoo!
One more note: If you’re hankering for a writing workshop that’ll help you root your words in place–wherever you live–check out “Writing Wild,” the online writing workshop I’m offering through Story Circle Network. It starts May 11th and finishes in early July, so it’s the perfect spring-into-summer writing boost. Sign up now and find a whole new vocabulary for your writing and your passion for the wild. It’s going to be a fun and inspiring workshop!