the 4th and so on

It's easy to fall into a pattern here--work at 2pm, off at 10pm, sleep until 10am where all you have time to do is toss in a load of laundry, eat, and get ready to head back into work. I have fallen into this pattern the last couple weeks and it has been keeping me from enjoying to outdoors and, well, blogging. I have clearly been slacking.

For the Fourth of July, a group of 8 of us from the North Rim drove about 7 hours to Telluride, CO, a winter ski destination, where we met up with a group from Flagstaff. We left on the 3rd, after the community cookout, and arrived at a campground a national forest at about 4am (very vague details, I know).

We headed into town in time to see the end of the parade and to see 3 F16's flyby, the second looking like it was going to hit the canyon wall before spiraling up. We spent the afternoon in the town park, enjoying local brews and playing volleyball. That evening, there was a fireworks display, shot off from the park and watched by thousands from the park. Telluride is in a box canyon, so the fireworks can't really be shot off from a safe distance. Instead, we lay on blankets and stared straight up to watch them explode. After an exceptionally large one, ash would fall on us and we shielded our eyes.

After exploring town a bit the next day, we started to drive back to the North Rim. On the way, we stopped at Mesa Verde National Park and acted as true tourists, visiting each pulloff from the main road. We saw ruins of communities built by the Ancestral Puebloans from A.D. 600 to A.D. 1300. The buildings are amazing--from the rim, the canyon walls drop down and towns are built of stone in alcoves above another drop to the canyon floor. How did the Ancestral Puebloans build these structures and then live there?

Ancestral Pueblo ruins at Mesa Verde National Park

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This past month, the wildflowers have bloomed here on the rim. I don't know what they are called, but we have fields full of fragrant, blue-purple (periwinkle) flowers dotted with tall stems holding white 3-pedaled flowers.

Spending a morning with the wildflowers.

And the last few days have been hot and humid. The sky opened up and it rained a bit Thursday night, but not enough to clear up the clouds and damp air. In the next couple of weeks we will be hitting monsoon season. Yes, we have monsoons here at the Grand Canyon. I am looking forward to a different type of fireworks--lightening displays over the canyon.

(P.S. Mike in HR says hello.)