Mesa Trail ch. 12
Draft 3

What would become known as the Mesa Trail Oasis started as a day trip. Hannah and Inuna received a day pass from school for independent study. The day pass turned to class trip. Class trip turned into the class itself, what Mrs. Diaz decided to call simply Social Studies. Who hadn't heard of the class by now? You didn't even have to meet inside a classroom, but outside the school, and the twenty-some students walked up the Chautauqua to Bear Canyon Creek where Hannah and Inuna had fully running, small outfit, sluice box gold mining operation! Who had ever heard of such a thing? Some teachers no doubt wondered about the academic rigor of the trips, but more than not they began to implement projects for their own classes and before you knew it there were multiple classes at a time joining in at the mountain sight as a collaborative studies project.  They had built a small shack for protection from the sun and very occasional rain. Besides the shack, three picnic benches where students sat down with their notebooks and pulled geography and natural history books about the Flatirons out of their backpacks.  Students were sometimes asked to teach the classes themselves.

Today was the day for a history lesson, Inuna decided. Inuna was of Arapaho descent, one of the last remaining of her tribe who lived here in the city and attended traditional high school. Without Inuna, there never could have been the Oasis because she was the one knew most about what it meant to spend your days out in the mountains, that the mountain is a classroom, and the lessons need only observation and reflection, some sense for history and ancestors, some sense for the future and preservation.  Inuna had already laid claim to her title as Flatiron Ambassador and would be found any moment helping along her mighty band of turtles at the end of the sluice box or initiating short hikes up into the rock history of the world.

"It is very difficult to show the world anything of our great ways if you are stuck behind walls." Inuna was the kindest person, they all agreed, on earth, but she was fierce in her opinions of the ancestral mountains.  She took long treks into the foothills in a black button up suit and a small black hat.  She brought no water or food but looked to the woods around her for sustenance.  It came naturally to her.  She would return to classes on monday morning and as the other childrens' attention spans dashed and dived in three thousand directions and wanted nothing more than to get out of school to play more video games in their basements, Inuna came to class to describe her expeditions up on Ute Trail at the top of the mountians. "The continental divide was very frosty yesterday morning.  Clouds of the ancestors were sleeping in among the giants of the great valleys."

At the mine site, Inuna seemed to always know immediately what to do in and around the creek.  Her people had watched the miners of old hastily reach these same heights and scratch and pick and even at times dynamite rock to crack it open for the glittery rocks.  Her people also respected stones and so could partially understand the cravings and decorative aspects of the great stones.  Before they reached the trailhead, near the city, where the Bear Creek had twisted in with Boulder Creek, she would find her 'friends' the turtles and bring them along for the day's dig.  "Our people were born by the turtle along with Man as the legacy goes." She was sitting now at the end of the picnic bench. Hannah could over hear her from the Oasis shack where she was preparing lunch for the three class. Inuna read from a small handwritten book, "our world had become water and Man had need to find land, so he sent Grebes, waterfowl, Beavers to dive down to the bottom of the great ocean for land.  So many attempts did not work.  Finally it was the duck and the turtle who successfully found the patches of earth and they brought it back up into the sky where Man dried it and cast it out into the wind of the four directions." Anybody listening wondered where such a soul came from. To be thinking these thoughts? She picked up the turtle and let it make its way onto the shallow shoreline as it made its slow way into the water.

The sluice box was now a fully functioning machine.  Mr. Pruitt had come up weeks before and tightened or replaced the hinges and re-attached some boards.  Inuna walked over to Josh and Kitie, who had permission to come along on the class project. "Look at this," Josh said, as he lifted up the gate board temporarily, then redirected the chute. Water began rush into the neck and he filled the first stage quickly with fresh very cold water. Unless their eyes completely deceived them, there was floating peppery flakes of glittery gold settling right down to the bottom. Josh stuck his finger along the side of the chute and pushed a flake with his finger and brought up along the side of the board.  He smiled. Inuna smiled and her eyes twinkled.  "Have you ever heard of the Ojibwe tribe?" Josh nodded that he had heard the word before anyway.  "The women of the tribe had many many responsibilities and duties in their societies.  "At the end of winter, women would leave their camp for a place called sugarbush village in order to make maple sugar.  They were in charge of collecting sap in the birchbark troughs and boiling it down to sugar. From their they would pour the syrup into carved wooden molds or birchbark cones. By summer, they would dissolve these in water for cool, sweet drinks or mixed with medicines for children. It was known that there would be a great celebration and feast for the first fruits of summer.  Maybe we should have our celebration for the first cups of gold!"

Hannah had by then walked over to the gate box and overheard some of the story.  The rush of the creek behind them could just about lull any of the workers to sleep.  The sun had coated the entirety of the camp by now and a very light breeze barely flicked at the stiff ponderosa pine limbs.  Hannah had been thinking about turning the shack into something more like a eatery for a few days now.  This seemed like a great invite to create a menu. "Like burgers and fries," Josh yelled out, now off of his step ladder and back down onto dry land.  Kitie was standing mid stream down in the middle section of the sluice box, noticeably cold, and walked up them with her arms split over her shoulders for warmth.  "What about Great Grandpa's gold? Isn't that up here also?" Kitie couldn't see as much as Josh or Hannah the great purpose of finding such little flakes, could take forever.  "I mean, didn't he hide like big boxes up in these trails somewhere?"  Inuna had never heard of this story, but knew of many such miners from generations past staking out claims as the Arapaho went about their business in these mountains.  Kitie was younger than Hannah but easily four inches taller.  She slender, like their mother, and not built very well for standing in cold water.  The sun beat down on her long neck.  The kids from her class were a little upset that they too didn't get permission to come to the Oasis for 'Social Studies.' She would prefer to find the real stuff.