Mesa Trail ch.2
Draft 3

Did somebody say dinosaurs? Not like the ones you see in the movies.  No no, those are so real that they couldn't be real, not really.  Try instead to picture the real ones now, right now, in your living room, out on the great Front Range thumping about their big horned feet along the dry gulches and crunching  small rocks steaming hungry.  What would that be like? An animal the size of the redstone rocks. The size of a yacht coming at you.  You might want to be invisible while they passed by. Or just settle with your imagination, a much safer bet.

It was no more than a mile as the crow flies from their house near Settler's Park, across that vast Chautauqua Park mountainside Trailhead, just past the last of those three famous Flatiron granite boulders jutting up into the sky like silver tongues, that Hannah's mother had planted herself that morning, earlier in the summer, in the middle of one of the new trails to be built off the south Mesa Trail branch. She stood very tall inside that early morning patch of sun, the shadows of her limbs as long as windmills.

Hannah's mom had been a famous volleyball player in her day. The joke was that she could spike a ball over the net from her knees. Out on the trail she was almost always the tallest person on the crew and was often be asked to reach for things in the branches of trees.  How was it, she wondered, that even though she was the big boss, she was the one who was looping the cables around the trunks of trees?

Hannah's mother was the only person anybody knew who had been a semi-professional volleyball player (beach volleyball circuit right out of college), trained as a paleontologist (a fossil finder) but who became a textbook writer as her first real job... not exactly your standard match-up of skills as a trail builder. But she did take great comfort in the fact that she knew everything there was to know about 10th, 11th, and 12th grade textbook world history. For years she kidded with her fellow mothers that she had never yet met or read about another mother of three who was also an aspiring bone digger. She spent all those years raising the kids secretly preparing and preparing, taking Hannah, Kitey and Josh on long walks pointing out the glaciation of the limestone ridges that lined the Mississippi River Valley back in the midwest.

Today she plucked at the long metal cord the trail crew used for hauling pouches of tools and dirt several hundred feet straight up the side of the mountain to another waiting crew member. "Ok, tug!" she yelped out, and Jayse, crew supervisor, pulled down on the cord behind the pulley attached to a pine tree below.  The cord and pulley system was not exactly a precise contraption.  Sometimes it sagged a little halfway up the hill, other times the loop that was pulled around the tree at the bottom might begin to loosen and whatever was in the pouch would come close to dragging along the ground. Luckily this was a pretty tight loop, Hannah's mom made sure. The bag full of hand tools flopped along suspended 10 feet over the trail.  Two hikers were coming their way down the Mesa. "Ok, stop." She put her two long arms way up in the air. They both knew the only thing important in this pouch was Jayce's lunch, a fish sandwich he had made the night before and set on ice to keep fresh (never never pack a fresh fish sandwich on ice for a lunch in the sun!). She crossed her arms signaling, again. As the hikers passed by underneath, the fish sandwich dangled right up above their heads.  Jayce was a line cook down at Mountan Sun at night and would bring whatever happened to be left over from the night before.

When Hannah's dad landed an interview with the famed Atmospheric Research Center in Boulder, Hannah's mom saw herself, in a blink of an eye, out of that office of hers, out of the house, out of 12th grade history books, and into the mountains, back with her rocks and bones. "They need me," she would say, and the rest of the family would give her a look like she was the crazy seven-footer who should have stuck with volleyball! Now that they were here, she was always looking at the trails  and would yelp out at random moments "we're walking inside history people.  "It's like a museum of stone." She asked every morning that all the workers "dig lightly." And so this became one of her esteemed nicknames up on the trail, 'Mrs. Diglightly.' "Delightfully, Mrs. Diglightly" she would say mockingly in the mornings as the trail team set off to work. If somebody on the crew was found spearing too hard into the earth, it was "watch out, Diglightly is watching, or Diglightly will track you.  If she catches you, you will have to 'haul the pails' for the rest of the day."

It was the day that Hannah and her mother walked down the newly picked trail together where the Mesa meets Bear Creek and felt for that split second the very same as all those who had been here before and washed out a claim to seek the prospect of a gold nugget.  There had been remnants of a sluice box up just fifty some feet from the trail crossing at Bear Creek which they had both seen before but not really thought of.  They had been told that the opening gate still looked workable, maybe an old claim abandoned during a dry spell.