Snapshots from Eagles Nest Colorado

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As you get up into the mountains, along Booth Falls, Gore Creek, Deluge Creek and Bighorn Creek trail, all of them have one fascinating thing in common -- the spring melt is in full force. The larger of the creeks, fed by their parental alpine lake above, hold way more volume then normal and much of the surrounding banksides tend to get crushed and gouged.  Just as fascinating though are the little

mountainside creeks that pass over rocks and create miniature river valleys through the lush green foliage. Water is never far from the mind along the Gore Creek Trail, the signature river for the

valley, as it gains steam off the mountain and curls down through the entirety of the city of Vail, beautiful, rolling, and quite wild.  Elevation on this hike gains over 3,000 feet; like Booth Falls, as you walk, and watch the beautiful varying zones of the Rockies take shape before your very eyes on

the climbing trail -- steppes, montane, subalpine, and the alpine that seems to always linger at the far distance of the view a bit like an unknowable dream.  A thousand nature writers have done a far more thorough job of describing this fascination of where elevation meets green meet water, but it is certainly well worthwhile to do my part in waxing at the marvels of these vast and ever-changing canvases that truly do look like the creation of paintbrush.  At points, the art and the functions of the mountains come together in indescribably spots of magic, as random dashes of wildflowers split out

from cracks of boulders the size of apartments; a tangled spruce or lonely Douglas, stand at the top of the hillock which then as quickly transforms to the bright clean stands of alder, then the trail weaves

back into ponderosa or, higher up, the Engelmann spruce, a creek shining through like a broad brushstroke of motion.