Long time readers of this diatribe may recall our (mostly aspirational) subtitle, “intrepid explorers attaining altitude.” Well if you are one such reader, you’ll find yourself in familiar territory, because today’s adventure had our intrepid explorers accomplishing both: being intrepid (a given) and attaining altitude. Granted, it wasn’t Chomolungma or Space, but it was, happily enough, a mile or so higher than our usual altitude in balmy Boulder.
Indeed, S and D headed up to the venerable Brainard Lake, on a Wednesday morning, no less, for a rare BMO adventure.
These days the park charges $16, egad, to wander around and admire the trees; thankfully, having the forethought to acquire lifetime senior national parks passes, our fearless adventurers paid only $2.
And admire the trees they did, especially the plethora of fallen trees — windblown, chopped, and sawn — imagining the sequences and circumstances of their unfortunate horizontality, as in, “tree A fell first, lodged in the Y-shaped branches of tree B, then tree C fell onto A, making an X, then D was cut down next to them…” etc. Ancient philosophers undoubtedly spent hours, or even lifetimes, pondering these random dendritic geometries, and never reached any particular conclusions. And neither did our fearless adventurers.
Also, no moose were seen. Let us just state that definitively, before anyone asks. No moose.
I mean, look at this perfectly nice and pleasant meadow. Seems like there’d be a moose in there, doesn’t it? But no.
People kept asking, and by “people” I mean fellow hikers, the majority of whom, one might surmise, had also taken advantage of their lifetime senior parks passes, “seen any moose yet?”
Egad. Look, it’s 9:00-ish, they don't come out until at least twilight, and in the meantime they hide in quiet meadows (such as the one shown above) behind brambles and junipers and willows, camouflaged in the shadows, nice and cool in the shade, and wait for the tourists to go home.
Well all this denial of moose sightings made our fearless adventurers conjure the notion of sewing themselves BNO Participant t-shirts with the slogan, “No we haven’t seen a moose today.” And on the back, “They only come out at night,” with maybe a scary font and a picture of a moose silhouette and a moon.
It also made them hungry, so off they went to Nederland.
P2. Ned Gen.
A reincarnation of the old Salto coffeeshop, now with more variety, wine, beer, and as their sign says, “some fine goods,” Ned Gen also has some hip and cool music. This gave S & D an excuse to open Shazam and raise their eyebrows at the song titles (such as, “Dunno”), while snarfing their brunches — D with a meat-head burrito (no, really), and S with something called avocado toast, which turned out to be more elaborate than its name would suggest. But it was also quite tasty.
And then you walk over to the counter and grab a fork and knife, and the knife looks like a switchblade (but isn’t), and you think about the song, and whether it’s hip hop or what, and think, “Dunno;” so I guess it’s apt.
The food was good, and so was the coffee. Sadly, it also absorbed whatever senior discounts had happened with the parks passes.
A lot of people with laptops, looking even cooler and more hip than the laptop-people at Neptune Cafe, almost a mile lower, if that’s even possible, to be more cool and hip, I mean: Neptune is pretty cool.
Then G showed up, on a lunch break from his job in Ned, and the intrepid trio set about comparing notes about aging and altitude and the menu and making custom t-shirts and stuff.
And guess what?
They all decided it was another successful B(M)O.
☶