Our first plan was that today would be my last outside swim of the year, in Grand Lake, in the town of Grand Lake. Driving over Berthoud Pass and seeing the clouds gathering along the Continental Divide, I figured it'd be too cold and Rich couldnŐt fish, so I voted to go farther west, to the Williams Fork, a tributary of the Colorado River. We went there once last year and I would have swum except I lacked a towel and dressing over damp skin, particularly socks and boots, is wretched. (The dressing might have had to be hurried because there'd be no intermediary of a bathing suit.)
The Williams Fork is one of the more western-looking places I've been. You hike out along a plateau in a dry canyon widening into a valley. Nothing but scrub grass, a broken down barn, swallows, and what looks to be excellent rattler territory. Then you begin to see green--an out of context green, the tops of trees. At the top of the ravine, you look down into a lush floodplain the river has carved out of the canyon through millennia of spring run-offs. Berry bushes, cottonwood trees, scrub pine.
RDC wanted to take me there after a fishing partner introduced him to it. Great fishing, a burbling small river or big creek to wrangle some swimming in, a beautiful valley. So then we just hiked--walked--alongside it for a spell and later that day visited a spot along the Colorado a bit downstream of where the Williams joins it. By this time, fifty miles (I guess) from its source, the Colorado is a respectable river and not the hop-across it originates as in the Park, respectably big enough to carve river valleys of its own. The week before, at the end of his first visit there, he and SPM climbed the steep bluff of the right bank and stood looking up- and downstream at the sunset before returning to the car. Just then, a bald eagle flew by, following the course of the river and about 200 feet above it, but because of where they stood on the ravine, just at the men's eye level. By the size, probably a mature female.
So anyway there we were under a blue sky filling with scuttling clouds. Either September is too late or I was insane last year, because now the water felt too cold to swim. Or maybe the day just wasn't hot enough. Anyway, as Rich fished I lay on my blanket reading Elementals and writing and enjoying the green.
And, looking up, the gray. Not too long after that, we hunkered under a stand of pines with two other fishermen and three dogs, glad of our parkas and wondering if the thunder we could hear meant lightning we would encounter on the two miles of plateau between us and the car. So it really was too cold a day to swim.
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Last modified 23 October 1999
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