Talking to the Owl

I’m always out of sorts the day before I travel.  I enjoy my destination when I get there, but I hate packing, catching airplanes, renting cars, and leaving Teton in the kennel.  Car travel is much easier than planes, but Colorado is just too far to go by car and I think my next car-ride there will be a one-way trip.

The place I’m going is Gould, which is west of Fort Collins about 60 miles just beyond Cameron Pass.  Near Gould is “Owl Mountain,” this blog’s namesake.  As mountains go, it isn’t that spectacular: Tree covered, rounded by glaciers, more like a New Hampshire foothill than a Colorado postcard.  My attraction is more the quiet solitude of the lodgepole forest that surrounds the cabin and extends uninterrupted by roads all the way to Rocky Mountain National Park.  I love the feeling of getting on a trail and knowing I could walk it for days and not see a road.

At one point in my life I had the dream to hook high-speed internet to the cabin and spend a good part of my year writing technical books and articles and the other part consulting.  Someday, I could make that a reality, and perhaps that will be my next career after Verisign.  Then again, I’m a social guy and I really like going to the office every day and working on projects. 

I’m the kind of person that always longs to start over.  I love the feeling of throwing away belongings except for a few essentials, loading a truck and going to a new life.  I wish I was doing that right now it were this summer, but we are much too entangled in our lives here in Rhode Island to leave this year.  Someday we will.

The photo on the left is of my mother in Acadia National Park a couple of years ago in June.