Colorado Life As A Miner in the 1900s I woke up to the sound of my cat jumping onto my chest. It was a work day and I was ready to go into the mines. It was dirty work, but it paid well.…
Here I am today singing songs about the south-land;because I miss 'ole' 'bamy once again. Years ago I left my home state of Alabama,where the skies are so blue and I moved to the not so great state of Montana. Many people questioned me on why I moved to Montana, and my response back is because in that moment I felt like I needed a change, but in the end I think I made the wrong choice to move away from Alabama. But soon I will be back to sweet home Alabama,oh,Lord, I'm coming home to you. Back in early March of 1974,I was working at a local convenience store.…
Just before I moved to Cedaredge Colorado, the earth under my feet shattered and sent me falling into a place of unknowns. After arriving in Cedaredge, I surveyed several churches and found Cedaredge Community United Methodist Church. The church members took me in like they had known me for my entire life. This restored the ground underneath my feet. After I began participating in the church, I told the congregation that my mother had been in prison for two years.…
As teenagers growing up in Powder Springs, Georgia during the 1980’s, it was somewhat challenging at times to find safe and entertaining ways to occupy our time. Even though we did not have free reign to do as we chose, I would not categorize my parents as extremely strict. Relying on our parents, as if they were our personal taxi service, my sister and I struggled to find activities relatively close to home. After discovering we really enjoyed skating, we spent countless Friday and Saturday nights at the Sparkles Skating Rink in Paulding County. The indoor facility was a safe environment for teenagers, which provided my parents with a certain level of comfort to allow us to gather with friends.…
Every summer as tradition dictates I take my cousins on a hiking trip. Every year we try to hike a different mountain for the day and this year four of us went to hike Mt. Tecumseh in NH. This year was particularly an amazing experience as it was great to spend the day with them all together before I had to go to college. I also got to utilize my iPhone’s camera to its full potential to take amazing photographs (which is a new hobby of mine).…
Well, as we hiked, we were laughing and joking, and then we ran into the biggest joke of all. After about ten or fifteen minutes the trail went from near perfect, (it was really a fire road) to suddenly a huge overgrowth of chaparral, you know that bushy stuff Mario mentioned earlier. The chaparral was over six feet tall and reached all the way across the trail, that is the trail disappeared! Looking to the side of the trail were axes, pickaxes, and a number of chainsaws, and…
From my last 3 years of running cross county I have learned a lot of things. One is that you should never give up, second is that if you work hard enough then you can achieve whatever you put your mind to, and third is how you can go from disliking something to loving something. How I've learned these things from cross county is when I first started cross country, my sophomore year I couldn't run to save my life. Coach would always time us on how fast we could run two miles and I would always be last and be so far behind everyone else which was quite embarrassing but I couldn't help it I had just started and I'd never ran before in my life, at my very first meet I couldn't even run the first mile and I ended up having to drop out. After that I didn't like cross county at all because I wasn't good at it…
One of the first things I remember about going on that trip is looking down at my feet and thinking that I would die if I fell. I was nine and very light-headed at the time. It was the winter of 2009 and one of the first times I had ever gone to Colorado. The drive there took about 6 hours from our house so you can imagine my excitement at finally getting out of the car as an inpatient nine-year-old. We were renting a small two story log cabin with a hot tub on the second- floor balcony from a family that had a winter home somewhere in Florida.…
If I could spend one day in the shoes of someone in a setting foreign to me, it would without question be with a constituent of the American Old West. Living in this time period would be gratifying because I appreciate how people fulfilled their share of the work in the community. This includes judges, merchants, and farm managers. Everybody had a role defined through their work. There was togetherness as well as individualism and freedom.…
March 1st, 2013, the night I turned my freedom over to a 5ft2 blonde whose name will be left unmentioned due to the integrity I have. I was a dumb stupid freshman and could not see past all the warnings I received from upper classmen warning me about this girl. I thought she was the greatest thing that walked the earth. I felt I was in love and that she was the one I would marry some day. When I found out I was moving back to Colorado after my freshmen year I felt the world was coming to an end because that means I would have to leave her behind.…
I once went on a hike on the Appalachian Trail with my mother. We set off and it started to rain on the first day, and my mom began to complain. By the end of the day, I wanted to jump off the mountain before I pushed her off it. Suffice to say, we were not well-suited hiking partners, due to our different processes; my mother dealt with her grievances by talking about the cold. On the other hand, I was just as miserable, but I attempted to ignore the dismal weather.…
On a day to day basis, it becomes easy to simply fall into routine and monotony like a cog in a machine. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had opportunities in my life to reconnect with nature and rediscover the freedom and expansiveness associated with it. I must have seen the same old roads and buildings and restaurants of my medium sized suburb a thousand times in my life. However, no experiences have been more memorable and impactful than climbing Whistlers Mountain, or the meditative silence of the Negev, or the tremendous expanse of the Pacific. These memories still remain in the back of mind like posters lining its walls.…
When I had finally reached the river, I realized that I had navigated my way back down the hills that made up Mt. Harrison’s base slightly askew from the path that I’d taken on my trip up, and was now a lot closer to the walking bridge that I had elected not to use earlier when I’d chosen the downed oak tree to cross instead. Looking back behind me, I saw that the black cat had followed me through the forest and down the hillsides. But, as I crossed the bridge (which was only a few feet wide) I looked back to see if my feline friend was still with me but she was now nowhere in sight, having disappeared back into the woods again. I wanted to call out to her to see where she might have gone, but then I realized that I didn’t have a…
Clomp! Clomp! Clomp! Our boots pound the rocky Colorado trail in the middle of a cold, starry night above the massive tree line with a spectacular view of the lights of Leadville, as we hiked our first 14,000 foot mountain of the summer. Clomp!…
Zane Christiansen Mr. Johnson ELA II 15 September 2015 My Time in Colorado Just last year a couple weeks into the summer, it was time for me to get onto the plane. I had been getting all my stuff together and packed up for about the last week. My mom and I got up early in the morning, on a gray and rainy day.…