The Sawatch Cowpoke

  I nearly shat myself as I popped the top of my head over the small boulder in front of me. Two big and beady black eyes stared back from an arm’s distance away. After a quick inspection they appeared to belong to an obviously well-fed, large, white, male mountain goat. It was breeding season . I popped back down and whistled to my wife, Sarah below me. We were nearly three-quarters of the way up the well-popularized “Kelso Ridge.” This route was more than proving itself to me as the best way to the summit of Torreys Peak. The weather the day we had chosen to scramble the ridge could not have been more perfect. Not too sunny, yet nary a cloud in the sky harkening any sort of danger. We chose the late season to go up it, about late September, as all the standing snow fields would be dry and the temperature moderate. I really couldn’t and still can’t find anything to complain about the day we had on the ridge. For reference, Kelso Ridge is one of the more trafficked “harder” routes on

  I blew a snot rocket into the surrounding sagebrush as I continued to huff my way up the sandy streambed that doubled as the trail. Silently, I regarded the tattered pile of deer bits and fur in the bushes next to me as I passed. “Another cat kill,” I breathed out to no one in particular. I was alone, after all, Sarah and I were traveling at different paces around the giant lollipop in the south Arkansas River Valley bush. I was over half way through the Catkin Gulch Loop, a more than ample tour of the newly-minted Browns Canyon National Monument. Browns Canyon sits right outside of the small town of Nathrop, directly south of Buena Vista and no more than 15 miles north of Salida. Hosting an interesting array of high desert scrub, river fauna, and needle-like rock formations slightly recognizable to the rest of the Ark River Valley, the National Monument protects a large swath of wilderness from the seemingly unending onslaught of human damage occurring to similar areas. With any w