Old Flowers Road

The highlight of this week was definitely the drive up Old Flowers Road. A little ways west of Fort Collins, Colorado, is this road named for the man who surveyed the route. Old Mr. Flowers created a great pathway to find a plethora of wildflowers. Our weather was beautiful, the views gorgeous, and the company even better! We had Giny and Joe with us, and Joe’s knowledge of all wildflower the names kept us astounded!

So I am going to post a few of my flower pictures, without any reference to either their scientific or common names, because I can’t remember all the wonderful names Joe attempted to teach me.

While on the trail, we saw only three other cars, and a couple of motorcycles. It was interesting to me that 2 of the 3 other cars were Suburbans!

We knew ahead we’d see lots of standing dead trees from past forest fires… it was nice to see how much has regrown, and sometimes interesting to see the way fire ate some things and rejected others.

Right around lunchtime we came upon a nice open-air restaurant. Ok, it wasn’t serving food, but the old cabin seemed a great place for us to enjoy our picnic lunch.

In the old cabin we found a Barn Swallow nest, with two cute little guys peering out at us. We didn’t get close at all, to create as little trauma as possible. (Photo with a 400mm lens)

While at the picnic cabin, we played a bit with the drone. Below you see me flying and directing traffic! I have decided to use new (to me) video editing software, and I’m not proficient at all with it. I spent many hours yesterday working on the video of this drive, but could not export it correctly. As of “Press Time”, (right now!) it is not available. Bummer. If I ever get it going maybe I’ll add it here instead of this lame apology!

The road was written up as a moderate 4 wheel drive road, and was basically pretty tame. There were many deep dips, and a few mud puddles to cross. There were also some fairly steep up and down stretches, which we had fun watching to see how steep the car thought we were going. When the going was the roughest, it was not likely I’d be taking pictures then! We did capture a little proof of pitch changes…