White Feather Mysteries Setting--Like a Song
O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the fruited plain!
Kathy Lee Bates wrote these lines standing atop Pike’s Peak looking out across the beautiful vistas, mountains and valleys of Colorado. She describes what I see looking out my living room windows at Wet Mountain Valley with the majestic Sangre de Cristo Mountains rising up fourteen-thousand feet across the valley from me. There is another song that comes to mind as I watch the buffalo roaming on the Wolf Springs Buffalo Ranch to the south, Antelope grazing with the cattle in the fertile green valley to the west and deer hiding in the San Isabel forest covering the Wet Mountains to the east amidst the peaceful silence and below the mostly tranquil skies. And when friends and family come to see us, they are literally coming around the mountain when they come.
The Wet Mountain Valley is remote and isolated in south-central Colorado and the two roads that feed into the valley only go here. People do not pass through here on the way to somewhere else unless they have purposefully detoured just for the magnificent views. Highway 69 starts at the south end of the valley near Walsenburg and ends at the north end where Texas Creek trickles into the wide Arkansas River. Highway 96 starts in the heart of Wet Mountain Valley in the little town of Westcliffe and climbs over the Wet Mountains to end on the other side in Pueblo to the west.
My wife and I fell in love with this heavenly paradise in 2001 when we took a road trip to see what lay hidden off the beaten path. I had noticed the long, thin, unassuming valley while studying a satellite map of Colorado. We were looking for a place to retire and when we drove through the Wet Mountain Valley, we knew we’d found what we were looking for. That year, we purchased a 35 acre lot south of the twin cities, Westcliffe and Silver Cliff, and named it “Sleeping Bear”. We immediately hired a driller to put in a well because without water, the land would be worthless to us. When we hit water, we celebrated by unfolding two camping chairs and setting them amidst the tall prairie grasses where we would someday build a house, poured Lin a glass of wine and me a glass of milk and toasted to our future.
We purchased a small travel trailer to stay in and for the next eleven years, we spent many weekends working on little projects building toward our retirement dream while continuing to work in Centenial, Colorado. First we built a shed for storage, then put in the septic, then had an oversized, three-bay garage built, added a solar-electric system, and finally added the house. In the summer of 2012, we retired from our jobs and moved to Sleeping Bear permanently. Lin has enjoyed working on her quilting and other crafts and I have been able to concentrate on my new writing career. We also stay busy playing golf, travelling, and working on the property. Life is good.
