Autumn Sightings in Our Neighborhood

I love living in Colorado and being able to once again enjoy the outdoors without chemicals keeping me a prisoner of my home like they did the last several months in Arizona. Clean air, fresh mountain breezes and plenty of open spaces make it ideal. I so love being able to be a canary free from her cage!

Yesterday was the most gorgeous warm October afternoon. Much too lovely to stay indoors so we decided to take advantage of Joel's current unemployment to take a walk and explore some of the nearby open spaces in our neighborhood. 

The communities from Denver north to Boulder have bought huge tracts of open spaces that they have left natural except for some trails within them. There are numerous streams, ponds and reservoirs and paved trails connecting many of them so one can walk or bike for miles upon miles without being in neighborhoods.

We tend to leave the paved trails to explore the less traveled paths.

Prairie dogs stand up on alert and whistle alarms as we near their areas. Prairie dogs are busy, curious, social animals. We noticed they are much plumper than they were at the beginning of summer as they are storing up fat for winter. You can read more about prairie dogs here.

Rabbits are very plentiful everywhere we have been in Colorado. I learned the hard way how much they enjoy nibbling on pansies! We kept losing the battle of them setting up home under our front porch until I sprinkled cayenne pepper along the perimeter of the porch. 

They believe if they don't move we don't see them. I guess these photos must have been "accidents" since I couldn't "see' them.

You would think the coyotes in the area would keep the population of bunnies under control...

The beautiful azure blue Colorado sky and fall trees are reflected in the still surface of a neighborhood pond.

The Front Range of the Colorado Rockies in the background with fall trees reflected in the pond. Isn't God the master artist!

On the other side of the open space we went to yesterday is a golf course community where I took the last few photos.

Our walk ended up being much longer than we intended as we decided to head home a different way through the golf course neighborhood only to get turned around on the winding lanes. By the time we figured out we were heading a twisted path north when we needed to go south we had traveled three quarters of a mile the wrong way! We were a couple weary wanderers when we made it back home. We may have been weary, but also blessed and very content.