Tag Archives: colorado

Weird Magnetic Spot in Colorado

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This past summer I added a freaky item to my cave tours: The Weird Magnetic Spot. Here you see a few guests trying the demonstration.

During my tours I stop in the middle of this circle and say, “The owners of this cave found out that there is an unusual magnetism at this very spot. So they laid out the concrete in this circle pattern with the ‘X’ in the middle, and they showed us tour guides how to demonstrate that fact to our guests.”

Then I take out my wedding ring, and an ordinary rubberband. I stick the rubberband through the ring and slant it upwards. The ring climbs UP the rubberband to my uphill hand.

I tell my group, “I don’t know what makes it work, but you can try it after the tour.”

I found one lady standing in the circle after the tour with her eyes closed. “Yes, I can feel the energy,” she told me. Her friends said that she was the best at that stuff.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I learned the trick in a magic book.

Barn Joke

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You’re looking at the second largest cave room in Colorado. It’s called “The Barn”, and tourists consider it one of the highlights of my guided cave tours at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park.

One joke I like to tell at the top of the barn is when we are standing at the top of the stair steps just about to go clomping down to the bottom:

I shine my flashlight on a bench and say, “This feature is called, ‘The Bench.’ It was discovered 12 years ago by carpenters in the cave. If you don’t want do go down to the bottom of the barn (that’s 127 stair steps down, 33,685 stair steps back up) you may sit on “The Bench” and listen to the water drip until we come back up.”

Laughter.

As we head down the stairs, I invariably will see someone who decides to sit out the walk on “The Bench.”

“Practical joke” takes on a new meaning on my tours.

I love sitting here and listening to the water drip in the cave. I wonder if the people on my tour are having a nice time down there without me.

Cowboys Hate Forest Fires

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This summer there were some crazy big forest fires here in Colorado. You know about the homes destroyed, and people displaced.

Locally, people were getting a little testy as we all expected something to catch on fire at the drop of a hat-or cigarette.

This sign was hanging at a ranch near Redstone, Colorado.

The guy who put the sign up was serious about fires. I couldn’t print the other sign he had.

Don’t mess with cowboys when it comes to fires.

El Kabong with a shovel.

Clumsy Deer

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As a species, deer are thought to be some of the most graceful animals on earth. They adorn paintings, book illustrations, and murals around the world, usually holding a graceful, stately pose. I’m here to put a kibosh on all that nonsense.

I was driving into Carbondale, Colorado, the number one place in the world where deer give you that “deer in the headlights” look. It was first light of the morning. You know, the kind of light where you are rousted out of cabin #13 at camp and made to do jumping jacks under the flag pole where some happy camper stole the camp director’s swim trunks, soaked them, froze them flat in the camp freezer, and ran them up the flag pole at midnight, making them look like a stiff, faded, green flag; and knowing all the while that the camp director would be asleep while we all did windmills and pushups with the chickens.

As I slowed down for the city limit, a small herd of deer ran across the road in front of me. Did I mention that the road was pure ice? “Black Ice” as we call it here in Colorado.

At the back of the pack came the big stately buck deer. The dad. The male. The one that protects the herd, and provides the example for all the little deer to follow. I came to a dead stop, so the buck could cross in front of me.

The buck jumped the fence, headed for the road, and looked up just in time to see that he was going to hit the side of my car if he didn’t change course. Being a deer, he should be able to gracefully bound to the side, and be gone in the flash of his tail, mooning me like an angry Scotchman in a Mel Gibson movie.

Instead, he put on his brakes, and slid on all four hooves across the icy road, back peddling with a wild look in his eyes. He slid about 10 feet, fell in a heap, and slid into the car at full speed. (He should play for the Detroit Redwings, or some other lame hockey team.)

The whole scene only lasted for a few seconds, then the buck was up, spinning his wheels as he went tearing off the road to catch up with a pack of laughing female deer.

It wouldn’t have been so strange if it hadn’t happened right in front of the Division of Wildlife office and Employee Headquarters. You’d think they could control their animals a little better than that.

Dangerous Highway 133

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Highway 133 in Colorado is rated by the Colorado Department of Transportation to be the 5th most dangerous road in the state. The road itself is impeccable. The blacktop is kept up to standards, there are guardrails on many of the curves, and the striping paint is always well done (except for that one time when the painter wobbled the centerline for about 5 miles. We think he was either hung-over, or it was his last day on the job.)

Nonetheless, there are persistent dangers on the road that I drive seven days a week, not the least of which, are the mudslides. On the most recent episode of “Have Mudslide, Won’t Travel,” I counted no less than 30 spots where the mud came out onto the road.

It reminds me of the time we were headed home and a big slide covered all the width of the road near Redstone, Colorado. It was raining, and nearly dark. Vehicles were backed up, but a few four-wheel drive trucks were coming our way through the mudflow.

I asked my son, Caleb to run up to the slide and see if he thought I could make it through with the Subaru we were in. He came back out of breath with, “Yeah, if you go fast enough you can do it.”

So being in the mood for adventure (when am I not in the mood for adventure?) we hit the mudslide at about 30 mph. It was deeper than I expected, and the rocks were bigger than I would have wanted to go over, but hey, we were in the middle of a quality father-son experience.

The car bottom hit some rocks, and we bounced like a cheap quarter ride at the mall. The car cleared the slide, and we came out the other side with a “Yee Haw!” and a prayer of thanks.

“We may have wrecked the bottom of the car, or punctured the gas tank,” I told Caleb.

“I said you could make it through. I didn’t say you wouldn’t wreck the car,” Caleb replied.

Mud flows can be fun. Just don’t try it at home.