Dude, don’t leave a geologist hangin’. What’s up, is this an academic exercise or a passionate interest for you?
We’re off to Durango and the San Juans first, side trips to Telluride, Ouray, Grand Junction and Mesa Verde. Later we’ll head to Vero Beach and hit Disney for a day but mostly just enjoy a nice rental home right on the beach. Later we’ll go back to Turks and Caicos. We fell in love with it last year, still relatively undiscovered and so easy for us to get to. We even made some really nice friends with a California family last time and have timed it so we can overlap again this trip. He has several restaurants so I’m hoping we’ll do a meal together too.
Weird story to start the week… Our ranch foreman got a call from ranch hand Ramon last week when he was out checking fences;
“I have a lady.”
“What do you mean you have a lady… you mean a heifer?”
“No, I found a lady.”
Parts of SE Colorado can get real remote out on the plains on some farm to markets and dirt roads. Seems some woman from town, someone my wife actually went to HS with, was travelling last Friday on one of the back roads and took a wrong turn, got into a friend’s ranch, got lost and ended up running out of gas way back in a lonely, unfrequented remote area. She tried to walk out, got off what dirt path there was, tried to head to where she thought the nearest town was and just got into worse trouble. She stumbled along without food or water, crossed gates and fences and slept out on the ground for three days and nights. There’s rattlesnakes, coyotes, and the heat of day and cold of night. As you know it’s snowing up there now. She became disoriented, then delirious and on Monday, completely spent, just sat on the ground without much of a purpose and that’s when Ramon came upon her. He told me where he was and I know the area well, back 10 miles or so into our place, probably 15 miles from where she’d abandoned her car and there’s no paved road or town for many, many miles in any direction. She hadn’t drank or eaten in 3 days and Ramon said she almost took his fingers off when he offered her his only half sandwich.
He took her back to the ranch house, our foreman called the police just to CTA, offered to take her to the hospital but she just wanted to go home. She did give them a number to call. Some guy answered, said “Good luck with that” and hung up. Fortunately with the second number she gave someone else did come get her.
I spend a couple of weeks each year up there, usually way back in the remote stretches looking for cattle, arrowheads, pottery, petroglyphs, rummaging around the old B-52 crash site or just exploring in general. One thing I never hope to find out there is some lost soul that met their end alone and desparate because they’d made some bad decisions. Fortunately, thanks to Ramon and a whole lot of luck, this time it didn’t end that way.
