My Hometown

I miss the mountains that stood to the west of my hometown. I grew up immediately outside Boulder, Colorado, and the Flatirons, huge slabs of sandstone and granite, create a dramatic backdrop for the city. All throughout my childhood the mountains had been something that simply was, they weren't anything special or something to comment on. They were just the mountains and they towered over Boulder Valley, showing tan and red in the bright Colorado sun. As a child I used to imagine you could see the shape of a sleeping Indian in the profile of the Flatirons against the sky, something I can still see to this day. I still know all of the local landmarks. There's the third Flatiron, the largest one, affectionately called "the Slab" by my family, that you can hike to the bottom of, and climb if you have the equipment. One summer some college students thought it would be a brilliant idea to use the winch of their jeep to pull themselves up the face of the mountain. They ended up getting stranded on top of the Slab, waiting for a rescue helicopter and lots of very angry city open space officials to rescue them and bring their jeep down off of the mountain. If you stand in the southern part of Boulder you can see the Devil's Thumb, a thumb-shaped rock formation the sticks out of the top of one of the smaller Flatirons. If you head north and leave from Chataqua park you can hike to a natural arch that's tucked away behind one of the northern faces. There's Seal Rock, a flatiron that looks like a barking seal, Bear Canyon, Shadow Canyon, Mount Sanitas, the Mesa Trail, Mallory Cave, where endangered bats nest every summer, and the Continental Divide standing even further to the west with permanently snow dusted peaks. I live in the San Francisco Bay now, and my mountains are fond memories, something I look forward to seeing every time I go back to Colorado. They sneak into my dreams sometimes as I relive camping trips or particularly memorable hikes. I can see Longs Peak or the Mummy Range or the summit of Loveland Pass in my minds eye without effort. Perhaps it's a sign of maturity or perhaps it's just a function of living somewhere else, but I can't help but think that I didn't appreciate my hometown and what it offered when I was there. Only in retrospect do I realize what a perfect setting it was for me, how wonderful and beautiful and rare an environment like that is. When I was living there they were simply the mountains. Now that I live far away from them they've been transformed into something that calls me home.