Today I drove to Wheat Ridge, Colorado for a book signing and ride at Wheat Ridge Cyclery (www.ridewrc.com). The shop is owned by my old friend and former 7-Eleven teammate Ron Kiefel, and if memory serves, his family owned the shop when he was a kid and now he’s keeping it in the family. It’s a great shop, if you’re ever in the Denver area, and Ron and his staff are equally superb.
Before the book signing at the shop, I went out for a ride with about 40 people who had reserved spots for a morning group ride as part of the event. (By the way, such group rides will be included in most of the stops in “The Time-Crunched Cyclist Tour, Energized by GU”.) It was a nice ride with a great bunch of cyclists, and turnout at the signing was very good as well.
What amazed me this morning, though, was how green Colorado is right now. It’s the second week of August, and normally the prairie grass out here is brown and tinder dry by now. But we’ve had so much rain this summer that not only is the prairie grass along Interstate 25 on the way to Denver green; it’s really tall too. In fact, everything that grows is growing taller and more robust this year. Wildflowers that last year were 8-10 inches tall are 3 feet tall this year, and there are so many sunflowers on along the trails in Colorado Springs that we all have scratches and rashes from the prickers on the stems.
Of course, great growth now may cause great problems later. Eventually all that greenery is going to turn brown, and those prairies and wildflower plants are going to become kindling. Worse yet, out east of Colorado Springs, the tumbleweed has been growing out of control this summer, and once it dries out and starts moving with the winds, it’s likely to build up on the ranchers’ fences into 8 to 10-foot tall walls of tinder-dry vegetation. Come September and October, Colorado’s Front Range will be one giant fire danger.
Which brings me to my other observation for today: people throwing cigarette butts out car windows. As a non-smoker, it would never occur to me to throw even a small piece of trash out my car window as I drive down the road. As a kid I was taught that trash goes in special receptacles called “trash cans”, and that knowledge has served me well for many years. How did cigarette smokers forget that lesson from childhood? How does a person get to the point where throwing a smoldering piece of trash out of moving car is acceptable behavior? Forget for a moment the arguments against smoking in the first place, that’s a different battle for a different time, but if you’re going to smoke is it too much to ask that you stub out your cigarette and dispose of the remains like a responsible adult?
I’m all for naturally-occurring grass and forest fires – it’s part of nature, cleansing for the forest, and important for the germination of some plant seeds – but fires caused by careless and irresponsible behavior bother me. Last year, if memory serves, a rancher driving a truckload of hay a few miles to the east of Colorado Springs threw a lit cigarette out the window of his truck. It was a very windy day and the cigarette was blown into the hay he was carrying, which promptly caught fire. The man stopped the truck and got away from it safely, but the high winds caused the fire to jump from his truck to the adjacent grassland. The end result was a very fast-moving grass fire fed by 20-plus mile-per-hour winds. No one died and I think the only property lost was the guy’s truck, but fires like that happen out here every year. As beautiful as Colorado is right now, I hope the local fire departments are gearing up for the fall, because as much as I hate to say it, I have a strong feeling that nature’s bounty and people’s stupidity (and that’s not restricted to flying cigarettes) are going to lead to a busy few months for hard-working and under-appreciated wildland firefighters.
Chris Carmichael
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