The Devil’s Gulch, one of many landscape features by that name (there are at least two of them in Larimer County), is a five-mile long canyon in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. It may have been named that way because one of its floods killed two people in the nineteenth century. Or maybe it was because of the poison oak, stinging nettles, and thickets of spiny bushes that make it nearly impassable. Or maybe it was because of the rattlesnakes. In the stretch that I regularly patrol, it cuts its way through the last granite buttress of the Front Range, carving stone-walled pools, waterfalls, and narrows. After leaving the foothills it meanders through the grassland between the red hogback of Morrison sandstone and the green hogback of Dakota sandstone that separate the Rockies from the Great Plains. Its waters (when there are any left) eventually merge with those of the Cache-La-Poudre, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri, and the Mississippi.
The first group of pictures all represent the same view--the mouth of the Devil’s Gulch,
where it enters the prairie--,
and they are ordered chronologically from January to December.
The second group explores the half-mile long stretch where the Devil’s Gulch forces its way
through the granite.
|