Sugarloaf

If there's going to be a bright spot in the future of this toothless, grumpy old man it might just be a dream come true or another excursion into some yet unknown dimension. In my attempt to prophecy future events I come up with the same thing repeatedly. I don't have a clue what will happen next. But I'm getting better at making sure I know what's not going to happen. As the sun is shining in this afternoon I get a short premonition of a warm spring day ebbing into a wonderful summer. So what I am remembering this afternoon while I listen to Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps is the day I hauled a short load of fuel up Sugarloaf to a subdivision that hosted a few of that generations wild ones including David Crosby, Neil Young and some of the outfit from Caribou Ranch Recording Studio. It's been more than twenty-five years since I was up Sugarloaf but I can imagine the condition of the trees from the bark beetle problem which was just getting bad in 1976/77 when I hauled fuel to the Forest Service to use in combating the infestation. I didn't know then that they were spraying the infected trees with a mixture of diesel and a herbicide. I also didn't know it was not meant to just kill the beetles. It kept them from migrating to healthy trees. The ones infected were already gone. They didn't want it to spread but, it did. Somewhere in my mess of pictures from back then I have a shot of my truck parked on Sugarloaf road right in the middle of the worst of it all. I'll look for it. Anyway, I'd like to go back up there one day this year and look the place over to see how much it has changed. Too many horror stories of what my life as a tornado did to the Peak to Peak region of the Front Range of Colorado.