Fine, sunny morning. Wrote till 11:30, then headed up the pass to the Florissant Fossil Bed National Monument—35 million years into the past. Saw the petrified stumps of giant sequoias. Fossils of fish and plants and birds and insects so crisp and clean they looked like intaglio. All the victims of a long-ago volcanic eruption that buried them in a river of mud.
I never knew Sequoias grew in Colorado. Or that Florissant was once a lake. Or that volcanoes existed in Guffey. But I’ve only myself to blame. I’ve passed by the monument in Florissant a thousand times on the way to the South Platte and the Tarryall in search of a good stretch of water to fish, and never taken the time to stop until today. Glad I did. Really glad.