COLORADO VACATION

 

Across the Fence

 

By Arvord Abernethy

 

I’ll be easier on you this week by not talking about any of you, but you may be worse off as this visit we’ll be telling about what we are doing.

 

We are spending most of the week at Ponderosa Camp which is in the Conejos River Canyon 22 miles west of Antonita , Colorado --a most beautiful place.

 

It is in the land of Chipmunks , humming birds and wild dewberries. The floor and walls of the canyon are covered with pine, blue spruce and aspen that blend so well together. The altitude of the camp is 8500 feet and the wall rises straight up to over 1000 feet, so at this altitude one could expect it to be nippy. And it doesn’t disappoint you. This morning the temperature is in the 20’s with frost on buildings and ice on the cars.

 

When you drive up the road about a couple of miles you can see snow on the Continental Divide in the Wolf Creek Pass area. This Conejos River starts right up there and the melting snows are sending down lots of crystal clear, (and take it from our grandson, Lynn) cold water.

 

Lynn was fishing off a log when he fell into the river. We are up here with Mary’s children, Lyndon and Donna Fisher, their sons, Wade and Lynn, and Donna’s parents, the Stanley Austins.

 

The boys have had some good luck trout fishing. Since you are allowed just so many in possession, they counted yesterday afternoon and found they were over the limit, so we had an outdoors fish fry last light to hide the evidence. We sit around the campfire each night trying to keep warm and telling a few tall tales. They are hardly as tall as they would be if a certain Hamilton man was here. His initials are S---h   M---e. [Seth Moore]

 

We took a trip up in the mountains yesterday and it was like “Springtime in the Rockies .” They have had rains lately, so everything is green and the mountain flowers are overdoing themselves. We saw a lot more cattle than we thought we would, and they were rolling fat.

 

We have killed two birds with one stone on this trip. We came by Odessa where we helped my brother, James. And his wife, Elsie, celebrate their Golden Wedding Anniversary.

 

Since his retirement seven years ago, James has been the associate pastor of the Cresent Park Baptist Church . The church there as well as his former churches (which were well represented) have been so nice to them. Elsie wondered why they had waited so long to have this celebration.

 

The ladies in charge included in the invitations suggestions that people send in memories of their connections with James and Elsie so they could make up a Memory Book.

 

I remember an amusing incident with them. James invited me to be his best man at their wedding which took place at Silverton.

 

After I had been there awhile, James got around to telling me that there was a little hitch in the ceremony. He said that for us to come in and be on the correct side of the altar, we would have to crawl in through a window.

 

I was attending a one room church, so my mind could only envision a one room building. I didn’t say anything, but thought a lot. I thought if Santa could crawl down a chimney to make people happy, surely I could crawl through a window to make someone happy.

 

Then I thought that we might wait until the soloist started singing and while everyone was looking at her, we would crawl in.

 

What a relief and surprise I got when we got in and I looked around to see that we were in a Sunday School room right off  the auditorium.

 

 

 Shared by Roy Ables

 

 ACROSS THE FENCE