The Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado: A Place of Change

 By Steven Wade Veatch

In 1965—when I was a boy—I picked up a chunk of petrified wood (about 34 million years old, or Late Eocene age) at the Florissant fossil beds and wondered how it was formed. This simple act changed my life: it started me on my lifelong hobby of collecting rocks, minerals, and fossils, and later influenced my decision to study science at college. Both were big and long-lasting changes in my life.

Steven Veatch (11 years old) and his brother Greg Veatch (4 years old)
sitting at the fossilized Big Stump at the fossil beds in 1965.
This was when the park was a private tourist enterprise. 

Years later, I experienced another transforming moment—meeting legendary scientist Estella Leopold at the fossil beds. On that special day, Estella and I ambled along the trail to the petrified stumps, deep in our thoughts. We plunked down on a park bench and chatted the afternoon away while sharing the excitement of Ice Age pollen discovered in a Pleistocene rock layer at the fossil beds. We shared a singular purpose then—to reveal a part of the Ice Age here at the fossil beds. Because the record of Ice Age pollen in the Rocky Mountains was limited, our work on Florissant’s Ice Age pollen was important. 

The Florissant Fossil Beds is also a place of change. Its landscape is a mosaic of montane forests and rich meadows enfolded in ever-shifting patterns of light, sound, and fragrance. It is a gateway to nature, to the past, and to the present. It is a tale of imagination, of scientific exploration, and of the Ute people. Whenever I visit, I find myself sinking mindlessly into its petrified past while I ponder its present.

The natural beauty at the fossil beds is also an invitation to explore its possibilities, to plunge into the forest and consider the flight of pollen grains, borne on a morning breeze. Or to follow a moss spore’s journey. Water moves slowly through Grape Creek. Moss-covered boulders slow the creek, making small pools. Gnats flutter above the creek, and green grasses, dotted with wild iris and other wildflowers, line its banks. Springs, coming from deep inside the ground, help feed the watercourse. I can feel this stream and its sounds deep within my soul. It is sublime.

Grape Creek in the fall. This creek runs through the monument.
Photo date 2018 by S. W Veatch.

My wife and I walk the forest trails often, and the landscape feels alive. Beard lichen’s wiry hair drops from forked branches. Chickadees and woodpeckers live with owls, deer, and black bears. There is a forest symphony of sounds composed of hums, trills, chatters, and peeps. Frogs call their mates. Wind stirs through the trees, rustles branches, and knocks down yellow mists of ponderosa pollen.

Black Abert squirrels leave a litter of chewed cones and tiny twigs, stripped of their bark, on the ground. In the winter, these cones, seeds, and twigs lie on the snow, showing that these squirrels do not hibernate. In the spring, pasque flowers poke up through the fallen pine needles and bloom in a soft lavender.

A pasque flower, a harbinger of spring, blooms
at the Florissant Fossil Beds.
Photo date 2019 by S. W. Veatch.

I notice the slow changes to a rotting log on the fossil bed’s forest floor. The log shows the passage of time on a different scale: the time it takes for a big, downed tree to be transformed back into soil—two centuries, or about seven human generations. 

Brimming with life, the log—now crumbled bits and pieces of wood covered with leaf litter—is a habitat for many species. Beetles chew the wood, forming serpentine galleries beneath the bark. Colonies of ants live in the cavities, forage for food, and remain subordinate to the mother queen. A mouse lives beneath the log’s rotting roots; fungal strands penetrate the decaying wood. Patches of lichen and moss grow green on its surface. Spiders spin webs on spindly branches. 

The log is now a spongy, mossy mound that once was a living tree. In this thriving microcosm of decay-dwelling species, there is a quiet yet energetic chemical factory recycling nutrients and organic matter. Altogether, this log, and others like it, nurture the forest by adding nutrients that sustain its health. And so it is that this landscape “nurses” my spirit.

There are other beneficial changes at the fossil beds. A combination of lightning strikes, a dry forest, and dry winds can cause a wildfire, which spreads across the landscape, bringing sudden change. Ponderosa pines are resistant to fire due to their thick bark and limbs that extend above the forest floor. Fire maintains the ponderosa pine forest by killing off competing trees. The ash from wildfires revitalizes the forest. 

Change at Florissant comes in many ways with the cycles of day and night. The red dawn splashes the sky with morning possibilities. The midday sun floods the valley with brightness while the spires of green trees poke at the sky. Wavering shafts of afternoon sunlight reach the forest floor. After sundown, the twilight spreads like ether, and the mountains cool like stone while the valley fills with a flood of moonlight. The stars become pinpricks that sizzle in the night sky.

The circling seasons of the sun, snow, and rain bring change on a longer scale. Summer sunlight falls from unbelievably blue skies. There is music in the rain as it slaps aspen leaves, bounces, and splats on the ground before it disappears into the soil. In the fall, the air is crisp, and the aspen leaves are a brush stroke of radiant gold and orange. In the winter, elk weave tracks across snowy slopes. Coyotes send their penetrating calls bouncing across the white meadows when the frosty night comes on.

Raindrops bead up on fallen aspen leaves at the park.
Photo date 2004 by S. W. Veatch.

Physical processes, such as the imperceptible progress of drifting continents, erosion, soil formation, or freeze-thaw cycles, bring change. And there are more rapid agents of disturbance—such as nearby volcanic eruptions that occurred 34 million years ago. These cataclysms sent flows of mud coursing down the river valley, forming a dam and lake that transformed organisms into fossils. The mud also surrounded the bases of trees, and, over time, petrified them. 

Today, petrified stumps stand like sentinels in the forest. Lichens cling to petrified wood like starfish on rocks. Kingdoms of moss stake their claims on fossil tree stumps. Whenever I hold a Florissant fossil or look at a stone stump, I experience the physical vastness of time and space.

A National Park Service archaeologist points out a peeled or
culturally modified tree at the monument. The Utes used
the bark for cradle boards and scraped the cambium layer
for food and medicine. Photo date 2004 by S. W. Veatch. 

Cultural change is a part of the fabric of this land of petrified forests and fossils. This was first the home of the Ute people, where their elders said you could learn a lot from listening to the land. The land was taken from the Utes, and these people were sent to less desirable places to subsist. I find evidence of these people today in the trees they modified or by finding an occasional arrowhead that is washed to the surface by summer rains. Roads brought homesteaders, who worked the land. Nearby goldfields intensified settlement. 

Lastly, the values of people change. After decades of being a commercial tourist attraction, people wanted to preserve the fossil beds. Activists, including Estella Leopold, helped to prevent the destruction of the fossil beds until the National Park Service could preserve the area for future generations. Outside the park, the forest and meadows were plowed under by bulldozers, subdivided, and further broken up by lots, fences, and roads. 

Advertisement for one of two tourist establishments
at the fossil beds circa 1965. Two tourist operations operated
at the fossil beds before it became a national monument.
From the S. W. Veatch collection.

Forests change, species evolve, and life proceeds. Today, the beauty of this place invites overuse, while the effects of climate change threaten the fossil beds with future habitat destruction and species extinction. 

For me, the Florissant landscape is a sacred place: A place of change, a place to meditate and scribble in a journal—a place to gain insight into how to live my life. It positioned me to think about time and change, to peer into the past and imagine the future. And to feel the present while I reflect on life, death, order, disorder, continuity, and change.

The Shadowgee

By Steven Wade Veatch
     
During the school-free months of summer my mother, brother, and grandfather stayed at our cabins in the mountains north of Divide, Colorado.  Mother’s cabin was next to my grandfather’s cabin. These were simple times where we passed the summer days with pleasant recreations. This was a time where relationships and memories were made—a time when my life was shaped. The two cabins marked some of the most memorable scenes of my boyhood.
     

Sunrise in the mountains. Watercolor © by S. W. Veatch

There were no malls or shopping centers, only a simple country grocery store six miles away. There were no toney, high-end country clubs; instead we went to the Divide Community club, which was built during the Great Depression, for a weekly diversion of bingo or a dance that alternated each Saturday with the bingo game. The mountain folks referred to the dance as “goin’ to the fights” as some of the rowdy cowboys liked to throw down and mix it up out back during the dances.
     
At our cabin I would stay up late and read. Before turning in for the night I would go out on the porch and look at my grandfather’s window to see if his bedroom light was on. It always was on—he would read into the dark and quiet hours of the night.  He liked to read, he liked words and working with words. I got that from him.

***

On this particular summer morning I got up at daybreak and looked out the window of our cabin to see welcoming smoke coming out of my grandfather’s chimney. I ran down the porch steps to start a morning with my grandfather—my mother and my brother would soon follow.
     
While my grandfather made breakfast I watched the meadow, forest, marsh, and granite rocks through his kitchen window. The July meadow grass waved rhythmically from wind while the wildflowers painted a splash of purple along the edge of the meadow. A chipmunk sat on a weathered stump and worried a seed.
     
After our breakfast of pancakes with Mickey Mouse ears, Log Cabin syrup poured from a tin, bacon, and orange Tang we eased into the main cabin room. The burning pine crackled, popped, and hissed in the Ben Franklin fireplace.  Angry red embers warmed the room. The calming aroma of the burning wood filled the cabin while the morning sunlight streamed through the windows where light, skipping off little specs of dust, created pinpoints of reflected light.
     
I curled into the couch and my grandfather relaxed next to me in an easy chair. He put a mug of black coffee on an old wooden barrel with a round top painted a deep red. Old liquor bottle labels, covered with clear shellac, decorated the top. He filled his pipe with Half and Half pipe tobacco, stuck a wooden match and lighted the bowl of his pipe. Soon a tendril of smoke climbed from his pipe. It was time for stories to be tossed around. I can still hear the deep, articulate, and measured sound of his voice—certain, knowing. He fired my imagination by telling erudite tales of mining days all the way back to territorial Colorado. His grandfather and father were pioneers in the windswept mining camp of Caribou in Boulder County.

***

Following our morning round of tales my grandfather took an old, gallon-sized Half and Half pipe tobacco can and reworked it into a lantern. He attached a wire at either end with the loop on the outside of the can. The wire stretched from end-to-end.  This made a handle and held the can on its side. Next he punched an inch-round hole on the underside of the can. Finally, he shoved a candle in the hole. The candle flame would reflect off the shiny, inside bottom of the can and shine out through the open top, creating a beam of light. Now the empty tobacco can was a makeshift candle lantern. I sat upright, engrossed. I waited with held breath and hoped that he would hand me whatever he was making. What could it be?
     
I said, “What the heck is that?”
     
Grandfather said, “It’s called a shadowgee, this is what the miners used in mining camps before flashlights. Would you like one?”
   
 “Heck ya!”
   
My grandfather reached over with the Shadowgee and handed it to me. I carefully took it from him and held it in my hands. I slowly looked it over. It felt so cool and seemed like the best thing ever made.
     

The shadowgee my grandfather made for me. Note how the handle is offset from the top. This way, when the lantern was carried, the candle would tilt away from the wire handle and not burn the miner’s fingers. Photo © S. W. Veatch.

View of the shadowgee in operation.  Photo © S. W. Veatch.

     
The empty can kept the mountain winds from blowing out the candle flame. The burning candle provided a steady light so the miner carrying it could check his corral in the dark or to see his way on a late-night trip to the outhouse. Grandfather used his shadowgee to find our two-holer outhouse at night.
     
The shadowgee speaks about mining life: miners were careful in spending their money; lamps and kerosene were costly; and miners were resourceful and had to improvise and use discarded tin cans as a resource, repurposing them into shadowgees or other useful artifacts.

***

That night, I waited to test my shadowgee. The wind quieted down so it could hear the alluring sounds of the forest. Shadows whispered across the meadows. The evening became a lingering twilight of layered crimson in the clouds. The night turned eggplant dark and the countryside calm. When the summer stars were bright it was time for me to test my shadowgee and follow the worn path to the outhouse. Out I went, into the night, shadowgee in hand. What I learned was that spending time with my grandfather was the best part of those summer days so long ago. He always had something new to show me or teach me. What I didn’t appreciate then was that his stories of living in a mining camp and the shadowgee sparked the beginning of what turned into a lifelong fascination with mining.

*** 

Today my grandfather is gone. My mother is gone too. The other day I was going through some of my mother’s boxes. I opened a cardboard box and saw a real treasure, a shadowgee—a battered tin can that was an affectionate throwback to the world of my grandfather. It brought me back, forty-nine years ago, to that moment when I first learned about the shadowgee, now a symbol of my grandfather and an intensity of life, a time of stories and where I could really relate to someone, a time before distractions of smart phones and other technology.
   
I know the time my grandfather spent with me enfolded me into something larger than myself. I emerged changed—nearer the person I longed to be. In this way he reshaped and repurposed my life, just like the tobacco can being made into lanterns—something better. I carefully put the shadowgee back in the box, and smiled.