Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Catch "Flume Fever" and learn about a rare piece of Colorado history

Hanging Flume near Uravan, Colorado (photo by Ealdgyth)
"Flume Fever" is a great little five-minute documentary about the coming together of a beautiful corner of
southwest Colorado with a unique piece of Western history.

In the late 1800s, hungering for imagined millions in gold in the Dolores River, miners built an amazing hanging flume to carry water from the San Miguel River to work the placer deposit in the Dolores Canyon. The wooden waterway was hung from the sheer sandstone facade of the San Miguel Canyon, in a completely ingenious -- and almost befuddling -- distinctly regional feat of engineering.

This short film captures the novelty of the Hanging Flume of the San Miguel through a group who put their "flume fever" to use unraveling how to reconstruct a 48-foot section of the flume to get a "glimpse of the level of the effort that went into the construction" of the structure in the first place, says one of the team.

Check out the video. Then go check out the place.



Flume Fever from Mara Ferris on Vimeo.

Sunday, June 15, 2014

A special Father's Day

My dad learned a thing or two from me, too.
This Father's Day is a special one, because it is the first in which I do not have a father.

A living father at least -- although I now only see more how much he lives on in the ripples that ripple on in myself, in my kids, in the people who knew him best, and, likely, in some who knew him little.

And I felt those ripples the first time after he passed away when I was unexpectedly given an unusual task: to write my dad's obituary for the local paper, the Cibola Beacon.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Old love

San Juan River 1991 -- two years into our 25 years of experiencing together
My wife, Sarah, and I celebrated our 25th anniversary this week. "That sure went fast," my mom commented
about this momentous event when I visited her last weekend. "Maybe to you," I replied, laughing. "It seems like a lifetime to me."

I didn't mean that sarcastically. Nor negatively. It just feels like ... Sarah and I have been together at this being-together thing for a full and ongoing lifetime already. Because while our time together has not always been harmonious, or easy, or perfect, it has always been deep, and varied, and ever-evolving -- experiences as rich as a lifetime.