The Colorado State Open Thread is written to invite thought and input from people interested in our square(ish) state. Tonight’s thread isn’t written to frighten, worry, or scare people. It’s to remind folks that even though we’re about to hit the winter solstice and face the shortest daylight of the year, we have much to celebrate and be grateful for.
Things I have to be grateful for include:
- I love the night, as much as I love the day. The night brings stillness to the world and a whole different selection of creatures that can be seen in and around my Colorado home. That’s a major reason we have cameras up on various sides of our “compound”. Night creatures I don’t see in the daytime have included packrats, bats, UFO’s (all this means is, I haven’t identified what the flying objects caught in our camera’s lights have been), an interesting variety of moths and the calling of a Sawhet owl (I haven’t seen the actual bird). Creatures I’ve seen mostly at night, but I know are around during the day include bobcats, mountain lions, bears, moose, rabbits, foxes, Great horned owls and raccoons. In Denver, I used to hear coyotes, but I don’t hear them nearly as much.
- The night allows some mechanical devices to be seen that are hard or even impossible to see during the daytime. Satellites cruise overhead. Airplanes that might be hard to see if they aren’t showing contrails (note I didn’t say chemtrails) show their blinking lights as they travel to near and far destinations. You can even find out about them in apps on phones. Lights in the distance are turned on, including what (to me and many others) include displays meant to show religious devotion (crosses or stars above the YMCA grounds and on the western boundary of the Denver Metro are very prominent), Christmas displays mounted around our town, as well as lights in trees and on buildings not just downtown but in many private homes around the area. These may be to fight back the dark and they may have a heritage that stretches back centuries, but these nighttime lights are done without care to what other people or animals might want.
- The night also lets you see Mother Nature from an entirely different perspective. Rocky Mountain National Park doesn’t qualify for national or international designation as a dark sky site — too much light pollution from Colorado’s front range, but if you’d like to see a list of official dark sky sights in Colorado, you can go to www.uncovercolorado.com/…. There are some towns, some parks and some other locations listed. Estes Park at least has ordinances to prevent new lights shining into the sky — they all must have hoods or other devices to direct light downward. Unfortunately, that still means that light can reflect off the ground and be bounced up into the night sky. Still, most nights I can see the Milky Way, which was very hard to do when we lived in the Denver metro area for most of the last thirty years. I took the photo at the top of this diary and it wasn’t even nearly as clear as some winter nights recently — the cold, clear air really helps the stars and planets stand out. I hadn’t been able to pick out the Andromeda galaxy with my naked eye for decades, but I can now. At night, you can also see distant lightning light up clouds or shoot down into the ground much clearer than one can in the daytime. Stark silhouettes backlit by the lightning can really be outstanding.
- The night brings calm to many noises from the daytime. Cars on the distant roads slow way down, though because of headlights, they’re easier to take note of. The wind seems to calm down as well, in part because after the air cools and flows down the mountains into the valleys, it tends to stay there and not move around. I don’t hear people with gas or even electric engines working during the night, so things like snowblowers, lawnmowers (yes, there are some people up here with lawns, mostly feeding deer and elk), noise from construction and people talking outside their houses or over at the campground or the YMCA are mostly quiet, especially after 10 or 11PM.
- When the sense of sight becomes harder to rely upon at night, other senses try to compensate. There have been some walks I’ve been on where I pass through a small patch of cold air that has gathered for some reason in a particular location. It either wouldn’t exist or might be unnoticed during the warmer daytime, but at night, is it a ghost? Or just an atmospheric disturbance? My sense of smell tends to be sharper at night — perhaps being able to smell wisps of campfire or fireplace smoke. Perhaps smelling dinner, to the degree that I might be able to identify what’s cooking. And sounds — what might be unnoticed among other sounds during the daylight can be heard more clearly and sometimes, with much more urgency, at night as some animal might crack a stick as it walks through the woods or you hear a rustling through leaves as a mouse or weasel goes looking for its dinner.
- One final note — I have enjoyed night pretty much my whole life. I have studied astronomy in high school and college. I also have collected a number of books containing stories of myths and legends from many different cultures from around the world about what we see in the stars when we look up. I enjoyed telling some of those stories back when I was hosting campfire programs for the National Park Service, and I still remember the “Frogs on the Moon” story from the Native Americans. I expect most Coloradans prefer daytime to night, but I hope you get out occasionally to enjoy the night and everything special about it.
Yes, this diary was written while I’m staring out into the darkness of my mountain neighborhood. Even though I’m looking over elements of civilization, it certainly isn’t nearly as lit as the city neighborhoods I used to dwell in. Please stay warm as the Solstice arrives with a blast of cold Canadian air. I saw Denver is expecting temperatures to dip to about -11, so that puts us likely into the negative teens, at most. We may not exceed 0 degrees for a couple of days this week.
Please let us hear what is special to you at this time of year down below in the comments. The floor is yours.