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The fire exhales in soft gasps and whispers, occassionally snapping a shot of sparks into the air. It's the longest day of the year, well past 9pm and the last reddish glow of twilight is still clinging to the high mountains of the Spanish Peaks wilderness, a good thirty miles from our camp here at Trinidad Lake.
We celebrated the Solstice by heading back up into the Sangre de Christo Mountains, to Bear Lake. We had to see it, even if we couldn't get the bus to it. It turned out to be a wonderful little glacial lake at the base of tk Peak, with a good view of the Culebra Range.
A mostly spruce forest, with glades of aspen here and there surround the Bear Lake.
The name comes from a large black bear that was causing a lot of havoc back in the early 1900s. An early forest ranger set a trap for it and the next day he went to retrieve the trap but it was gone. He tracked the bear and trap to the middle of the lake. The bear was so big that it had dragged the trap cross-country several miles before dying in the lake. A story that serves as a remider that the pre-Aldo Leopold forest service was not noted for it's ecological outlook.
A tributary of the Cuchara River runs down the hill and into Bear Lake. The water is cold. Too cold for any of us to give it a try. The kids contented themselves with throwing rocks in the shallow water.
<img src="images/2017/2017-06-21_145828_trinidad-and-around.jpg" id="image-606" class="picwide" />
<img src="images/2017/2017-06-21_135627_trinidad-and-around.jpg" id="image-604" class="picwide" />
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