Today: 60 miles, 3146 feet climbing.
Cumulative: 13 biking days, 953 miles, 48000 feet climbing.
'Nother easy day. Woohoo! More beautiful mountains. And we stay at a hot springs resort. Nice!
The bird is the Colorado state bird, the magpie. There are a lot of them and they have a very distinct look when perched and when flying.
The cool rock formation is Chimney Rock. The namers saw it from the east where you don't see the second rock sticking up like that, but the better view is from the west as we approached it. There are Anasazi Indian ruins near the peak, though they only inhabited it for about 50 years from 1075 AD to 1125 or something like that. Weird, huh?
We got loads of magpies on our back lawn.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magpie
The European Magpie is the only non-mammal known to be able to recognise itself in a Mirror test.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy
Hah! I don't think Americans play the magpie counting song, do they? In Taos, they need a vulture counting rhyme.
ReplyDeleteIt turns out I was wrong about the magpie being the Colorado state bird. I lived all that time in Denver and
thought they were. The real state bird is some stupid nondescript sparrow thing. I did a google search on "magpie
state bird" and found about a half dozen western states where people thought the magpie was the state bird or
should be. Though, in fact, it is the state bird of none (the wild turkey makes a good showing, being the state
game bird of three and I saw some of them here today in New Mexico).
As for the mirror test, that makes the European Magpie smarter than some people. I wonder how well they would do
with the dog urine self-awareness test :)