For several hours this afternoon I wandered happily around Enchanted Mesa. Whoever named this peaceful place must have loved it. I do too.

I went in search of more wildflowers of spring. I am beginning to believe that spring has finally arrived here. I think that we had the last snow of the season a couple of days ago. Today was sunny and warm.

This month’s storms left a lot of moisture. In fact, this has been Colorado’s wettest April in at least a decade. With all the snow and rain during the past three weeks I figured that the early spring wildflowers would be in bloom. They were.
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With sunny skies and the temperature in the 70s, spring came roaring back to Boulder today. Almost overnight grass turned green and flowers bloomed. My mood too has lifted by many corresponding degrees.

Just four days ago we were blessed with more than 5 inches of exceptionally wet snow followed by constant rain the next day. Already the snow has melted.

In its wake the ground is as wet as ever. The moisture is great for everything — except hiking.
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My bureaucratic career peaked more than 40 years ago. I had joined the U.S. civil service in 1961 just after getting my master’s degree in political science from Claremont Graduate University. I went to work in Washington for the U.S. Agency for International Development. In 1965 just after my wife Doris graduated from Howard University I switched to the U.S. foreign service and accepting a posting to Nairobi, Kenya.

Three years later the honchos in Washington decided that for the good of the service I would be the next AID Affairs Officer in Malawi, a land-locked country in Southern Africa that had formerly been known as Nyassaland. I didn’t want to go because I loved working and living in Nairobi so much, although I realized that a posting to Malawi was a lot better than luck than most of us were getting. Most of us had to go to South Vietnam.
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When I toured Somalia in 1963, it was much different from the failed state that it is today. I was working then in the State Department building in Washington, D.C., as the assistant desk officer for Somalia in the U.S. Agency for International Development.

I loved my job, the country, and its people. I learned everything I could about Somalia and the Somalis and had a huge library of everything written in English about them. Now I’m sad to see how terrible the lives of Somalis have become, but I retain my fond memories.

The American aid mission in Mogadishu put me up in a house complete with a support staff. Mohammed took good care of me including shopping, cooking, and drawing my bath. But he had to start by killing hundreds of huge cockroaches that had made their home in my house.
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Here on Colorado’s Front Range the pasqueflower is the first wildflower of spring. Today I went hiking in search of one.

Yesterday evening I showed my friend Mark some barely adequate photos of pasqueflowers that I took a few years ago. Mark is a fellow photographer and hiker, but he’s new to Boulder. I told him that the pasqueflower is the first flower of spring.

The flower takes its French name from the Hebrew word “pesach” or Passover in English because it begins to bloom at about this Passover-Easter season. Telling Mark about these flowers inspired my search today. But I had almost given up my quest before I found any.
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Some of my friends encouraged me to share my favorite photographs of flowers on a separate blog or on Flickr. My programmers and I looked into these options.

But the cost of additional bandwidth for a blog of photographs would be too much for me. And the idea of using Flickr, where my photographs could get lost in the millions of other photographs there, didn’t appeal to me.

So I decided to pick out a few of the flower pictures that I like the most for this photo essay. This time my emphasis is much more on the photos than the essay. While I caption these photos with their location, I usually don’t include the names of the flowers.
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While I never wrote about the Tenderfoot Trail before, it has become one of my favorite hikes. It wasn’t always so.

My love of this loop grew slowly. For a year or so after I learned about this 4.5 mile loop in the foothills above Boulder I completely avoided it. I had read a Web review that panned this hike because you start at the top and hike down. Like the wimp who wrote that, back then I would have been too exhausted to enjoy the final leg of the journey.

Now the downhill leg just gets me warmed up for the return trip. The trip back often seems too short in my reluctance to return to civilization.
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