Rabbit Mountain used to be called Rattlesnake Mountain. Both are supposedly plentiful here, but I didn’t see any of either today.

I did see lots of prairie dogs. Like this one running:

Running Dog

Two Dogs

Maybe they should change the name of the mountain again. But for now it’s Rabbit Mountain:

Rabbit Mountain

I hiked the trail to the overlook above the Little Thompson River in warmer February weather in Colorado than I could imagine. The temperature in the shade was in the high 60s — probably a record for the day — and I was in the even warmer sun all day. In fact I was dressed too warmly for the weather.

Rabbit Mountain is 20 miles north of my apartment in Boulder. I decided to go there today because I had a followup appointment with my urologist for the TURP operation that I had just before Thanksgiving. It has not been going as well as we had hoped for, and I will have another procedure on February 17. That will be at his office, but I may then have to go back to the hospital after that.

Still, I wouldn’t trade places with my doctor for anything. While he is stuck in his office doing things like DREs, I get to hike.

In fact, I have hiked every day this beautiful week. I didn’t write about my hike along a section of Coal Creek Trail that I had never hiked until yesterday. Even though I clocked more than the recommended 10,000 steps that my new pedometer counted, for once I didn’t see anything that I wanted to photograph.

The plant below is nothing special. But the combination of the plant, the sun shining on it, and the lichen-covered rock is beautiful to me:

Plant, Sun, Rock

And today was the first day of spring. At least that’s what some optimistic flowers growing along the trail must have thought:

Optimistic Flower

For this shot I used another trick of professional photographers. I learned this one from the instructor at the macro photography seminar that I took in Denver a couple of weeks ago. The instructor said that of course flowers look better just after the rain when they have a few drops of moisture on them. I knew that and remember some beautiful shots I took on my rainy backpacking trip to Devils Thumb Lake. But we haven’t had any rain for months, and still these flowers have little droplets of water on them.

How? I sprayed them as the instructor said to do and showed us that he does himself. I was going to buy a spray bottle when it dawned on me that I already had something better than anything I could find in a store. It was an almost finished bottle of lens cleaner that my optician gave me. It is small enough — less than an inch in diameter — that I can easily carry it even in my smallest pack.

And that’s the pack I took today. When I got to the end of the trail and found the bench looking out, I was regretting that the pack wasn’t big enough to hold even my smallest trail book. No matter. I had in me something even better — the capacity to sit and meditate.

I have joined two vipassana meditation groups in the past few weeks. I am so glad to get back to the meditation that I did regularly in the 1970s. It helps me so much to deal with the stress in my life, something that I know is especially good for helping to tame my diabetes. I sat here at the end of the trail and meditated for three-quarters of an hour in the bright sun today:

Meditation View