Hygiene was good to me this weekend.

It was good for pictures. Hygiene is a little Colorado town with a funny name 18 miles north of Boulder. The town got its name not because it is particularly clean, but rather because the Rev. Jacob Flory established a “hygiene sanitarium” for tuberculosis patients there in 1882. The cool dry air that we have around here is good both for people and nature.

While the ponds at Pella Crossing ^[1], which are a mile this side of Hygiene, were my destination, I first drove around the backroads to see what I could see. Along North 59th Street in Hygiene, near where last February I got a favorite shot of a painted silo ^[2], I captured this fall scene:

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Fall Colors

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Then, I remembered having seen a huge cottonwood tree along Crane Hollow Road nearby. I didn’t get a satisfactory photo then for a couple of reasons (I didn’t have the right lens with me and the light was wrong). But when I went back there this weekend, it worked.

This “Gentle Giant of Boulder County” is America’s largest plains cottonwood, according to a sign there. It is 105 feet high, according to the sign (95 feet high according to the National Registry of Big Trees ^[4]) and has a circumference of 36 feet, which is 432 inches). Since the National Registry says that “No image available,” I just sent them this one, which they immediately put online:

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The Biggest Plains Cottonwood in the Country

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Still driving to the ponds at Pella Crossing, I found this hawk perched on top of a pole along Hygiene Road. Using my SUV as a blind, I pulled right underneath the hawk for this shot:

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A Red-Tailed Hawk and I Study Each Other

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Reaching the ponds just an hour before the light faded behind the mountains, I broke a “rule” of photography and shot into the sun. This worked too:

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A Trail at Pella Crossing

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When I reached Webster Pond at Pella Crossing, the few birds remaining for the season were either along the pond’s far side or in the air. So I concentrated on looking up. What I saw was one of our most common birds — but one of the most graceful.

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A Gull Flies Over Webster Pond

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