Making the Mark

Another Big Thank You

We’ve reached my initial fundraising goal of $2500! Thank you to all of you who have supported my cause with donations. What at first seemed to be a challenging goal proved to be less so thanks to your graciousness and philanthropy. I received an email earlier today from the local chapter of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society that congratulated me on this achievement, and I’d like to direct most of that congratulations to you. If you have not yet contributed and would still like the opportunity to do so, you are certainly welcome to link to my fundraising page here. Though I have reached my personal fundraising goal, the ultimate objective of curing blood cancer still needs support. You have my sincerest compliments and thanks.

David

An Ankle Twister

Dakota Hogback, South Valley Park

South Valley Park

Voyaging west from the Mississippi River, travelers cross the Great Plains, a landscape characterized by pervasive and sweeping flatness. Through Iowa, Nebraska and eastern Colorado, the most significant elevation could generously be called a hill, and more reasonably termed a “rise”. Then, just to the west of Denver the Earth crumples, warps and folds dramatically into the Rocky Mountains, climbing to over 14,000 feet. The first minor rumpling that hints at the terrain beyond is a tilted outcrop that geologists call the Dakota Hogback. Millions of years ago layers of sandstone and shale were laid flat below ancient seas. After eons of laying peacefully, the Rocky Mountains lunged up from deep below the overlying layers of stone, punching up through these layers and bending them skyward. Imagine a clenched hand punching up through the bottom of an apple pie, the crusty layers being cracked and tilted upward. Those tilted crusts are synonymous with the layers that now make up the Dakota Hogback, just on a much larger scale. The tilted sandstone cliffs have sheltered life here for thousands of years. Early humans and Native-Americans used the southwest-facing cliffsides as a winter home where they could hunt elk, deer, and antelope through the harsh colder months. On this day, cliff swallows darting swiftly around there nests represented the local inhabitants. My five-and-a-half mile run started along the Coyote Song Trail that threaded its way through the sandstone outcrops and crossed the road to connect to the Grazing Elk Loop. To the west, the foothills rose sharply behind Lockheed-Martin’s glass and steel Deer Creek Facility, home of their Space System-Astronautics Operations Center. The tread of the trail here was a narrow furrow that made for difficult and risky footing, I tweaked my ankles on more than one occasion here, trying to find good ground, and I’d direct runners to spend their time elsewhere. The trail looped around a flat bench hooking around a few shallow fissures before crossing back over the road to finish on the smooth gravel of the Swallow Trail.