The more time one spends in the outdoors, the more unusual sights one experiences. I was having lunch with a co-worker one sunny day in Ladore Canyon of Northwestern Colorado. My companion was a scientist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and together we were searching out infestations of insect pests which damage range grasses. This beautiful canyon, frequented in its colorful past by Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang, stretched to the western horizon from our lunch site at its eastern end. It was summer and the sprawling meadow was green with lush grass.

    We chose our picnic spot with no hesitation. It was under the shade of the only tree in the entire basin floor. Just as we had spread our lunches, we noticed that we were sharing the shade with a rather large king snake, which lay unmoving at the far edge of the shady spot. Briefly I considered chasing the friendly fellow away, snakes not being among your typical welcome onlookers at lunch time. But then I considered the facts that he was there first and there was nowhere for him to go but into the hot sun. My companion and I agreed to let the snake be. An unusual lunch indeed. And I kept an eye on the snake as I munched my

sandwich.

    Another strange happening outdoors was witnessed by a pilot friend of mine whom I know to be truthful. As he was flying a government coyote control officer around the sagebrush country of western Colorado, they spotted an antelope. This was not unusual as one would expect to see hundreds of these speedsters in a typical over flight of the area.

Piggyback predator

    But this pronghorn had a large golden eagle on its back, and was quite unhappy about it. The eagle had obviously pressed its talons into the antelope’s back and was holding on and flopping its wings as the animal ran at top speed in an attempt to dislodge its attacker. Later in the morning the pilot circled the same area and saw that the antelope had slowed to a walk; the eagle still firmly gripping the spine of its prey. And still later in the day, my curious friend made another pass and saw that the antelope had finally fallen to the ground and the determined eagle was eating its hard won meal.

    We speculated that the eagle, which had perhaps a six foot wingspan, had worked one of its powerful talons between two vertebrae in the pronghorn’s spine. Quite a supply of meat for a predatory bird which usually kills jackrabbits, lambs and deer fawns for its meals.

    Another oddity happened in eastern Moffat County while I was hunting antelope alone there some 10 years ago. I was ambling along a dry and desolate wash when I suddenly became aware that my environment had changed. I looked around and realized, very much to my surprise, that I was standing in a coral reef. Yes, a real, ocean produced, beach-side coral reef, right there in the semi-arid desert west, some 6,000 feet above the sea.

    There, above the wash, was an area the size of a gymnasium which consisted entirely of huge shelves of petrified coral, resting perfectly level atop eroded pillars of pure ocean sand. The sand glistened as beach sand does when you look closely. Layers of coral were interrupted by intervening channels, through which I could visualize colorful fish swimming about, as I have seen while snorkeling in Hawaii.

Expert analysis

    I collected a piece of the coral from thousands of chunks lying about on the “beach”. I took it to the geologist at the Bureau of Land Management in Craig, Colorado because the find was on public land managed by that agency. She was excited about the find, asserting that the site would help her age the land mass in that area. It would have been pushed up by the monumental upheaval which formed the Rocky Mountains, she told me. I marked the site on her map, some 17.2 miles from the nearest paved road.

    I moved from Colorado shortly thereafter and never got the chance to learn what the geologist determined about the site. But I vowed that someday I would return there to photograph it. One fall, while on an elk hunt, I traveled a hundred miles out of my way to do just that. I was a little apprehensive about finding the site, distrusting my failing memory. But I had taken good notes and marked my map precisely. There it was, practically unchanged from the day millions of years ago when the waters of some ancient ocean bathed the reef  and surrounded it with multicolored fish species perhaps never seen by man. I exposed two rolls of slides, and I show some of them on occasions when I make presentations to groups interested in the outdoors.

    Because there are many tons of the coral at the site, I brought back a couple of baseball size chunks of it, now heavy as lead in its state of petrifaction. We can hold in our hand something formed millions of years ago and get a bit of the rush which I suppose sustains the geologists among us. Unusual sights and places in the outdoors, hiding out there like the colorful Easter eggs of our childhood fields and woods and churchyards, incite us to keep searching.