AmeriCorps 2020: An unexpected visitor

This post continues the retelling of my 2020 AmeriCorps service term in Boulder, Colorado. More specifically, it details the final day of a camping trip near the town of Nederland. The rest of this series can be found here.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when camping, I always seem to wake up with the sun. The same thing happened on the final day of my camping trip with my friend Mark, which turned out to be quite fortunate.

I woke up a little before 7 AM on August 9, and immediately began packing up. I finished rolling up my sleeping bag, and I was in the process of taking some final pictures of the purple flowers you’ve seen all over this blog.

Before I could snap a pic, a massive deer walked right through camp. The deer paused, giving me a perfect opportunity for a photo, so I focused my camera on it and pressed the button to shoot. At the point, I discovered that my camera’s shutter speed was still set to 10 seconds from my night sky experiments the previous evening. Needless to say, a 10 second shutter speed is too long for a moving target like a deer.

Frustrated at my lack of preparedness, I switched to a longer lens and followed the deer through our campsite. It wasn’t shy, but it kept moving, and there always seemed to be trees in between me and the deer. Thus, after a few disappointing photos, I decided to let it go and went back to packing.

Then, after only a few minutes, the deer came barreling back through camp at high speed, before vanishing into the bush.

I was ecstatic about this encounter, because I’d never seen a deer that big before, and I thought it was a young elk. It turns out that it was a mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) – which are much larger than the white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that I grew up with – but that doesn’t change how special that experience was.

Once the deer had left and Mark and I had packed up, we headed into Nederland to get something to eat.

Nederland is a charming, but eccentric, mountain town. It’s home to the “frozen dead guy,” an absolutely bizarre story that you have to read about. It’s also a major tourist destination in Colorado, which means it’s often packed on the weekends.

Mark and I arrived in Nederland relatively early on August 9, so the crowds weren’t bad. We chose to eat at a popular barbecue stand, but when they didn’t open at their posted time, we switched to the New Moon Bakery & Cafe. Unfortunately, by then it was lunchtime, and Nederland was full of tourists.

Mark and I got in line, and then we waited for about 12,000 years. We eventually made it to the front of the line, and I ordered some type of bagel sandwich and my usual double espresso. While ordering, I was able to joke around with the barista, which made my frustrations from the 12,000 years of waiting disappear.

It’s amazing how restorative a light-hearted conversation with a stranger can be. Or maybe it was the promise of espresso.

After lunch, which we took under the warm, Colorado sun, Mark and I headed home. He dropped me off at the Joder homestead, before he drove back to Denver. So concluded the best three days of my time in Colorado.