As I left Columbia this morning, a silver dollar moon beamed in the western sky, illuminating the predawn landscape. By the time I reached western Missouri, the pink rays of sunrise were reflecting from a deck of high, puffy clouds and several flocks of snow geese wavered southward above the rolling farmlands.
Once I entered Kansas a thick layer of clouds covered the sky but rusty grasses of the Flint Hills added color to an otherwise drab landscape. Numerous red-tailed hawks perched along the highway, restless Canada geese moved among the crop fields and a lone Cooper's hawk streaked across the roadway, headed for a valley woodland. The first snow banks appeared west of Hays and snow cover waxed and waned for the rest of my trip, peaking near Colby, Kansas, and along the base of the Front Range. On the High Plains, flocks of meadowlarks, horned larks and longspurs drifted across the fields, ring-necked pheasants foraged along the highway and northern harriers flapped low above the crop stubble, hunting for rodents. Finally, north of Limon, a few herds of pronghorn, the only wild mammals encountered on my journey, roamed the grasslands of the Palmer Divide.
As I approached Denver, the Front Range was backlit by a brilliant sunset and a northeast wind was producing both upslope haze across the city and lowering clouds across the wall of peaks. A significant snowfall is not forecast for the Metro Area but one never knows along this corridor of fickle and ever-changing weather. It is, after all, December.
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