My trip to the Monte Vista Crane Festival was a wonderful experience. I plan to write more on a few subjects that came up for me, but I’ll do that over at Fierce Planet, my politics blog.

Greater Sandhill Cranes and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Photo by Jennifer Powell

For this post, it’s enough to say that the San Luis Valley was full of Greater Sandhill Cranes, about 20,000 of them overall. Even when they weren’t within sight, you could hear their echoing ping-pong calls all around the place. I was part of tours to two other wildlife sites, and also saw many elk, pronghorns, raptors and lots of other birds. The whole thing was a delight.

Highway 285 in Colorado is my favorite road in the state, winding through the mountains across very high desert basins. There are incredibly beautiful views on every side, and I enjoy the drive very much.

Before I left on Thursday, I did manage to keep up with my (reduced) ROW80 goals and worked more on the cover art for my book. That continues to go okay. I’ll have more to say next week.

In the meantime, here’s the blog hop link for today’s check-in. Off to see how everyone else is doing!