Colorado Springs: Garden of the Gods

The people of Colorado Springs are so lucky to have a world-class park, Garden of the Gods, right in town. It is on everyone's must-see list for very good reason: if you have time in the Springs to do nothing else, a visit to Garden of the Gods should be the one thing that you do.

After spending most of Saturday and Sunday with Carter and Emma, we planned to make an early Monday morning trip to see Garden of the Gods before heading downtown to watch the opening World Cup match for the US team, a 1-1 draw against Wales and a disappointing finish for the young American team.

Because 30th Street, the main drag to the park, is closed for repairs, we ended up detouring in from above on Mesa Road and that was a lucky thing in that it afforded us beautiful views of the entire park from above, with the golden early morning light reflecting back at us off the rock formations and Pikes Peak towering above everything.

Once down in the park, we parked at the not-yet-open-for-the-day Visitor Center and walked under 30th Street towards the center of the park. The first thing I saw was a bird that you don't see every day, a shrike. I didn't have binoculars with me, but from the photo, I want to say that this is an overwintering Northern Shrike.

A Shrike, Perhaps a Northern Shrike

The Park Mascot, One of Many Black-Billed Magpies

Townsend's Solitaire in a Juniper

Pike's Peak

Scrub Jays are extremely common in the west. In fact, I'm watching and listening to one of our noisy pair in the spruce at arm's length outside my window as I type. It is shrieking away hiding in the branches staying out of the snowstorm that is currently raging. When I was a kid, I learned that there was a single species called a Scrub Jay (and my bird book still says that). Rarely, it was called a Western Scrub Jay to differentiate it from the population in Florida, now called the Florida Scrub Jay. Although I know our local scrubbers are officially called California Scrub Jays, I had not realized that the inter-mountain population is now considered a different species called Woodhouse's Scrub Jay. Live and learn.

Woodhouse's Scrub-Jay in a Piñon

In another change of nomenclature, I have just discovered that the bird I knew as a Rock Dove is now called a Rock Pigeon. I'm pretty sure that I have mentioned before on this blog that while large flocks of pigeons are nuisances in urban situations, that seeing them in their natural habitat among the rocks and high places is pretty special.

Rock Pigeons High Up in the Rock Formations

Iridescent Male Rock Pigeon

Annie at the Base of a Large Red Rock

Tree Growing out of Seemingly Pure Rock

I'm a kid of the East and each fall that I lived back there, we eagerly anticipated the arrival of the Dark-Eyed Juncos. We had the migratory form called the Slate-Colored Junco, the males resplendent in their crisp black, white, and slate gray plumage, a most handsome bird and one that was only with us in the winter. We always heard that out west they had a resident form called the Oregon Junco which had different plumage, notably less slate on the head with chestnut sides thrown in for good measure. In my twenties, I finally got to see one of these strangely colored juncos at Red Rocks Amphitheater west of Denver. Back then, the amphitheater was a good bit west of town; now I suppose it is likely engulfed by civilization.

Little did I know then that when we moved to the West Coast in McMinnville in 2017, we would have scads of Oregon Juncos, including multiple pairs nesting in our yard, bringing their babies through our flowerbeds scavenging plant seeds. Now that we have moved east of the Cascades, juncos are not super common and it is notable when we do see one, so it was great to see the little fellow in the photo below at Garden of the Gods, just a few miles south of where I saw my first one ever. But I still miss the eastern Slate-Colored Juncos.

Male Dark-Eyed "Oregon" Junco

Beautiful Plant, But Unknown to Me

Since moving to the desert in 2021, I cannot remember seeing a yucca in our sagebrush scrublands, whereas they were somewhat common back East. Yuccas are native to Virginia and the southeast from whence we came and there the form is Y. filamentosa which really does not look anything like the yuccas we saw at Garden of the Gods. Seemingly in every direction that we looked, we would see large stands of Y. glauca, a handsome plant in the arid landscape, with much finer and many more leaves than Y. filamentosa.

Ubiquitous Yucca glauca

Annie Taking Advantage of Shade

Lots of Mats of Tiny (3" High) Prickly Pears

Buck Grazing in the Morning Sun

Close-Up of a Piñon Cone, Pinus edulis

When we arrived at Garden of the Gods around 8:30 in the morning, the sun was just getting up and few people had arrived. More and more and more people kept arriving as we walked through the central part with its amazing rock formations. We started getting more and more claustrophobic as more and more families with noisy packs of kids obliterated the early morning quiet, so we pushed south into the less visited parts of the park and walked several miles in relative quiet, before returning to our car to go see the World Cup game downtown.

Garden of the Gods is a spectacular gift to the city of Colorado Springs. It would take many days to explore it all and it's a shame that we didn't have time but to scratch the surface.