I'd been watching the forecast for Sunday because I wanted to take my daughter hiking to the Pawnee Buttes – which are an hour and a half northeast of Fort Collins, out on the shortgrass steppe. The forecast promised ideal, sunny weather. Then on Sunday, as we drove east out of Fort Collins, we noticed the clouds and rain.

We stopped for breakfast in Ault – at Gray's Cafe. And let me tell you – Gray's Cafe is the best. I ordered two eggs over-easy with hash browns and toast. My order arrived within minutes and could not have been better. Sometimes, hash browns come to you too greasy or undercooked or not-great looking (although usually still good to eat). Sometimes an over-easy egg comes to you as less runny (or more runny) than what you want. Sometimes the toast is "blackened" rather than toasted. None of those problems affected my breakfast at Gray's. What I got was a simple breakfast prepared perfectly. It's worth your drive to Ault, just to try out Gray's for yourself.

We continued towards Grover, which is the town nearest to the Pawnee Buttes. The weather didn't improve, and heavy clouds hung overhead. At Grover, we turned north and anticipated the six mile drive to the Pawnee Buttes turnoff. We drove eight or ten miles and turned around. We then turned east onto a county road, which looked like a likely candidate for accessing the buttes.

We got lost.

We drove for an hour, up and down the county roads, some of them paved and some of them gravel. We saw more large raptors than I've ever seen before in such a short period of time. The birds looked like hawks and mostly sat on the fence posts. There's no doubt how exciting it was, to watch the birds spread their wings and fly as we approached. We also saw a lot of pronghorn antelope and chased two of them down the road, before they darted towards the fence and wriggled underneath.

Eventually, we crested a rise in the landscape and came upon the Cedar Creek Wind Farm. The propellers of the wind machines slowly rotated in and out of the fog. The photos, below, give you some idea of how surprising but eerie the sight was. Cedar Creek is the world's largest wind-energy project engineered as a single facility. It includes 275 wind machines, all located between Grover and Hereford and positioned along the crest of the Chalk Bluffs. It cost $489 million to develop; employs 20 permanent staff to maintain; and one-third of it is owned by BP Alternative Energy (yes, the BP that's in the news).


We returned to Grover. I noticed some brilliant yellow roses growing along a fence in one of the alleys. I told my daughter that the original Grover homesteaders probably brought those roses with them – and therefore the roses connected us directly with who those people were and what they liked. She rolled her eyes and didn't have a clue as to what I was talking about.

I'm not a horticulturalist or a rosarian, but I'm interested in the relationship between the built and natural environments.

We explored the unpaved streets and alleys of Grover and took photos of the roses. I later looked up antique prairie roses online. The description of Harison's Yellow fits the rose we saw:

Deep yellow. Mild to strong fragrance. Up to 25 petals. Average diameter 2". Medium, semi-double to double, borne mostly solitary, globular bloom form. Once-blooming spring or summer.

Homesteaders brought Harison's Yellow with them when they settled the west. It's a hardy plant, and as a result, it's now naturalized across the prairies. In the Grover area, many homesteaders came from Iowa in the first part of the twentieth century. The rose my daughter and I found probably came with them.

Grover, itself, has experienced better days – it's now as remote a place as you can find in Northern Colorado, but the rose – whether it's Harison's Yellow or another cultivar – is still going strong.


After driving around Grover and photographing the rose, we returned to the crossroads on the east side of town. We turned right and went south – and immediately saw a large sign directing us straight ahead to the Pawnee Buttes.

Throughout our hike, the fog drifted across the landscape and often obscured our view of the buttes. Then, the sun would come out, and we'd see how dramatic, massive and isolated the West and East Buttes were. Raptors nest in the crevices of the buttes and all along the Chalk Bluffs, but none showed themselves during our hike.


As we drove home, the sun came out – which causes cactus flowers to open to their fullest. Between Briggsdale and Ault we came upon a stretch of prairie that was thick with prickly pear cactus (probably Opuntia polyacantha), and all of the plants – for as far as we could see – were in full bloom. Prickly pear is native to the shortgrass steppe, and the form we saw grew in small clumps and low to the ground. It must be a nightmare for management purposes, but it was gorgeous to see.