WALKING ON THE WILD SIDE
ONE MORNING THIS PAST AUGUST, I PEDALED MY MOUNTAIN BIKE THROUGH HIGH-ALPINE MEADOWS THAT made everything seem limitless, even me. Specks of crimson, cobalt, purple, and ivory dotted the grasses like marks from a pointillist’s brush, and the small lakes I passed blazed blue along the trail linking the Rabbit Ears rock formation to the Steamboat Springs ski area some 20 miles away. At the last lake on the route, I saw a moose. And it saw me.
I braked to a stop, and my riding buddies halted behind me. Seeing moose around Steamboat isn’t unusual; the animals have taken to lounging on the ski runs and in the aspens separating those trails. But moose are crotchety creatures, as likely to charge humans as to flee from them, so as soon as we noticed this one wading among the reeds at the edge of the pond, we dashed off-trail into the pines to give it space. The 50 feet between us grew to 75, then 100 as we hiked through dense shrubbery that scratched my legs and pulled at my bike.
Once we’d skirted the pond and rejoined the trail to continue our ride, we congratulated ourselves for our wildlife-savvy evasion. Yes, traipsing around off-trail was onerous, but we’d respected the moose’s need for space. Or so we thought.
different than the rest of the United States, where people reportedly spend about 90 percent of their lives indoors. Here, residents make a point of getting outside to hike, picnic, ski, run, climb, fish, hunt, mountain bike, or pilot an off-highway vehicle: 69 percent of Coloradans log some form of outdoor recreation one or more times per week. Many of the state’s 84.7 million
