After yesterday, though, I'm feeling very tentative about Colorado canines. On our afternoon walk, Hana was attacked by a huge Rottweiler. The dog, whose leash was held by a small girl, was in its owner's front yard as we passed by on our evening walk. When the dog saw Hana, he pulled over the little girl (fortunately, she was on the grass). She let go of his leash, and the dog charged Hana with fangs bared and grabbed her. It was like a horror movie; I couldn't get her away from him.

After what felt like five minutes, but was probably a lot less, the owner came out and collared the Rottweiler. He offered to pay the vet bill for any injuries, but didn't apologize. In shock, I said that I'd have to take Hana home to look for puncture wounds.

When we stopped back at the Rottweiler's house on the way to the vet--Hana had a deep puncture wound on her spine--the owner still didn't apologize, but went on and on about how this had never happened before, how his dog always got along with people and other dogs, blah, blah, blah.

I can never walk that route again. For the first time in my life, I'm scared of a dog.

On an unseasonably hot Sunday morning, we hiked at Pella Crossing, near the town of Hygiene, once the home of a TB sanitarium. The "lakes" promised in our hiking guide proved to be smallish ponds (at least to our Great Lakes State eyes), but the view of Long's Peak, the only "fourteener"* in Rocky Mountain National Park, made up for the lack of scenery on the ground.

*"Fourteener" is a mountaineering term for peaks above 14,000 feet.

As of today, we've been Colorado residents for five weeks. So far, the most striking thing about the state--apart from the obvious, the incredible scenery and the wild swings in weather--is the Coloradoans' calm, easy-going attitude toward life.

After living in Brussels, though, where every (locked) electrical box on the streets bears a sign with a lightning bolt and the words "Risque de la mort!" (Risk of death!), it was just a tad disconcerting to come across this nonchalant tag on an electrical wire wrapped around a power pole that Hana and I pass every morning on our walk.

(By the way, the tag has been there for over a week, waiting for the Trouble Department crew to show up.)

Front page news from today's Denver Post:

[Colorado] Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer unofficially launched his campaign Wednesday with a biographical spot he was forced to pull almost immediately because the image in the ad of Pikes Peak--where he proposed to his wife--turned out to be Mount McKinley in, well, Alaska.
. . .
"To Schaffer, who came here from Ohio, all mountains probably look the same . . ." penned Michael Huttner, director of ProgressActionNow.org.

Walking our pack o' hounds at Michigan's Maybury State Park, we'd snort with laughter when we saw perfectly able-bodied people using trekking poles to traverse the flat, small (1,000 acres) park. "Must be training for Everest," we'd snicker.

Flash forward to Mother's Day 2008 in Rocky Mountain National Park: If someone had been hawking trekking poles on the trail to Dream Lake, we'd have overpaid for them in an instant.

We're still getting acclimated to the Colorado weather and topography. Temperatures swing 30-40 degrees from one day to the next. Even though we can see the snow on the biggest peaks from here in Arvada, well, I guessed we thought we wouldn't be up that high any time soon.

Things were pretty dry in the foothills of the park, where the mule deer, looking bedraggled in the transition from winter to summer coats, were grazing. Tourists were jumping out of their SUVs in T-shirts.

We'd decided to hike in to Dream Lake, elevation 9,900 feet. It's apparently a popular trail in the summer, but on Sunday, most tourists pulled up to the trailhead, saw the snowpack, and opted to just walk the few hundred feet to Bear Lake for their photo ops. (Note: Many tourists weren't dressed even for summer hiking; in the windy trailhead parking lot, one middle-aged woman with an updo kept moaning, "I just know I'm going to lose my hairpiece . . .")

Gillettes are hardy souls, though, and, by God, if, in the comfort of the foothills, we said were going to hike to Dream Lake, then we would do it, snowpack or no snowpack. The views were more than worth the effort. But trekking poles don't look nearly so silly in the Rockies as they do in suburban Detroit and would have made the going easier on the narrow spots with steep drop-offs. And those cool, high-tech snow shoes might have kept me from stepping knee-deep in snow when I moved aside to let some climbers pass us. I'm not sure we'll be pairing snow shoes with shorts, though, as one young fashion-conscious couple we passed did.

After living among the wondrous architectural diversity of Ixelles, it's been incredibly depressing to return to endless suburbs of identical homes and ubiquitous strip malls.

Fortunately for my sanity, the absence of man-made beauty is offset by natural beauty that is ridiculously easy to come by. The Denver metro area is blessed with miles of interconnecting trails through its urban neighborhoods and suburbs; the trails are bordered by green space, some of it substantial. We're two blocks from the Ralston Creek Trail. In our neighborhood, the creek opens into a small pond that attracts the usual mallards and Canadian geese, as well as more exotic passersby. A lone female bufflehead recently spent a few days there, looking like a stuffed toy among the bigger mallards. At dusk last night, a huge northern goshawk made us jump when it landed in a tree right in front of us as we were walking Hana. (We told her that the hawk had targeted her for dinner.)

For serious hiking, we can be in the Flatirons in less than half an hour. We haven't managed to spot a whole lot of wildlife there yet, although the Black Angus babies tottering around the nearby grazing fields on their spindly legs are way too adorable to end up as hamburger. At least the wildflowers are beginning to show themselves in the Flatirons, like this early--and, as of Sunday, only--bloomer in a huge field of wild iris, plants that are perfect miniatures of the iris in my Northville garden.