Spring is coming hard to the high country in Colorado....Amazing birds are back, the grass is turning green under the snow and my tulips are up. It's time for me to do some serious work. I would like to get back to the landscape and it's always changing form. The land is endless in the West. I dream about riding over spaces that change with color, contour, endless vistas drawing me on and out. This winter when I was in Durango there was so much snow that the fences were erased, trash gone, endless white punctuated with the early color of willows, that beautiful raw umber and indian red and marked with a few slashes of pale mustard. Horses huddled close to the barns where they could walk and feed on hay thrown from short distances are images that are burned into my brain. There are not many, if any, dead and dying trees there. However there are the burned areas from the Mission Ridge Fire. These black and brown areas were covered with snow and the landscape looked much like I imagine it to have looked before the coming of man and the roads. Everywhere I looked was a landscape portrait worth turning into a fiber piece. Then there were the rivers, so much water and motion and another group of colors to contrast with the winter landscape, dark blues, greens and gray. The town of Durango was enchanting also. I would really like to live there. The drawback is that it is so very expensive. There just isn't a way to change geography for us. I would miss my home in the front range terribly too. But I did love the expanse of the Durango area.