Florissant fossil beds.

• Author: Brosman, Catharine Savage
• Position: Poem

The sun has warmed us through the thin, high mountain air, and, panting a bit, we hasten to find shade in ponderosa pine and spruce before continuing along the sunlit path that winds among the fossil beds of Florissant. We've admired the fallen giants' huge remains--Eocene sequoias turned to stone, the limbs long gone but the base still upright, petrified after tides of volcanic fire and ash roiled across the valley, more than thirty million years ago. There are signs here, too, of paleo-Indians, mixed with artefacts of Uncompaghre Utes and Apaches of the Jicarilla tribe, who left their potsherds scattered in the redwood ruins; too, abundant shale, imprinted with the brittle, delicate debris of ages even earlier--times I cannot imagine-- when sediments, compressed, solidified, took hostages-- living witnesses from sea and earth. Remnants hide still among alpine flowers of late August nearly unnoticed, and so ephemeral that, by this evening, many will have dropped or...