It was an usually quiet, calm Saturday morning in the Valley as I drove through the North Ranch neighborhood towards God’s Ass.

Now that it was the second day of November, it was finally getting cooler. Not yet cold, but cool enough for me to wear a hoodie without getting soaked in sweat. 

When I got to God’s Ass, I gathered up my camera gear, locked up the Xterra, and immediately headed for the cave between two huge red rock boulders. As I approached the entrance of the cave, I clicked my tongue as loudly as I could to let the resident pigeons know that I was coming in. In the past, if I simply snuck into the cave without making a sound, the pigeons would freak out and practically fly into my face while getting away. But, if I simply announced myself, they wouldn’t panic. Instead, they stayed in their little alcoves in the red rocks and cooed as they watched me pass below. 

The cave was short, with the exit to the outside hardly 300 feet from the entrance. Thousands of years before, the Ute and Arapaho tribes used that cave as shelter as they traveled from the plains to the mountains and back. Like Red Rocks, located just a couple miles north, they considered that red rock cave sacred. Nowadays, it’s surrounded by multi-million dollar homes, one of which stands just another 20 feet from the exit side of the cave, where I paused to look around in search of any signs of life. 

There were no deer. There were no turkeys. There wasn’t a single bird in the gambel oaks above and around me. It was unusual, but I wasn’t picking up any “bad vibes”, so I kept going, following the path away from the cave and down into a small field, with the red rocks to my west and mansions to my east. 

From then on, the hike around the red rocks was completely silent and uneventful. I could’ve stopped to take pictures of those red rocks, but I didn’t; I already had taken hundreds, perhaps even thousands of pictures of those rocks over the years. I didn’t need or want any more. 

As I followed the trail around to the western side of the rocks, the sound of a little Cessna finally broke the silence, but not for long. I watched as the little plane flew eastward directly overhead, and listened as the sound of its engine gradually died out, leaving me in complete silence again. I hiked in the shadow of those giant red rocks till I got back to my Xterra, a little disappointed by the fact that I saw no wildlife, but still glad I got out there in nature to give my mind and spirit a break.