Beaulah Colorado

Blogger friend and fellow curmudgeon One Fly posted that Michael Martin Murphey donated the easement on 120 acres in Beaulah, Co to the consevancy district.
It's amazing what memories that brought back.
My maternal grandparents owned a small cabin in Beaulah. The road curved around a hill and there was a bridge over a small creek. The pink stucco cabin was on the inside of the curve. It had a large main room with couch, chairs and book shelves on the wall on one side and on the other was a sink, wood burning stove, table and chairs. There was a bedroom past that and the back door. Behind and a ways off was an outhouse. It did have electricity. The book shelves were full of reader's digest, coronet and national geographic magazines, misc. books and lots of reader's digest condensed books. When you went there it was for peace, quiet and reading. Lake Isabel is not far away and lots of times we'd spend the night at the cabin and go fishing at the lake.
Between the cabin and the creek were willow trees. Grandpa had some long butcher knives and gave one to Bruce and one to me. We attacked those poor willows and made bows & arrows. The willow branches were too flexible to make much of a bow and the arrows never sailed very far. On the other side of the road was a hill with a flag on top. We would always have to climb the mountain (when your 7 years old just about anything is a mountain) and reach the flag.
We lived in Pueblo then and it was only a forty five minute drive to get away from the heat of town and relax for a weekend. Grandpa's brother, Frank, lived in a beat up trailer there for a few years and we (Bruce and I) would hike up to his trailer to say hi whenever we were there. Frank was moved out of his trailer and put in a retired journalists home in Colorado Springs. Mom took us to visit him once before he died.
A rancher there would rent out horses for riding and I remember Dad would have Bruce in front of him and I'd be in front of Mom as we went horse back riding. It was a big deal when they let Bruce ride alone. We moved down to Albuquerque before they thought I was big enough for that priveledge.
Perhaps the singular memory of Beaulah was a labor day weekend. We drove up on Friday night in the rain. The plan was to go fishing on Saturday and Sunday at Lake Isabel. Mom woke up and started trying to make a fire in the wood burning stove, but filled the cabin up with smoke. Dad got up and looked out the window to see four inches of snow on the ground and it was still coming down.
We ate breakfast and as there wasn't much else to do while hoping the snow would let up and perhaps we could get some fishing in on Sunday we sat around the wood burning stove. Either Mom or Dad chose a book named Pioneer Go Home by Richard P. Powell. They took turnes reading it aloud. Around noon the wood was giving out and Dad went out to get more coming back with a bucket of coal. By late afternoon they decided the fishing trip was a bust and we went back home.
This event was burned onto all our memories particularly that book. By chance we found it was made into a movie but renamed Follow That Dream starring Elvis Presley.
We moved down here. The Record Music Company in Pueblo fell victim to discount stores and Grandpa sold the building and the cabin. When Mom and Dad went back for class reunions they found that the cabin had been leveled, cleaned up and restricted for habitation not to contaminate the stream. My fondest memories before the age of ten are about Beaulah.