Beware Teller No. 5, Boulder County

[Tom Wilberding Boulder CO]

Hello COBirders,

On 9/13/2012 Ted Floyd warned of quicksand at Teller Lake No. 5. Believe him!
The rest of the story:

Wife Barb out of town so I took a day off from my butler duties and went birding this morning. Saw a Golden Eagle & Rock Wren south of Marshall, then visited Dowdy Draw—Vesper, Chipping and White-crowned Sparrows, Warbling Vireo, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Townsend’s Solitaire and others—mostly at the bridge to the Community Ditch trail. Then I drove to Teller Lake No. 5 hoping for shorebirds.

At Teller Lake I looked around, no quicksand, must have been an exaggeration. Then I started walking across the dry lake-bed to get closer to the shorebirds. Interesting hexagonal cracks in the shrunken, dry mud, reminded me of lava columns at Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway and California's Devil's Postpile. Lake bed springy--this is fun, walking on this weird lakebed. Suddenly my right leg ploinked right into the dry mud, not so dry beneath the surface, right up to my knee. I foolishly stepped forward and my left leg sank into the black tar. If I tried to loosen my legs they went in deeper. I couldn't believe it, “What is this, a Tarzan movie?”

Suddenly I looked like a dwarf, Toulouse-Lautrec standing on a mudflat. I looked around to see if anyone was there to throw me a rope or pull me out. No one, only distant cars zooming by on Valmont, like the peasants in the Icarus story, oblivious to my gravitational disaster. I felt like a fly on flypaper, or Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, but without Br’er Fox to throw me into a brier patch. After a while, in despair, I felt like Edward G. Robinson’s character at the end of Little Caesar, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

I managed to set aside my tripod, hung my bins on it, then laid down on my belly in the mud like an alligator. After much thrashing, flailing and grunting I finally extricated my knees, shins, and $150 hiking boots from the black, stinking glue. I then crawled to safety and staggered to shore, heavier and wiser. After scraping off some mud and composing myself, I proceeded to photograph several shorebirds--Lesser Yellowlegs and a Dowitcher, presumably the Short-billed reported by others.

Here are 7 photos from today, takes less than a minute to view. http://bit.ly/OKohrk

BTW, my hiking boots are yours for only $10, size 13, almost new.

Tom Wilberding
Boulder, CO