Summer Sunday: Why June is the Best Month in Telluride

28 Jun Summer Sunday: Why June is the Best Month in Telluride

My husband and I have a disagreement. He says September. I say June. The debate is over our favorite month in Telluride. He favors the crisp days and cold nights of early fall. The shift in leaves from deep August green to the autumnal vermilions and russets.

Early Morning Light in June

But for me, June will always trump any other month in Telluride. The long days, where the light stretches from 5 in the morning until 9 at night, feels like possibility. I can wake in the morning with sun, run and write long before my children awake. And in the evening, my children can play outside after dinner, while my husband and I enjoy a glass of wine on the patio and watch the sun slowly make its way west. The sunset’s pink and orange streaks remind me of a school of salmon swimming their way upriver on their return home.

In June, I lie awake at night just so I can hear the river a little longer. Only in June does the San Miguel swell enough so that I can hear it through my skylight, its ancestral gurgles filling my ears in the same way that they once filled the miners’ ears and before that the ears of the Ute. I wonder if the sound of river at night grounded them in the same way that it grounds me. Or perhaps they weren’t as far from the earth as I am and weren’t hungering for the same connection, weren’t dreaming of an island in Alaska they could escape to, where there was only the rising and falling of tides and the steady plunk of salmonberries in a pail. They didn’t need to escape the incessant sounds of emailing arriving and texts being sent. Maybe they actually were tired of the wilderness—the miners with the mile-long dripping tunnels, the Utes with their dependence on wilderness to provide. Either way, they couldn’t have ignored the presence of the river in June, the way the San Miguel explodes over its banks, the way it scours the river bed of trees and muck until its waters are as clear as our insight is on the past. So clear that the whole world feels new. Neither could they have ignored the river’s vitality. The sound of river in early summer in the Rockies makes everything feel more alive.

Bear Creek Trail

There’s another reason I prefer June above every other month. Bear Creek. When I climb its trail in the early morning hours, I fall into an almost childlike trance. There are many reasons that I love this trail. The sound of the rushing creek that weaves in and out of sight. The rambling grace of the falls. The sight of mountains surrounding me from the upper boulder. If I’m ever feeling lost in the world, no matter the month, I imagine the feel of Bear Creek’s emerald leaves swaying over me as I run up its trail in June. Going there in my mind, imagining the gradual warming of air on a summer morning is often just enough to remind me of the good that exists in the world.

Every season in Telluride has its charms. The sounds of elk bugling in fall. The first real snowstorm of winter. The sight of crocuses peaking out of snow in spring. Yet, June will always be the month in Telluride that stands as my favorite, the only month that in Telluride that speaks to me of wildness, a wildness that carries me home.