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There are many dangerous things in the mountains here in Colorado. Some are very obvious, the western Rattlesnake, angry beavers, the Unibomber, well he isn’t here so much anymore, but one of the deadliest is our State flower the Columbine. Yeah, sure they look harmless and they’re pretty, some might even say beautiful, but therein lies their menace. Just like their sister in crime that Venus fly-catcher trap thing that lives somewhere else and does deadly stuff, these harmless appearing flowers sit in the dappled sunshine of a shady grove and startle you with their absolute undeniable beauty.

To illustrate just how dangerous these innocent looking flowers can be we asked our resident Flowerologists the twin PhD’s, Drs. Solenoid and Nodule Stem about them. We here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire sponsor a lot of freeloaders, I mean researchers for a small cut of their grant money and the publishing rights to any lucrative research they might accidentally produce. They couldn’t wait to describe their deadly encounter with these harbingers of evil.

The Drs. Stem had been on a field trip to discover whether any of the flowers pictured in their “Flowers of The Rocky Mountains” guidebook actually grew here. As this was a government-funded project they were obligated to obtain results and had struggled for weeks trying to show some sort of progress. The pressure to protect their phony-baloney jobs I mean large, tax deferred grant was paramount.

So with these discouraging thoughts weighing heavily on their minds they were totally unprepared for the radiant gorgeousness that suddenly appeared before them.  Solenoid, being the older of the two twins by three days, and some say the more intelligent one, immediately spun around to warn his brother Nodule to cover his eyes before they were damaged beyond repair by the insidious beauty lashing out at them in shades of Columbine blue and pestle and/or stamen yellow. Instead of protecting his sibling he accidentally struck him with the tripod he was carrying knocking out his gold tooth and causing him to drop his notebook with all their irreplaceable data in it.

Of course while looking for his tooth he accidentally kicked his notebook under a rock and it was lost forever, the big dummy. At least that’s what they told the people administering their grant, hoping to salvage something out of the catastrophe. I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed we were with the Drs. Stem. The grant was gone, our sponsorship fee was gone, everything was a total screw up I mean, in disarray.

We don’t like failure here at the World Headquarters of our Media Empire and take any very poorly. Very poorly indeed. But life goes on, the Drs. Stem are out in the forest turning over rocks hoping to find grubs which they say are very nourishing. Their petition for the return of their cafeteria privileges is on my desk and I intend to look at it, perhaps as soon as next month, and we are still dedicated to the research necessary to maintain our position as one of the premier research facilities anywhere on this planet.

The only bright spot to come out  of this whole mess was our ability to point out the dangers that lurk in our natural environment so that you, our most favored readers, can remain safe while visiting our gorgeous state. Remember, let’s be safe out there, not everything is as it seems even the really pretty stuff.