The year was 1979, August 20 to be exact.  My family and I were hiking a trail through the Holy Cross Wilderness Area in Eagle County, Colorado with a good friend from college days.  Our two young sons, collectively known as “the bumbles” because their approach to adventures like this resembled two rambunctious puppies, darting off here and there to explore interesting rocks, stick their hands in gurgling streams, and bombard us with fallen pinecones, made up the rest of our party of five.

I had just transitioned from curious birdwatcher into hard core birder intent on sooner or later seeing every avian species in North America.  My friend, who like my wife and I had grown up on the Midwestern plains, had lured us on this trip to introduce us to his recently acquired love for the Colorado mountains.  He had regaled us with the requisite tales of indescribable scenery, proximity of wilderness escape from urban life, and frequency of wildlife sightings, most notably bears on this, his favorite trail.

Readily embracing his enthusiasm, we were hiking with lunch, cameras, and binoculars, on high alert for anything that moved, but we had no intention of traversing the entire 10.5 miles to the top of Mount of the Holy Cross, reputedly the most picturesque of Colorado’s fourteener routes.  This was a day hike through open spruce and fir forest, not a backpack to summit glory, and the bumbles had already mentioned lunch.

“One more hill” we promised them, and as we topped the rise with me in the lead, I surveyed the trail downhill and spotted movement.  I saw a splash of red in the pines, and then a medium sized bird flew across the trail and perched on a spruce bough in plain sight.  I threw out my arms and stage whispered.  “Wait!  Stop!  Bird in that tree, there, halfway up in the largest spruce!”  As my bins came up, my brain jumped ahead. 

Red bird in high altitude pines?  “Yes” I croaked, and then the yellow female flew over to join her mate, my Lifer Pine Grosbeaks.  Our friend looked bemused, probably wishing it were a bear or at least an elk.  A birder he was not, but when I got him on it with the bins, he was duly impressed.  The pair quickly disappeared into the forest as I explained to him this was an uncommon and uncommonly beautiful species, highly sought by birders.

That memorable moment turned out to be the highlight of the adventure for me.  To this day, some forty years of hard core birding later, I still have only ten sightings of this species, in five different states and two provinces, and I have yet to photograph a female.  I have seen them only once when actually looking for them, and all my other  sightings were random and totally unexpected, once on a Boreal Owl search, once in a driving rainstorm, once in near zero temperatures.

Uncommon for sure, sightings of this large, unwary but elusive finch have always brought back fond memories of a close friendship, long since waned, with a kindred spirit who loved nature, the great outdoors, and especially high and lonesome places as much as I.  Though he never got into birds, we shared many unforgettable adventures before I became a birder, all of them as lucid and cherished as my first Pine Grosbeak.  I received notice just before Christmas that my old friend had passed away, peacefully in his sleep.  I have added one more sighting of Pine Grosbeak to my bucket list.

*My thanks to folk rocker Al Stewart for the perfect title for today’s column.