Columns and other sights near Buckley AFB

An overcast day today for us here in the Denver Metro area, but with temperatures in the low 40s, it was Brigitta's turn for a little ride near Buckley Air Force Base.

Brigitta felt a little weird when I first rode out of my neighborhood.  She felt like I was riding on a flat rear tire to tell the truth!  I stopped at a nearby side street, got out my small air pressure gauge and the tire pressure was at 34 P.S.I. just as I had checked it minutes before during my pre-ride safety checks.  Weird.

I headed on back home, used the pressure gauge on my air compressor and again, it was 34 P.S.I!  I pushed down on her tail end and she seemed a bit "spongy".  I asked my wife to take a look as I sat on Brigitta and she also thought she was a bit "springy".  A few minutes examining the shock and the motorcycle in general rendered nothing untoward.  Writing it off as not enough riding on her, I rode off again in search of sights.

I headed north on Gun Club Rd from Quincy Rd, thinking to take pictures of some carved wooden animals near the Aurora Gun Club.  Once I got there though, a fence line prevented near enough positioning of Brigitta with the said animals in the background so I bagged on the idea.

Continuing north on Gun Club Rd however, I spotted the high overpass ramp that is part of the E-470 Tollway arcing over the I-70 Super Slab.  Thinking it would make for a nice "artsy" background, I headed in that direction, found a frontage road which gave me this angle on the overpass:

 

I like to picture objects which "lead" the eye, there's probably a name for such an effect but I don't know it

Continuing on along the frontage road, I saw off in a field an oversized small letter h next to a housing development sign for horizonuptown.com.  I made to get closer to the oversized letter to use it as a background.  The trail leading in its general direction was packed dirt and I had good traction.  Things changed quite a lot when I got off the trail and was on the field itself.  It was that squishy, slick Colorado clay/mud combination which I'd found before to my dismay!  

I gave up on trying to get closer to the h, instead slowly and unsteadily made my way via a wide u-turn back to the dirt trail and firmer traction.  I could feel the rear wheel wanting to fishtail on me, not good.  Fortunately, I made it with minimal dog paddling back to the trail without dropping Brigitta

 

 Here's Brigitta back on the dirt trail and as close as I was going to get today to that letter h!

 

 Colorado has some amazingly slick and glue-like mud that is mostly clay, nasty stuff

 Now to the title of the posting, the sights above are to the east and north of nearby Buckley Air Force Base.  The base's several large golf ball shaped housings for satellite downlink dishes are visible for miles around and are a local landmark of sorts.

I wandered near the golf balls and spotted what looked like the Air Force's newest transport plane, the C-17, parked real close to the border of the base, near where Gun Club Rd becomes Sixth Avenue.  It was quite the imposing sight and I maneuvered Brigitta onto the San Simeon Catholic Cemetery's parking lanes for this shot:

 

 The view from San Simeon Catholic Cemetery

The grayness of the skies played a bit of havoc with the light meter on my camera and so all of the above pictures were tweaked somewhat using the tools at picnik.com.  As I played with said tools on the last picture, I realized a bit of cropping and some extreme tweaking of color saturation, temperature and light exposure and contrast could render a photo that evoked perhaps a bit of mystery, perhaps the atmosphere of the airplane's presence at some exotic location with weird shaped buildings nearby.....what do you think?

The forecasted snow probabilities for the next two days have gone from 20-30% to 30-40%, we shall see how much snow we get.  Glad I got Brigitta out today, she ran fine after that initial weirdness, which I am sure now is because I am not riding her often enough during the winter!