Douglas MacFelcher,

 I hope your mani-pedi was worth it, because you missed one heckuva hike. Sunshine, budding ass-pens, suspicious strangers, mortal remains, biblical floods, high drama and thought-provoking controversy. It was like something you’d find in one of the thousands of classic Hollywood films available now through NetFlix.

We parked on Silver Plume’s main drag in front of the famous “Innisfree House,” so named because it was featured in John Ford’s memorable 1952 Hibernian reflection, “The Quiet Man”, featuring John Wayne as troubled prizefighter Sean Thornton and Maureen O’Hara as Mary Kate Danaher, the flame-haired beauty who scores a TKO on his heart.

This was an important hike for poor Electa, as she’s already been up this rocky road twice but had yet to hit pay-dirt. But hopes were high – almost as high as the balloon carrying Phineas Fogg and his resourceful Passeportout in the lengthy 1956 screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s celebrated “Around the World in 80 Days, “ starring the always-dashing David Niven, Mexican film legend Cantinflas, and a very young Shirley MacLaine utterly miscast as the Indian princess Aouda.

You may recall the wealth of mouldering mine ruins that pepper that loose and treacherous trail. Here, Bonnie tries to regain her confidence before continuing, not unlike Nigel D’Ascoyne, just one of eight characters all masterfully portrayed by the endlessly adaptable Sir Alec Guinness in the 1949 English black comedy “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”

This was new: bleached bones littered the trail, sad reminders of our own mortality, which can also be said for the melancholy 1943 classic Western “The Ox-Bow Incident,” in which a desperate and horrified Henry Fonda stands by helplessly as an enraged Nevada posse metes out Nevada-style frontier justice to Dana Andrews, Anthony Quinn and Francis Ford.

O Joy! O Rapture! She made it! You know who else made it? Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, ably played by Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, respectively, all the way down the Ulanga River to cinematic immortality in the 1951 classic “The African Queen.”

We relaxed for a bit, in the shadow of Clifford Griffin’s somber cenotaph, and Bonnie told us the story of a serial killer who buries his victims in his garden. I didn’t say anything, but I recognized her “original” tale as the precise plot of “Mr. Frost,” French film director Phillipe Stebon’s cerebral and spine-tingling study on the nature of evil featuring the irreplaceable talents of a more-than-usually-creepy Jeff Goldblum.

Being in perverse love with Nature, Bonnileski wanted to take a picture of these willow buds. After she took a few, I took a few more. This is the best of the lot, and it sucks like James Arness as the terrifying creature that sucks the life from a doughty group of Air Force scientists trapped with it in the high Arctic in the unforgettable 1952 sci-fi classic “The Thing from Another World,” the black-and-white forerunner of the better know John Carpenter remake, “The Thing.”

Barricaded as it was behind a lethal wall of thundering white death, we decided to avoid the 7:30 Mine Tour the way Major Major (Bob Newhart) avoided Private Yossarian (Alan Arkin) in the hilariously disturbing 1970 WWII picture “Catch 22” (screenplay by Buck Henry)

Nobly exhausted and heroically famished, we stopped at the Main Street Restaurant in Idaho Springs for nourishment. Bonnie had a burrito the size of Neptune. Electa ordered wagon-wheel-sized peach pancakes with a savory side of pork for Claire. Ever looking to test the boundaries of the possible, I chose an alternative form of mealtime madness and ate the bizarre, but tasty, Cheeseburger Club, which featured three slices of bread, roughly corresponding to the three “Droogs” with whom Malcolm MacDowell’s sadistic “Alex” terrorized the staid and courtly citizens of suburban London in the darkly comical 1971 Stanley Kubrik masterpiece “A Clockwork Orange.”

Fin