....o was born along with John when I discovered that Mr own personal Rocky Mountain High was listening to waterfalld? Watching sunrises and seeing eildlife. So peaceful.

..Windsong! I always loved the wind and how it made me feel like flying. When I heard John sing Windsong for the first time I felt like I had found a long lost friend. Nature has always been my best friend too....I finally felt connected to someone and the feeling has never stopped. Now I have the John Denver family - my best friends all because of John...thank you John

The summer between my 7th and 8th grade years, my dad arranged for a business colleague of his to drive me from our home in the Panhandle of Texas, Amarillo, to the Rocky Mountain Mennonite Camp in the Pikes Peak National Forest area in Colorado. It was a big deal, because it was the first time away from home by myself; I was only 12...young for my grade level, with a birthday in August. We left very early in the morning, drove straight through, and pulled into the camp late that night.

While the "Mennonite" part of the camp name might give it a more structured-sounding, less fun ring, there was very little I recall that about it that was overly church-y. What I mainly remember was being in the beautiful, cool, lushly green mountains, in the middle of nature. It was like being transported into another country and another time -- it was so different than everything I was used to, having lived all of my life on the flat High Plains of the Midwest, first in Kansas, then in the Texas Panhandle.

I was just starting to get interested in popular music then, which was only available on the limited number of AM and FM radio stations we had then. I hadn't really built up a large, conscious playlist of favorites yet, but one song that I really enjoyed was the title track on John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" album. That voice, the deep resonant guitar, the ascending, passionate vocals about the natural beauty...it all just clicked.

But, as much as I enjoyed that track, if I could only pick one, it would be a song that - in fact - has no vocals...no singing. My favorite song from that album and, if I could only pick one, from all of Denver's catalog is a track from "Rocky Mountain High" called "Season Suite: Late Winter; Early Spring." To the rest of the world, it's a track that has made so little an impression, that you won't find it on any "Greatest Hits" or Anniversary collection.

It's in *my* collection of memory, however, because it is song that two my cabin mates, on that very first trip to camp, worked out by ear on the guitars they had brought with them to camp. I had just gotten my very first acoustic guitar a year earlier and was still mostly plunking around on it by learning the melody lines from popular radio songs, also by ear.

The experience of listening to my cabin mates work that song out - the underlying backing track and the lead melody track over it - while starting to drift to sleep, laying in the evergreen tree-smelling bunk bed, with the soft gurgle of the Colorado stream rushing outside our cabin less than 100 feet away in the dark, is a deeply held memory. Even today, as I write about it, more than 40 years later, I can imagine the scene vividly. It's a scene of tranquility, of unboundedness, and the inexpressible happiness that comes from being in the fullness of life. I'll never forget it.