Mark Loader is up a tree.  At least that is where his story has taken him.  He spreads his arms wide and leans into his works:

    "Well, I heard that grizzly bear splashin' around in the creek.  And pretty soon, here he comes with a beaver under each arm, and he set them right there at the bottom of my tree where they started chewin'."

Before it is clear how the treed mountain man is going to make it to his escape, in through the door of his mountain-man library/lair slips the quick and rhythmic beats of Middle Eastern hand drums.  The drums hold tempo as the sweet nasal tones from a snake charmer's horn wind their way through the crystalline notes of tiny finger cymbals.  Cindy Loader is practicing a new belly dance.

Such is life the home of Cindy and Mark.

    "I met Cindy when I was just a baby," explained Loader.  "I was born in Fort Collins, but my dad moved to Cheyenne to work on the railroad.  Her folks, Mable and Ken, lived across the field from where we lived in a tent, and my older sister baby sat their kids."

Time passed.  Cindy's dad moved his family to Loveland and the Loaders moved back to Fort Collins.  One day, Ken spotted the name "Loader" on a mailbox and stopped to see if his old friends were living there.  They were

   "Mark and I met again when we were sophomores in high school," said Cindy.  "Mom liked Mark but I was too shy to talk to him."

Cindy and her family lived a sparce and isolated life in the canyon beyond Horsetooth Mountain, two miles from any neighbors.  She grew up without running water and electricity. The  parents slept in a two bedroom cabin while the six kids bedded down in a converted granary.

    "We were very religious," said Cindy.  "I couldn't date or dance, but I had my horse and so everything was OK."

Meanwhile, Mark played football with athletic devotion.  He kept himself focused on sports and a growing fascination with mountain men, particularly as they lived during the "Rendezvous" era, between 1824 and 1840.  He read everything he could get his hands on.  He devoured James Fennimore Cooper and challenged his teachers to explain to him why the Last of the Mohican was not great literature.  The girl who lived west of Horsetooth had not yet captured his heart.  That happened in 1971.

In August of that year, Mark and Cindy met again when Cindy appeared at the Loader's front door in need of a ride home.

    "I had gone out with a couple of my girlfriends, and they wanted to smoke.  I didn't," recalled Cindy.  "So I told them just to drop me off at the Loader's house and someone there would take me home.  I took one look at Mark and I was gone."

That was in August of 1971, by April 1972, they were married.

Now at this point of the story it is fairly clear how Mark developed his mountain skills and his love for the lore of mountain men.  But belly dancing for a young woman who had been forbidden to date, dance, wear jewelry or makeup?  How did that happen?

    "I was driving Mark crazy,' She said.  We were married at 20 and had two little boys at 23.  I thought I could keep house forever.  But I didn't want to let Mark out of my sight.  What if something were to happen to him on the way to the grocery store?"

It wasn't just the grocery store that took Mark out of her sight.  As an aficionado of wilderness skills with ongoing aspirations of honing them, Mark had to get out in the wild and practice from time to time.

    "We call it 'getting on the ground'," he said.  "No air mattresses, no sleeping bags, no matches.  Just what the mountain man had to use.  You want to get out with people who know what you know about etiquette, dress and history."

The stress of separation might have played havoc with the marriage, but (as it often happens in a good mountain man tale) just in the nick of time Cindy overheard two women at a gas station talking about what a great time they were having belly dancing.  She relayed the message to Mark and he said, "You sign up right now."

    "I was terrible at first.  Stiff,"  said Cindy.  "For the first few years, I wouldn't perform in front of anyone, not even for my class."

Luckily, the family business they started in 1979, Coffee Craze, was doing well enough (then as now) to support both the family and the Loaders' his-and-her vocations.  The Loader living room became a dance studio; Cindy stitched together bright, spangled costumes and began to fill her closet.  In the room across the hall, Mark built his library, stored his otter skin filled with his friction-fire kit, studied lore of mountain men and then started to share what he knew with anyone who asked.

    "My parents were liked by all the kids," said Shane Loader.  "There was always more going on at my house than anywhere else."

    "I still run into people who remember Dad's putting on a fourth-grade rendezvous," added Tad Loader."  Those were the days when you could still bring a muzzleloader into a public school."

Even as Mark perfected his skills at "brain tanning" his buckskins (the lecithin in the brain breaks down the collagen in the leather), Cindy got so good at isolating and undulating every muscle in her belly that she started her own school; Jewels of the Nile.  Just as the whole family counted coffee packs when Coffee Craze was starting up in the 70s, they worked together to build a stage with Taj Majal backdrop on their deck in the 90s.  When in January 2002 Cindy's January recital and workshop at the Colorado Academy of the Arts drew a standing room only crowd, the event was the object of considerable family pride.

It appears the Mountain Man and the Belly Dancer have struck the ideal blend of partners embracing each others pursuits.  At Cindy's recital, Mark worked the crowd at intermission; this spring at the Rendezvous outside of Grand Junction, Cindy will give the mountain men tips on horsemanship.  No matter what the other one chooses to do, the other- along with their sons- will be right there in the cheering section.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering how the mountain man escapes from the grizzly bear, well it goes something like this: You see, there was a Swedish fellow at the trapper's camp who had arrived on skis, the first these mountain men had ever seen.  So while the beavers were chewin', the mountain man was cutting and bending and shaping the boughs of that tree.  He was just pulling his left ski on tight when the tree went down in a great crash!  But instead of ending up as grizzly food, the trapper glided all the way down the mountain and back to camp.  "They all was surprised when I walked up and kissed that Swede."