Yampa Float

As promised, the next installment of our weeklong Colorado trip. For the second adventure of the week, we canoed 50 miles of the Yampa river from the city of Craig to a place called Juniper Canyon (several miles upstream of Maybelle). We did not expect to accomplish this in one day, so we spent two nights on the river. I don't know what the flow of the river was officially; it was enough to keep us afloat (barely), but clearly had been higher earlier in the season.

Launching from the city park in Craig

This section of river quickly goes through farmland, then through BLM land known as Duffy Canyon, past Duffy Mountain and then back out to farmland. Somewhat surprisingly, the BLM land had more cattle than the farmland. It is not fun to camp with the cows (Vixen disagrees) and it is not legal to camp on private land, so we camped on islands.

Beached on a desert island for the first night

A lazy river

Full moon rising over our second camp

The shuttle vehicle at the Juniper Canyon takeout

After 50 miles of river, I biked back 30 miles to retrieve the pickup truck. Every afternoon on the river, we had wind gusts pushing us back up-canyon. I was hoping that would be a tail-wind on the bike, but that last day just wasn't as windy. Or maybe it was the 95-degree heat that slowed me down.

Laboring up a mountain

For Labor Day, we visited Hubber's grandma... but along the way we found this mountain that just needed to be hiked. It's Missouri Mountain standing at 14,067 feet tall in the vicinity of Leadville, CO. We started just after sunrise in the chilly 35-degree morning. The aspen were just barely starting to turn yellow. Bonus points if you can find the dog in the first photo.
This is really one of the nicest 14er hikes. It started in a forest, then proceeds up an alpine valley...
... and finishes with a good long ridge walk. You can't see them at this resolution, but there are people standing on the summit (the highest point in the photo below).
That's me just below the summit block. Those last few steps were pretty tough.
At the end, we're rewarded with a great view of mountains stretching into the distance. And gathering clouds, which can mean only one thing...
... hail on the way down. We were off the ridge before it hit, but still above tree-line. This was Vixen's first hike up a 14er and she still had plenty of squirrel-chasing energy at the end of the hike.

Sabbatical

Hubbers is on sabbatical through August. This means he has a book to write, but otherwise is not required to do all the other things that professors usually do. And I no longer have to take classes (because I passed my comps, yay!) So, we're both taking advantage of the "not-attached-to-campus" status by spending some time in Winter Park, Colorado where we should have a view like:

(photo by drocpsu @ flickr)

Some people are calling this our re-enactment of The Shining. If one of the dogs starts muttering "red rum", I'll know what it means. Actually, our lodgings should not be a deserted hotel: the description makes it sound quite lively and not rustic.

Here's my favorite part about the description of the condo we'll be living in:

1br 1 bath sleeps 6 comfortably.

Hah! Clearly, someone has a different idea of comfort than I do :) Okay, so it wouldn't be too uncomfortable if you wanted to come visit... we have room for 4 more people. We'll be there Feb 15 - March 31. As for contacting us while we're there, just use the usual cell phones, email, FB, Skype, comments on this blog...

Oh, I should mention that I am now moderating comments on old blog posts due to a splattering of spam comments that appeared one day. So if you make a comment on an old post, it may take a while for it to show up.

Loveland

Chapter 3 of the Colorado trip: Wedding in Loveland. It seems I attend a wedding a year. This year it was time for Troy's college roommate to get married. Coincidentally the friend now teaches at the very same school they attended as undergrads. On Saturday morning, I got up early enough to do my running workout on a high school track in Denver, then got ready for the wedding and drove on up to Loveland.

Thanks to my knitting group, I was told that there is a great yarn shop in Loveland called Woolen Treasures that I just had to go to. Only problem: the shop is open 10am - 5pm on Saturday and not at all on Sunday. The wedding was at 10:30 am and the reception was scheduled to end at 5pm. Well, it turns out that the yarn shop was nearly across the street from the wedding, so I did find time to go to it.
Of course, I don't actually need any new yarn, but I wanted to see what was so cool about this shop. They really manage to pack a lot of fun yarn and inspiring sample projects in a cute little house. I got some half-price sock yarn. And then I searched for anything I could justify as "local" yarn. I found some gorgeous hand-painted stuff from Lonesome Stone. Most of the yarn cost far more than I could justify spending without a project in mind. So I got a reasonably-priced skein of mohair in this fiery colorway which they call Aztec Mountain. I have a couple of ideas for how to use it, and I'm eager to get started... but I have other things to finish first.
Oh yeah, the wedding was nice. There were plenty of friendly people there and it's good see a couple that knows not to get all stressed out over little wedding details. We also enjoyed the Sunday picnic by Loveland Lake.

Visiting Gramma

This is chapter 2 of the Colorado trip (see previous post). Gramma is actually my grandmother-in-law, but I have no other living grandparents so it should be clear to whom I am referring. After climbing Mt. Yale on Thursday, we continued the drive on into Denver to Gramma's house. At 91 years old, Gramma has limited activities that she can do. Her favorite is telling stories and talking. So I spend a lot of time sitting in the living room knitting and talking (listening, mostly).

On this trip, she made an odd comment about how she always sees me starting projects but never finishing them. It's odd because she sees me in the middle of projects... she almost never sees me "start" a new project, and she actually has seen some of the finished products. Anyway, it was Thursday evening... the night before the start of Ravelympics. Which of course meant that on Friday I would be starting a new project. Therefore on Thursday I was working on a sock that I knew I wouldn't finish before starting my Ravelympics scarf. So on Friday, for once, her comment was actually true.

On Friday, I took a badly needed rest day from running and hiking. By the end of the day, I had used up most of my first skein of Irish yarn on this scarf:

Colorado mountains

I just got back from a 6-day trip to Colorado, which included hiking mountains, visiting Grandma and attending a wedding. I'll post in chapters. The first chapter is Mountains.

Why climb mountains? It's for the view, of course! Okay, that's a quick answer, and obviously it's not always true. The top photo shows the best view we got during a lot of steep hiking up Mt Yale. We still went all the way to the top to get the great family portrait below... that could have been on any old rock pile. Despite the clouds, the weather was pretty good for being 14,000 feet up. This was last Thursday.

On Monday, we did a quick hike up Mt Evans where Wiley enjoyed the view below. We actually started lower down than this parking lot. We hiked about a mile to reach the summit, although most people simply drive the whole way. Clearly, we didn't hike this one for the wilderness experience.

Finally, on Tuesday we got a great view and a mountain to ourselves. Getting to the top of Mt Columbia was a tough 4000-foot elevation gain in 5 miles (one way). This certainly isn't the toughest 14-er in Colorado, but it kicked my butt. Actually, I've done 16 of these 14,000+ peaks and all but two of them have kicked my butt (those two weren't easier, I was just in incredibly good shape that year). Even that short one mile hike up Mt Evans, required many breaks to catch my breath and convince myself that there was some reason to keep going.

I still can't explain what reason I find for pushing myself up these mountains. It's the same reason I train to run 10k's, knit challenging projects, and go to school for another degree.

(There are a few more photos from the trip on Flickr).

Pesto

A few weeks back, I mentioned that basil is taking over my garden. Well, it still is, despite giving away several plants. I've made plenty of basil-based dishes over the past few weeks. Today I decided to pick as much basil as I could and make however much pesto that turned out to be. I managed to pick 4 cups of basil and 2 cups of parsley before giving up... there's at least 4 times as much basil still out there. With my little mini food processor, I can only turn one cup of basil (and all the other ingredients) into a batch of pesto at a time. Now I have a batch of regular basil pesto, spicy pest, sun-dried tomato pesto and garlic-artichoke pesto. The last one was experimental and it turned out rather creamy, more like a spread. Invite me over for a potluck, and you're likely to get a pesto dish!

I'll be heading up to Colorado later this week. The primary reason for the trip is a wedding on Saturday in Loveland. But then, we also have to visit Gramma in Denver and climb some mountains on the way. The plan is to drive to an as-yet-undetermined mountain in southern Colorado on Wednesday evening. Climb that mountain Thursday morning. Climb Mt Evans on Friday morning the continue on in to Denver. Attend wedding and related activities on Saturday and Sunday. Return to Denver and hang out there on Monday. Climb another mountain on Tuesday and head home. Somehow this long weekend turned into a week-long trip.

Neither the mountains nor Gramma's house are conducive to blogging... so it may be a while before the next post. Unless I find time to say something before I leave.

Labor Day

As a break from "work", we celebrated Labor Day weekend by climbing mountains in Colorado. Specifically, we tackled three 14ers near Lake City. We drove up to the trailhead for Sunshine and Red Cloud on Friday (it took about seven hours, so we had to deal with the rough dirt road at night). On Saturday, we started hiking around 6:30am to summit Red Cloud, then we traversed the ridge to Sunshine. Then we had to hike back over Red Cloud to get back down. So we actually climbed three 14ers in a day if you count Red Cloud twice. It was 11 miles round-trip, and such a beautiful day that we spent quite a bit of time on the summits. We didn't make it back to the camper until 4pm.

Troy and Wiley approaching Red Cloud.

Sitting atop Sunshine with the ridge to Red Cloud behind us.

On Sunday, we climbed Handies Peak from the American Basin trailhead. This was a relatively easy hike compared to the day before. Only 5 miles roundtrip, but the view was gorgeous!

Down from the mountain

After being computerless for a while, I have returned with some photos of Uncompahgre Peak. We were in Denver for a wedding, but what's a trip to Colorado without climbing a fourteener? So after the wedding weekend, we headed down to the Lake City area. The weather was nicely much cooler in the mountains than it had been in Denver. The hike started on a nice bright morning. Here's the rocky summit:

You can see that the clouds were starting to gather. They quickly turned dark and reminded us why we needed to get an earlier start to our hike. Get off the mountain by 1pm is the rule we'll stick to from now on. Wiley did not enjoy hiding out under a rock while waiting for the hail to stop on the way down the mountain. But he did make it to the top and back down again. Some people had their doubts that he could handle it.