rocky mountain national park

the view from our campsite

Paul's parents arrived on Saturday. We're going on a nine night camping trip with them to the Four Corners area, so we've been busy buying some gear and two weekends ago spent a night in the Rocky Mountain National Park to check it all out. We took our summer sleeping bags and spent a cold night. Tim started out in his own 'room' in the tent but woke and joined us. The body heat was welcome even if he did keep us up tossing and turning. It took us about 1.5 hours to get to our campsite, the last one available. The pine beetles have killed thousands of trees. They've cut them all down in this campsite and it looks like a moonscape. The trees become prime forest fire material after the beetles are through with them, so they cut them when they can. Environmentalists would like them to be left to burn.


our campsite sans trees - the stumps are evidence that this was thickly forested


our new family tent

After setting up camp, we took a short walk to nearby Sprague Lake. There's a well maintained path all the way around it. We walked through the forest from our campsite to get there and encountered no one until we arrived at the shore. There's a parking lot on the opposite shore from where we arrived, and there were loads of people taking advantage of the warm weather. It was windy, but Paul did some fishing whenever we found a sheltered area. I had to keep a close eye on Tim who has no concept of the end of the land and the beginning of the water and will happily march into the lake. He loves to throw rocks and sticks into the water but has to get very close to actually hit water.


sprague lake

Paul used our new camp stove to grill lovely steaks. We ate rather late and went to bed soon after the sun set.

The next morning Paul and Tim went for another walk to the lake and I buried myself in both our sleeping bags and got some sleep. Paul cooked up a yummy breakfast and then it was time to break camp. It was windy again and dark storm clouds were moving in quickly.


cooking breakfast on the new camp stove

We drove uphill to Bear Lake and planned to walk around it. We walked from the car to the shore, got a quick look, and watched the snow move across to where we were standing. It was more like small snow balls then snowflakes, but they were soft. We took that a sign to go home and saw a small heard of elk on the way out of the park. When we got out of the mountains and into Loveland, the first city on the plains, the clouds dumped about 15 minutes of hail on us. We pulled off under some trees and watched it come down.


hail storm

It was nice to camp out again and we're both impatient now for the trip with Jenny and Neville. They are here for three weeks and we're making the trip in the second week.

santa fe

25 May was Memorial Day in America, a public holiday, so for Paul's first day off of work, we went to Santa Fe, New Mexico with Dad, who was nice enough to fly us down and back. Mom was planning to come but came down with a wicked cold the day before departure and decided to stay home. The Spanish were the first European settlers to Santa Fe, and their influence is obvious in the architecture. There are building codes that force the adobe structure on most new buildings. Native American pottery and blankets seem to be the key ingredients for decorating and everyone wears turquoise. It's a happening art scene (the healthiest in the US), but on a scale way beyond our budget. We enjoyed the main plaza and surrounding streets with art and souvenirs to sell, but we also went further afield to Kasha Katuwe, a small National Monument about 40 miles from the city.


the cathedral just off the main plaza


a colorful shop near the plaza


iconic dried chilis hanging on a porch


art for sale


one of the many art galleries


the kasha katuwe walk begins with a roomy canyon


that quickly narrows


and narrows


ending with a steep climb and views of the 'tent rocks'


beautiful geology

Before flying home on the last day of the long weekend, we drove the Turquoise Trail south to the small village of Cerrillos, called a 'photographers heaven' by our guide book. It was a bit of a disappointment.


main street cerrillos


a restored cerrillos home

buddha and hockey

Sunday morning, we took a drive up the Poudre Canyon to see The Great Stupa of Dharmakaya, a Buddhist temple near Red Feather Lakes. It was a pretty, hour drive to Echo Glen and then a short drive on a dirt road to the Buddhist Mountain Center. Paul’s been to Nepal, so this is not a new thing to him, but it was my first visit to a Buddhist temple. I learned that it’s actually a stupa, a place for the remains of a great teacher. This one houses a man who helped spread Tibetan Buddhism in North America.



The temple is a tall and colorful structure in a pretty valley. It’s a peaceful spot for meditation. While inside, (surprisingly small) a man told us that Timothy could have a small red marble that was among others in a spot cut into the marble floor. We don’t know what it signifies but will save it for him as a memento. If we gave it to him now, he’d swallow it, and I don’t believe that was the man’s intention.



One of the Buddhists practices is to write prayers on a strip of cloth and hang it so that the wind blows it. Every time the material is moved by the wind, the prayer is sent. The first time that Paul told me this I thought it was a rather lazy and passive way to pray.



In the early evening, Bob and Sue, who live next door and treat Timothy like a second grandson, called and offered us two tickets to the local hockey game. They have season tickets but didn’t feel like going out last night. Mom and Dad offered to babysit, and Paul and I went to our first live ice hockey game: the Colorado Eagles vs the Mississippi Riverkings.




It was loud and action packed. We didn’t see a big fight, but there was plenty of slamming against the glass to make it exciting.

The puck is much easier to follow live than on TV. The Eagles won, but only in the last period. The area is a testament to capitalism with advertisements on every flat surface. The big screen TV’s (two of them plus the four on the scoreboard hanging from the ceiling in the center) blasted commercials with every break. Almost all of the players for both teams had beards. I wonder if this is hockey fashion.

horsetooth

After three days of no sunshine, snow and then rain, yesterday dawned clear and warm. The snow was gone from Fort Collins on the day it fell, but the foothills were still blanketed. We wanted to take advantage of the lack of wind, so we took a short walk in Horsetooth Park.



long's peak from horsetooth park


timothy's first time in the carrier that jennifer gave us


pelicans finding some thermal lift above the house

mt rushmore

I can say with shame that I finally visited a place that is in my own backyard yet known to many around the world: Mt. Rushmore.



How can I claim something in South Dakota as my own backyard? When your father has an airplane, your backyard becomes a much larger place. It took us 1 and 1/2 hours to fly up there and a little longer to get home.

tim and i on the wing

We saw both the presidential monument and the unfinished monument to Crazy Horse.

crazy horse

a smaller version of the project

We even had time to stop in at an all wooden church (no nails) built by Norwegian immigrants, but it was closed for the season. It was apparent from the multi-level parking garages and long sidewalks in front of the ticket booths that this place gets very busy in the summer. For us, it was almost a ghost town, and we enjoyed the space and unobstructed views of the monuments and the lovely Black Hills.



I knew that moving back to the US with Paul would mean finally getting to see my own country, and as with so many other things, he's making this dream come true.

breckenridge

Terry and Marilyn Brandt invited us to join them and their children, Sam and Haley, at their condo in Breckenridge last weekend, and we were packing our bags before we even finished reading the invitation. For me, it was an afternoon of skiing that made me wonder why I ever left Colorado.





We all enjoyed sledding. It snowed a little Saturday night and was warm enough on Sunday to melt the icy patches but not turn the slopes to mush.

a view of our condo complex from the top of the sledding hill

sammy off-piste sledding

sammy involved in an abrupt stop

me enjoying a gentler slope

tim dressed appropriately

paul and tim taking a break

Terry is an excellent skier and knows Breck intimately; he took Paul out for a day of intense skiing that exhausted both of them on Saturday.

paul taking a turn on a green slope

breckenridge from the top of peak 8

sammy snowboarding

terry heading down a black slope

paul enjoying the view from on high

denver

Paul and I decided to exchange the provincial life in Fort Collins for a day in Denver last Saturday. It was nice to be back among the skyscrapers and crowds. I even heard people speaking languages other than English. We started at Union Station, the original Denver train station that still functions even though we don't really have a rail service in the US, then walked up 16th Street to the capitol building.

union station

downtown denver

the state capitol building

There's a large park in front of the capitol that is very pretty and full of vagrants. We watched as two policeman ran after one man and wrestled him to the ground. Ah, the big city.

one of the more appealing residents of the capitol park

frontier statue

REI has a flagship store near the downtown and we stopped there onthe way home. They have a play area inside for kids made to look like a small mountain complete with a cave and climbing wall. Tim thoroughly enjoyed himself while Paul found just what he wanted. We didn't take the camera in the shop, sorry.