Crested Butte - Part 4 of 4

This is a picture from our last day here looking out from the balcony of our house.  The early morning still had some clouds lingering in the valley below.  What an amazing view!

Finally, here is a picture of our house that we stayed in.  It was a super cool house.  Not huge from a footprint standpoint, but it had three stacked floors and tons of windows looking out.  Our only real complaint was that directly behind the house is the main road up to the ski area and it had a surprising amount of traffic noise starting pretty early in the morning.  Outside of that, a place like this really makes you think about investing in a second home as a getaway place!  We were sad to go, but happy to have the special trip and get to return to our kids who were eagerly awaiting us at home.  Happy Anniversary, Babe!

(Tara here, and my important two cents to chime in here is that we had SUCH an amazing time together in Crested Butte!  It was every bit as good as our honeymoon, in my opinion.  So great to have so much uninterrupted time together to explore a new area and be doing things every day that we both really enjoy!  Babe, thanks for all of the great ideas, the boy scout planning, and the way you really engaged and listened well to me during that trip.  Let's do it again next summer and find a new place to explore and make memories in!  I love you!) 

Crested Butte - Part 3 of 4

The following day turned out to be the nicest day we had from a weather perspective.  It turns out the goal for each day was fairly simple: hike in the morning, bike in the afternoon, and a nice dinner on the town each night (which also required some tiny, fresh, hot doughnuts from Niky's for dessert).  This hike's primary destination was Copley Lake but we also went a bit further up past the lake.

Here were some beautiful wild flowers on the way.  All the colorful flowers were simply amazing and covered most of the grassy areas.

After about an hour we ended up at Copley Lake and were greeted with these impressive views.  It was mostly marshy extending around the lake edge so we enjoyed the views for a a bit and then turned back to hike some more.  We don't have pictures but continued on up towards another peak off to the East (right) of this area.  There were two very interesting, noteworthy things to mention here.  First, we ended up hiking right past a full-sized silver Airstream that was just planted halfway up this mountain side along a river.  It was almost impossible to imagine how it possibly could have gotten there.  It looked fairly abandoned, so we left it be and kept going.  The second interesting thing was arriving at a mine site that Tara wanted to explore.  My better judgement won out and we decided not to get arrested or shot at for trespassing on someone's mining claim.  After a while, we decided we better head back down to civilization to get some lunch and have an afternoon bike ride.

Another picture of some really amazing flowers along the way.  Man, do we have a good looking state flower, or what?  (Clearly, the author just changed with that question...could you tell?) ;)

Crested Butte - Part 2 of 4

The next day had a better weather forecast so we wanted to jump right into some hiking.  The mountains around this area are absolutely gorgeous.  Our first choice for a day hike was trying to drive over past the West Maroon trail head and park for a short hike to what's called Devil's Punch Bowl.  It was supposed to be a crazy waterfall that drops right into a mountain pond.  What we found after all the rain was an absolute zoo of a muddy dirt road trying to get there.  After a few miles on the road past where the pavement ended, we saw a few four wheel drive trucks spun out off the side of the road near this bridge that had been stuck for over an hour.  They said the road only got worse up ahead.  I was fairly confident that my driving skills were superior to those who were in the ditch, but we decided to turn around and retrace our tracks about a half mile to a new trail head.  This new trail head led to a hike past Judd Falls and toward Aspen to another small lake.  Luckily, we were one of the first people there, which was quite nice as it was more congested on the hike down and the limited parking spaces at the trail head.

This is a picture of some of the beautiful columbines we saw along the hike. It was just a short hike to the first destination point, which was Judd Falls.  After a little under a mile we soon arrived:

This is Judd Falls from across the canyon, but is about as close as you can get to the falls themselves without risking life and limb.  After staying a few minutes to take it all in, we started off toward the second destination.

This weathered sign indicates the start of the Maroon Bells Wilderness in Gunnison National Forest.  The trail would actually take you all the way to Aspen if you followed it far enough, but we were not looking for that serious of an adventure.  We did hike for a good several miles until making it to a river crossing.  We sized up the crossing (that was about 15 feet wide with a decent current that would be shin to ankle deep) and decided we might follow this very lightly trodden path that continued alongside the river rather than crossing it.  It was apparent after a bit more hiking down this path that it was probably not going to work back anytime soon to the main trail so we decided to turn around.  As it turns out, there were four more river crossings on the way to the lake we were aiming for and we probably had easily another hour or two to go if we had not turned around.  Maybe next trip we can try to get all the way to the lake, but it was a great hike.

After the hike and a shower we decided to relax on the nice leather furniture in our house.  What you can't quite see from this picture is that across from me is a view that looks out across the whole Crested Butte Basin and down onto the town.  There were wall to wall windows to capture every bit of the view.  Pretty amazing!

Crested Butte - Part 1 of 4

Tara and I were able to get away for an amazing anniversary trip to Crested Butte!  It is only about a four hour drive away from Broomfield, but is remote enough that I've never been and it had been years since Tara had visited there with her mom.  After much questioning of various locals, this is a picture of the Crested Butte for which the town is named.  It also is the edge of the ski area that basically extends from the point of the butte back toward the left of the picture.

When we first arrived into town, we quickly started looking for a place to eat as it was pushing close to 2 pm.  However, we were greeted with a torrential downpour of rain.  We were so hungry but couldn't leave the safety of our car for probably another 20 minutes.  It let up slightly enough for us to make a mad dash to a great pizza place called The Secret Stash.  It was a packed house in there, and the pizza was hot and very tasty.

After a long lunch we headed over to the house that we rented which turned out to be amazing and was located about halfway up the hill to the ski area from the town below.  A short walk around the neighborhoods and up to the ski area led us here.  During the summer months the ski area transforms into a downhill mountain bike paradise.  Here are some trails ending at the ski lifts which people ride back up with their bikes to do loops.  Tara certainly was in awe that people could do this!  (Tara here, and I truthfully still think that the green runs look like something I would really enjoy!)

Lucky Pie Criterium

I always love this race!  It is a great venue near downtown Louisville and always has great competition as it has been the State Championship Crit race the past few years.  Another draw is the kids' race that rewards participants with Sweet Cow ice cream after the finish.  Gavin actually aged out and either has to race with a license or just be a spectator, but Gage (above) got to toe the line and show us what he had.

It was pretty impressive to watch--in the 7-8 year old group, he was 2nd with just one boy ahead of him at the finish line.  He was quite happy with that performance and felt pretty professional with his newly acquired racing bike from Gavin!

The other part of this day's tale is a bit more exciting.  I raced in the 35+3s for a shot at the state championship jersey.  I was feeling pretty good but the race was very sketchy.  You can see me in the above picture sitting around 10th position out of maybe 65 guys as we come around one of the corners.  A few laps later, someone tapped my back wheel and went down causing a three or four person crash.  I didn't go down but had to get a spare wheel at the pit because my wheel was rubbing my frame from where the guy hit me.  Back in the pack we continued to race and I got into pretty decent position for the last few laps.  With one lap to go, I was in about 6th or 7th place and we were all lined out and gunning it.  I would have ideally been in 3rd or 4th but the competition was tight.  In the finishing straight, with about 300 meters to go, we were going all out in a single file line and there was a small gap between me and the person in front of me.  Someone came up from my right shoulder and tried to shoot through the gap and ended up sweeping my front wheel out at 35 mph.  Nothing ever ends well in that situation or at that speed...

I remember flying over my handlebars and landing on the back of my legs/bottom facing backwards and then tumbling off the side of the road.  Then, just pain...intense pain.  As we had just spent 50 minutes racing at the top of our ability, I was having trouble breathing and it felt like someone had stabbed me in the side.  I was unable to move, not because I had broken my back, but because the rest of my body seemed incapable, so I just laid there.  Another minute or two later, course marshals and medical personnel came to attend to me and slowly rolled me over to check me out.  I had a large contusion on my hind quarters, many scratches and scrapes up and down my body, and something was majorly wrong with my ribs.  I was in bad shape.  Fortunately or unfortunately, my family was there.  I remember Gavin running up as I laid there and then instructed someone to take him back away.  I didn't want him to see me in this condition.

After about 10 minutes we were able to get me into a medical car and taken to the medical tent where they continued to check me out.  Due to the pain I was experiencing and the trouble breathing they strongly recommended taking me to the hospital in an ambulance, an idea that I couldn't really get behind.  However, as we pulled Tara's minivan up in order to load me into it, it because increasingly clear that I was unable to get off of the cot due to intense rib pain.  Every time I moved or shifted weight, the pain was unbearable.  Finally, they informed me that if an ambulance came they could give me some IV drugs to tolerate the pain for the move and I was all in from then on out.  They got some morphine running and then loaded me up and off we went to the hospital.  Thankfully, the story ends reasonably well, but not perfectly.  Once in the ER they performed many CT scans and Ultrasounds to ensure I hadn't bruised or damaged my heart, lungs, or any other internal organs with the crash.  I ended up fracturing the cartilage off the end of a few ribs and now the ribs were sticking out about an inch above the rest of the rib cage.  I also ended up separating the dermal layer from the muscle in about a six inch circular patch on the back of my hamstring where I initially impacted the road and I have lost all feeling in that area due to the trauma.  Hopefully, that numbness will subside and feeling will return one day.  In the end, I was able to go home by night time after wracking up a $35,000 bill in the ER.  I am thankful that my family was there to collect my bikes and ensure I made it to the hospital.  I think this was a traumatic event for us all and is definitely the least fun part of racing.

South Dakota Trip - Fourth Day, Part 2

After a morning out in the "Hotlands," as Tara would call them, we headed up to the hills in search of some water to cool off in.  This area has quite a few really cool lakes and so we found this place with a little beach and some swimming areas.  Here is Gage letting his sunscreen soak in before being turned loose in the water.  The one drawback of this place was the really sharp rocks that made up the lake bed.  You can see Gage is wearing some flip flops because the rocks were quite painful to walk on.

Tara got in on the action and got her ankles wet as she made sure Gage was safe in the water.  Gage's swimming is getting better, but it still isn't good enough to where we want to let him go much further than arm's reach away.

Gavin and Gage both made some friends while building sand castles in the more "sandy" and "beachy" area.  These guys probably played for two straight hours with these other two kids.  We ended up talking to the parents quite a bit too and they had one of the more unique stories we had heard in a while.  At first we thought it was a mom, her two kids, and the grandfather which didn't turn out to be quite correct.  It was actually the mom (~30 years old) and the dad (~65 years old).  Apparently the dad just burns it and is into all this crazy skiing and other sporting activities.  The mom said she hardly noticed that he was much older than she is, which is quite hard to imagine, but they seemed to make it work somehow.  The only regret I have from this day is that I don't have a picture of Tara's face while hearing the story about the two and their extreme age difference!

This marked the last full day of adventures for the trip.  The next day we packed up shop and headed back home.  This turned out to be such a great family adventure, and hopefully one that the kids will remember for a long time!

South Dakota Trip - Fourth Day, Part 1

On the fourth day, we made the road trip over to the Badlands which is about an hour east of Rapid City.  We were pretty excited but didn't quite know what it would be like, though we anticipated it being very hot.  It certainly lived up to its reputation and looks like something straight out of another planet.  Did I also mention that it was a tad bit warm there?  I think by 9 or 10 am Tara was already glistening in the picture above.  It was quite amazing though, with the picture hardly doing it justice.

This picture is just a few minutes inside the entrance to the National Park.  These formations extend as far as the eye can see in about 270 degrees.  They are mostly like a crumbling grey/red clay that has eroded into clumpy sand.  We were very nervous taking a lot of these pictures because we were standing on the edge of the super steep drop-offs.  For the more daring (unwise), you can actually make out faint trail lines across the ridge tops where a few people had walked or run from peak to peak.  It seemed like one wrong fall and you'd be tumbling quite a long way down.

We continued our drive through the park and looked for a place to hike.  About 30 minutes later we arrived at a nice trail head that had a similar but somewhat different set of land features.  There was a nice hike across this ancient rock/clay bed that seemed like a good idea.  Keep in mind that it was almost 100 degrees already with not a plant or tree in sight.  We set out over the horizon and it sure felt quite remote.  Above, you can see Gavin walking along a ridge.

Halfway through the hike we found the one bit of shade in the whole place!  Both Gavin and Gage were bright red due to the heat and were taking a nice rest in this tiny cave.

After returning from the hike we continued to drive through the rest of the National Park.  We came upon some antelope that were living on the side of this hill.  I can hardly image that this would be a comfortable life.  It just seems like there is so little in the way of water and food.  Not super hospitable, if you ask me!

South Dakota Trip - Third Day, Part 2

After finishing up the morning mining and grabbing some quick lunch, we decided to drive through "Bear Country."  This is a fairly large open space zoo/reserve that has a high concentration of animals, and particularly bears, that you can drive your car through with the windows up.  We first saw these two guys off in the distance slowly lumbering about.

Then we realized a lot of these animals get quite up close and personal.  This scrappy guy was just walking down the road next to our car.  At one point, a bear decided to lean up against the car right in front of us and ended up scratching it quite a bit.  It was pretty awesome seeing them so close up, but we had to make sure the doors and windows were on lockdown.  Something tells me that "Grampa T" would love this place and would be openly tossing food out the windows with no regard for safety.  After all, he was known to regularly feed the bears his left-overs (whole pies included) at the river house in Loveland.

Once you drive through the park area, there is a smaller zoo type area that has some open animal enclosures.  The above one is just for baby bears.  We probably watched these guys play for a solid 30 minutes.  They wrestled, bit each other, played tag, and also got themselves into quite precarious positions like this guy above.  We thought for sure that this guy was totally stuck up there.  I am not quite sure how he was even able to balance on that small branch, but he moved around in a tight circle for quite a while, and then about 15 to 20 minutes later, just crawled straight down the trunk.  Quite amazing!

If you look closely you can actually see this golden bear sitting upright like he is on a couch or in an armchair.  He never really moved from this position, and it was hard to tell if he was real or not but eventually his head would move around or he would scratch himself.  It was so strange, but the kids loved it!

We caught this great brotherly shot right before leaving.  Standing in the background is some small antelope or deer thing that was also inside the park in the enclosure with some bison and other small animals.  "Bear country" turned out to be a pretty big hit with everyone!

South Dakota Trip - Third Day, Part 1

 

 

Today's adventure had a few exciting things on the list, with the Big Thunder Gold Mine tour up first!  This mine is located in the town of Keystone which is about 30 minutes away from Rapid City.  The mine is no longer active, but they now give tours daily.  Here is Tara--with the classic Dad pose-- heading into this famous mine.

 

We joined about 6 other people on this tour.  It turned out to be a fairly relaxed tour, as you can see by the pics we had time to snap.  Our tour guide was quite interesting for this one.  This was her second week of giving tours, and I don't believe she could have been a day over 15.  She was trying her best to remember all of the history and bullet points of what to cover.

 

After heading approximately 250 feet into the mine, we ended up at this circular room in the end where they eventually quit digging.  Here the guys are, standing in one of the old rail ore cars.  All the long while we had thought we were touring some amazing mine, and it turns out that the mine had produced a total of about 8 ounces of gold over some 25 years.  It was cool to us, nonetheless, and we proceeded to head back out to pan for some gold with some gravel brought in from a nearby river.

This turned out to be one of the major highlights of the whole trip.  I can hardly imagine finding something that fits our boys (especially Gavin) better then setting them down and telling them they can keep any gold they can pan for out of some troughs of dirt.  We probably spent two to three hours hunched over our pans collecting real gold flakes and dirty garnet stones.  We had several almost accidents as our vials of jewels went missing under the water, but all was eventually recovered.

Here is Gage, intently scouring his pan for any sign of wealth.  It was a bit harder for Gage to work the pan, so I helped him out quite a bit.  After a while, he was more focused on the garnets as they were a bit easier to separate out.

South Dakota Trip - Second Day

After a good night's sleep at the hotel, today's primary agenda item was to head out early to try to secure tickets to a cave tour at Jewel Cave, which was about 45 minutes west of Rapid City.  The tours are first come first serve for tickets each day, and we weren't necessarily sure which tour would be the best.  After a bit of stress related to picking the right tour and some significant kid behavior issues, we did in fact arrange for a lantern tour where you hold real burning lanterns and make your way around for an hour and a half hour tour.  A few hours later we met our drill sergeant/smokey the bear/park ranger tour guide to get our lanterns.  This guide was classic!  At first we didn't quite know what to make of him because he was so super serious and dressed in ranger clothing indicative of 100 years ago, knickers and all!  However, he grew on us and his knowledge was truly impressive.  It also turns out that he was an amateur spelunker and had discovered and named his own cave in the area some years back.  Above is the entrance to the cave that we would spend the next hour and half hour exploring.

The tour followed this cave as it burrowed into the ground.  We only really explored a small portion of this expansive cave system that is believed to go on for hundreds of miles in different directions.  The system is still being explored and mapped even to this day, and some professional expeditions go down into the caves for up to a week charting new areas.  It is difficult to see in the above picture, but this is actually looking upwards at Gavin, Gage, and Tara descending down this very tight staircase that has been constructed to aid in the tours of this part.  We dropped almost 30 feet straight down and then it continued horizontally as we went deeper into the mountain.  After about an hour, we reached the destination of the tour which was a room called the Heavenly Room due to a bright white crystal formation on the dome of this large cave room that looks kind of like Mother Mary and a baby.  We weren't able to get better pictures because cameras weren't allowed due to all the tight spaces you have to squeeze through.  What is pretty crazy is the temperature drop along the way.  It was ~40-50 degrees colder in the cave than it was outside in the summer heat.  After spending a bit of time in this room, we returned to the surface.  This was a truly awesome experience for all.

We finished up the morning cave tour just before lunch time and we weren't quite sure if we would have time to find another cave tour to go on, so we decided to take a drive up toward Lead (pronounced LEED) and Spearfish to the North.  This was about an hour drive through the forested hills and mountain lakes and was very beautiful.  As we were driving, we eventually settled on the idea of finding a waterfall and seeing if there was a little hike involved.  We found the waterfall above called Roughlock falls.

There was a small parking lot about one to two miles down from the falls.  The "hike" was more like a walk up a fairly mild trail that followed the meandering river down the canyon, but stretching the legs felt really good.  The kids were particularly interested in all of the nice trout that could be seen swimming.  They probably were so abundant because the whole area was protected from fishing.

After an hour or so of hanging around here, we headed back to the hotel to get some rest after the long day.

South Dakota Vacation - First Day

I (Brent) am still on a vacation rationing plan as I get through my first three years at Leprino Foods, so we tried to look a bit more local for vacation options.  We had heard amazing things about the Black Hills of South Dakota and realized it's only about a five to six hour drive from us.  It had been quite a long time since I had driven north out of Colorado, but it is really a pretty drive up their through southeastern Wyoming and into South Dakota.  We were all excited when we finally got close to our destination (Rapid City) where we rented a hotel room for the week.  We actually drove by a few monuments on the way in, starting with Crazy Horse above.  We decided not to pay the extra $20 or $30 to get a closer look, but it was pretty cool from a mile or two away.

With the kids getting a bit stir crazy in the car, we had to stop at a mountain lake before we made it to Mount Rushmore, which was the main destination for the first day.  We stopped and had a picnic lunch, as well as put our feet in the icy lake, looking for crawdads and other things.  Other people were actually swimming in this lake and, just to the right of the picture, were jumping off of these cliffs into the cold water.  Gavin and Gage were thinking about it, but we decided it might just be better to stick to the shore activities. 

Another 5-10 minutes down the road from the lake was Mount Rushmore.  I would say that it looks so very impressive in person that the pictures barely do it justice.  It is amazing to look at the work it must have taken to carve this huge monument into the side of the mountain.  We stayed for a few hours touring the area and going to this museum area where the had presentations on how the carving was done and all the history tied to the site.  I would like to note that one of the benefits of visiting in the middle of the week was that the crowds were very reasonable and we were able to just pull right up and take it all in.

This is a picture from along this short hiking trail that takes you a bit closer to the base of Rushmore than the main gallery walk.  It is good to see Gavin smiling in this picture, as he was quite angry right before this, that I wouldn't let him crawl all over the mountain side and rock climb at will at a federal monument.

After finishing up at Mount Rushmore, we headed toward our hotel for the week but had to stop at what was advertised to be an amazing dinosaur park on the west side of Rapid City.  After getting there, we were extremely underwhelmed to say the least.  What you see above is one of about six dinosaur statues with disintegrating paint, some dying grass, and a crumbling sidewalk linking them all together.  After spending all of about 15 minutes here, we decided to head back to the car, thankful that someone didn't try to charge some sort of entrance fee for this "park."

Colorado Rapids Game

This year for the 4th of July, Brent's mom and Bob invited us to watch a Rapids soccer game in Denver.  All of my soccer fans were especially excited, as it was the first Rapid's game we had ever been to.  We played the Seattle Sounders which was great because they had several of the USMNT (US Men's National Team) members playing on their team.

This is a picture before the game of both teams and it shows some of the stadium.  We ended up getting crushed 3-0, but it was super fun anyways.

The special draw on the July 4th game is that they invite everyone onto the field and then light off fireworks for everyone to watch.  During the short time after the game and before the fireworks started people were up and dancing and, apparently, flexing their muscles.  Is this picture funny or what?!  The only negative for the night was the traffic nightmare on the way out.  I think we need to have a discussion with the traffic engineers on this one.  The stadium was not designed to facilitate people efficiently leaving in mass, it seems.  I think it took us close to 45 minutes just to get out of the parking lot and onto an actual road to head home.