The List (Part 1)...

The countdown has begun. We are leaving Colorado soon and may never be here for an extended amount of time again. You know what that means, squeezing every ounce out of Colorado before we leave. And since I'm a "To Do" list kind of guy, here are the few remaining things we want to do before our time's up (and because I've been so busy crossing things off of the list, I'm just going to go over the first few...)

1) Visit Rocky Mountain National Park - DONE

I've heard that Rocky Mountain National Park was beautiful, and even though we've been to the mountains many times, we've never actually made it to the park. The hike was rather impressive, essentially several lakes nestled among ridges of mountains.

My only issue was with the guide book that I bought - our original plan was an 8 mile hike, however doing the calculations on the way back it was really 11.5 miles and we were almost dead on our feet after 7.5 hours walking around. The elevation gain wasn't too bad (~1500 feet), but the last mile or so there was basically no trail - it was all covered in snow banks! Mind you we hiked this on June 17th and were comfortably wearing shorts. It was definitely a cool experience, but a few sections became quite slow because you were either worried about sinking down a lot or slipping on the hard-packed snow.


This last stretch was a little nerve-racking because as you can see the snow pack actually covered the river at that point with nothing to stop you from falling through.

2) Visit the Ski Resorts in the Summer - DONE

This was something I thought about doing for a while. We had spent so much time at these places over the winter that it seemed fitting to go back and see what was going on in the summer time. It ended up being quite a fun day...we randomly ended up eating lunch at a BBQ festival in Frisco (right on the way to Breck). Plus Sarah saw her first pig race, quite an accomplishment for her. Then we went to the Peak 8 fun park at Breck. There was a lot going on for kids, but we just wanted to ride the chair lift up and do some hiking on the ski slope (it was free with our ski passes). It was actually pretty entertaining to see the same ski slopes that we were used to with more runoff, spring colors, and bike trails than actual snow.

We hiked up a fairly steep slope to a bunch of expert trails and got a kick out of taking pictures in front of the trail signage (the trail signs seem so high without the base):


3) See a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre - DONE

Red Rocks Amphitheatre is essentially an open air concert venue between 3 giant red rocks just outside of Denver. Supposedly it had some of the best acoustics for music anywhere. It was definitely a cool place to see a concert. There wasn't a whole lot of time to pick out a show but Sarah loves Rob Thomas, so we ended up watching a Jewel/Rob Thomas concert there just last week.




See the final list items in an installment next week...