A trip down memory lane

I'm not only a bad blogger, I'm a bad parent.  I have hardly taken any pictures over the past several months.  What I really need is a picture of B since we made him get his hair cut.  Well, we didn't really make him.  We just told him that he'd have to brush & wash it more often if he was going to keep it long.  He was in the barber's chair in the blink of an eye.

So these are pictures taken last September that never made it onto the blog.  Hiker B looks SO young in these pictures!  It's amazing how much he's grown up in just five months.  Kindergarten will do that to you, or so I hear.  Both of these were taken on our Backyard Mountain.

Then there's the ever-popular Z-pounds-a-beer shot.  Ever since he totally freaked me out by sending Z in to chug water out of a beer bottle in front of me, M has thought it's hilarious to let her "drink beer."

Mt. Evans from the other side of the lens

You remember the Mt. Evans trip, right? Here are the pictures Nia took:





Pictures of me on this blog are rare enough, but a picture of me actually behind the camera? Unheard of!

Mount Evans

My friend Nia is only here for about ten more days before she goes home to Indonesia. She has done some hiking while she's been here, but had never seen dramatic Rocky Mountain vistas. I thought a trip to the top of Mount Evans would take care of that.

On the drive up Squaw Pass, the views were still pretty stunning. Storms were moving in, but you could clearly see the ranges to the north and west of us. By the time we stopped at Summit Lake, it was snowing lightly and pretty misty. We hiked a little bit there, did a little bouldering (B) and saw some wildlife.


I couldn't believe how close we got to this mountain goat! It was an accident -- he was behind a big pile of boulders, and we didn't even know he was there until we'd been a few feet away from him for several minutes. He didn't seem to mind our presence though -- he'd look up from his foraging every few seconds to study us, then went back to digging and eating.


Then we headed up to the top. It's been years since I drove up Mt. Evans, and I didn't realize there would be so many people up there! We practically had to wait in line to get to the top. Nia was overwhelmed by the scenery, even with all the mist and clouds. She told B at one point that it was so beautiful she felt like she was going to cry. Both of us were amazed by how many cyclists there were up there, and awed by the bravery (or foolishness?) of the people hiking up then skiing down the boulder-strewn snowfields.

At the top, it was only 30 degrees and very windy. Plus it was snowing these weird little pellets of snow that were blowing horizontally. It felt like needles hitting our faces. We didn't even stay five minutes -- just long enough to take in the little bit of view that was visible and take a photo.

I am so lucky to live where I do. Colorado is a wild, beautiful place, even when you have to endure a traffic jam at 14,000 feet to see it. At the end of the day, I felt like climbing a fourteener again. It's been many many years since I did that, and back when I was doing it, I barfed off the side of quite a few of Colorado's most beautiful mountains. Yes, even though I've lived here for most of my life, I get horrible altitude sickness. Horrible. Debilitating. Seriously -- on Mount Massive, it was so bad that I laid down in the shelter of a boulder and dozed/barfed while my family went the last few hundred yards to the summit. But I'm willing to try again!

Memorial Day hike

Beautiful Frazier Meadow, at the top of the trail

B and I took my friend Nia for a hike on Monday. Nia is here from Indonesia. She's on an amazing fellowship program that includes people from 90+ countries. She spent two months at the University of Oregon studying English, then eight months at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and she's winding up her year in the U.S. with a two-month internship in my office. She's wonderfully friendly and fun to talk to, and is living in an apartment near the office by herself. I knew she wanted to do some hiking, and it just didn't seem right for her to spend the whole three-day weekend on her own, so I invited her to go with B and me and then come to dinner at our house afterward.

We went up to a state park that's only about half an hour from our house, and is so lush and green that you'd never imagine a place so beautiful could be a mere half-hour from our bare, arid backyard mountain. We stopped in at the visitors' center before we set out on our hike, and read that there had been a black bear sighting that very morning half a mile up the trail we were headed to. We kept our eyes open the whole time (and B kept his squirt gun at the ready, just in case), but we never did see a bear. We got rained on for the first half hour and got pretty wet, but after that, the weather couldn't have been better for a hike. It was overcast and cool, and just a lovely day to be in the woods.

Nia is here for one more month before she goes home to the four year-old daughter she hasn't seen since January (I can't even imagine!), and has told me she'd like to climb a mountain.  If any of you locals have a suggestion, shout out.  Keep in mind that this is a woman who has lived at sea level all her life, so it probably doesn't need to be a fourteener, and should probably be a relatively short & easy hike.  Twin Sisters, maybe?

B takes aim at a shadow that could be a bear

Fearless

Checking out the ruins of the homesteader's cabin in the meadow

B and Nia near the end of the hike

B and Nia on the trail

On the way down, in an aspen grove

Happy new year

I'm able to take a minute to do a blog post because both kids are upstairs playing happily in my closet. Yes, you read that right. They each got a new flashlight for Christmas. B's is shaped like a horse, and Z's like a chicken. When you squeeze the tail, the mouth opens up, it makes an animal sound and a flashlight shines out through the open mouth. They adore those flashlights. Right now they're hanging out in the walk-in closet with them, but they've been known to cram themselves into the two-foot square coat closet together too. They also like to turn off all the lights at night and have me hide things for them to find with their flashlights. That was $10 well spent by Grandma, I think.

B and I started out the new year with a hike yesterday morning. We went up to an open space park in the foothills west of here where you can see an actual castle from the trail. B must have asked me at least half a dozen times if a king and queen lived there, or if they ever used to live there a long time ago. No, I told him, I'm afraid it's only regular people. Or as "regular" as you can be if you choose to live in a castle, anyway. And a rather creepy looking castle at that, if you ask me. He decided they probably didn't have a dragon either, since "dragons aren't real, and neither are dinosaurs or unicorns." Lots and lots of hiking pictures follow.

We spent New Year's Eve pretty quietly, considering the monkey house we live in. Not that we used to go out and whoop it up before we had kids, at least not since we were in our 20s. My sister & her husband (and their unborn baby -- I'm going to be an auntie!) were here with us that night, and left for home (Maryland) yesterday morning. Here we are roasting marshmallows on the back patio on new year's eve:

Last week, we started a new family tradition. We went to volunteer at a homeless shelter/food bank/clothing donation/etc. center, all four of us. I had thought we'd sort food in the food bank (a job that sounded like it would suit itself to the skills of a two year-old and a five year-old), but we ended up filling little bottles with lotion and shampoo out of bigger bottles. They wanted one-person sized bottles to hand out. This wasn't really something that Z had the dexterity for, so she lost interest pretty quickly and multiple hizzies ensued. We're going to do this once a month though, and next time we'll make sure we find a job she can help with too. It was fun, and B keeps asking if he can go back. Doing this together as a family is my sort-of a New Year's resolution.

Frozen Bear Creek

My hiker B

Clutching the new digital camera he got for his birthday -- he's taken hundreds of pictures of the floor, the walls, the dog's paw, etc.

This was the highlight of the hike for him, even better than the castle

Look at that sweet, shy grin

And how quickly it turns sassy

Back to sweet

Then he shoots me with a stick-blaster

I love this pair of pictures. You can just see the wheels going around in his head as he gazes at this stick: Can I possibly hold a third stick?

Look at the expression of pure satisfaction when he figures out a way to do it

B doing one of his absolute favorite things, although he didn't enjoy the rock climbing class he took last winter, which is odd