Colorado!

Amy is grading and we have had lots of requests to hear about Colorado, so here it goes!

Since we had a 7 AM flight out of Nashville on Friday, we decided to drive up Thursday and stay at the Music City Sheraton hotel (Thanks Priceline!). Luckily, the hotel lets you leave your car at the hotel and take the shuttle to the airport. That a pretty good deal when you are talking $9/day for parking at the airport. Anyways, we grabbed the shuttle to the airport with a bunch of Southwest employees. Our Flight was uneventful and very full.

We arrived in Denver and quickly got our luggage and found the way to the car rental shuttle. Getting the car was a breeze and we were soon on our way to Buena Vista. We stopped off for lunch in Conifer at Brooks Place Tavern which was really good. We continued on and stoppoed occasionally to take a picture.

We arrived in Buena Vista (Elevation 8,000 ft) around 4 and found our cabin by the Arkansas river. BV is an interesting town. On the east side (where our cabin was tucked) you have the Mosquito Mountain range (12,000 ft peaks) and the Collegiate range (14,000 ft peaks) on the west. I found it interesting that the Mosquito were formed by volcanoes and the Collegiate by tectonic plate movement. So needless to say there endless scenery to gaze upon.

Now for a few highlights from the Trip:

Saturday we went whitewater rafter down Brown Canyon. It was Amy's first time and we enjoyed it. Usually there isn't enough water flow this time of year for rater but they still had lots of snow melting in the higher elevations. It lasted about 4 hours and we were tired so we headed back to town to celebrate Amy's B-day! I am not not a baker by any means, but I though it looked just dandy.

Sunday we went to Mountain View CoC for the morning service (Cant think of a better background for a church) and then took a hike up to Browns Falls after lunch. The hike was nice going up buy entirely too rocky on the way down.

Mountain View Church Of Christ

Browns Falls

Tuesday we decided (Mainly Clark) that we would try and hike up Mt. Massive. Massive is the second highest peak in Colorado at 14,428 ft (The tallest Elbert is 14,433). I choose the easier yet longer route up with the trail head at about 10,000 ft. It was a cold start as temps were about 28 degrees but we soon warmed up and were at 12,000 by 11 AM. The last 2,428 ft were difficult since we were not quite use to the low oxygen levels. We still make pretty good time and reached the top by 1. To our surprise there was a family of Mountain Goats. To Amy, that was the best part. We sat on top and chatted with a few other folks that we had seen hiking up that day for a few minutes. The way down was pretty uneventful and much slower than we had anticipated. Any how, after 14 miles of hiking we got back to the car and were excited to visit the first outhouse we could find.

Amy promises to post the rest of the story later this week.......to be continued!