sometimes you try too hard …
My cousin swung back through Denver at the end of his two week trip. We went for a hike on Chief Mountain. The hike starts around 10.7k feet and ends around 11.7k feet. The fact that we were higher than nearly everything around us combined with scattered thunderstorms all around us made for some fantastic views. A chubby chipmunk at the top of the hike made for some fun as well. The hike was short and the drive relatively far, but it was gorgeous.
The rest of the pictures are here.
My cousin was driving through town on his way to Yellowstone and stopped by for a couple of days. He’s really into rock climbing (we climbed with him in Kentucky if you remember) and wanted to do some climbing while he was here. He knew of some climbing in Clear Creek and took me a long with him. It was some great climbing and a lot of fun.
These were our second and third climbs:
Here’s me making a sweet move on the second climb:
The rest of the pictures are here.
Yah, that’s right. Colorado wins:
I say it’s because of all of the Ethiopian restaurants around here.
From here.
Hard to believe it’s been that long. Time FLIES. It’s amazing how the inspiration for things ebbs and flows. Hopefully this one will come back soon. I have some pictures and stories burning a hole in my hard drive.
I have eight posts that have been saved as drafts with half ideas written. Some of them have been sitting there for years. I’m sick of seeing them listed there, so I’m going to clean them all out in one post. Here they are in brief.
In January of 2007, we bought a new car, I planned, purchased supplies for and installed a dog kennel in our back yard (in MI obviously), we started getting heavily into wedding plans and I think I self diagnosed myself as bipolar or something. Also, Kuma was turning into a very good puller of me on a bike. This post was all over the place.
In March of 2007, I was inspired by a co-worker’s attempt at waking up at 5 AM (see here). I was proving to be fairly successful at getting up at 5 AM for a while. Some things that helped me were to disallow the snooze button entirely and to move the alarm into the bathroom. Also, preparing my clothes the night before helped me avoid that period of time where you figure out what to where which was also when I was dangerously tempted to just lie back down. I was fine as long as I was out of the bedroom area by the time my post-wake up adrenaline wore off.
In June of 2007, I decided that one of the best motivators to get me to work out was to limit my work out session to 30 minutes, regardless. So, I get in what I get in in 30 minutes instead. I’m boxed to a time limit instead of completing a certain set of exercises. That was liberating for me for some reason. I still do the time limit thing today.
In spring of 2007, I started counting the nutrition of EVERYTHING I ate. I counted calories, fat, protein, carbs, fiber and sugar. It was tedious but very fun. I stopped around mid-summer because wedding planning was hectic. I haven’t started again, but I still adhere to 4-5 meals a day and sticking to roughly the correct proportions of carbs, protein and fat in each meal.
In June of 2007, I also decided that the best way to get anything done that you really wanted to get done was to do the first preparation steps for the task at the time you’re thinking about how important it is for you to get it done.
In January of 2008, with the housing crisis hitting full steam and many of the brokerage firms losing money, I questioned how someone could let a brokerage that is losing so much money convince them that they’ll do any better with that person’s money.
In January of 2008, I also encountered my third canceled flight IN A ROW. I’ve been luckier since.
There you have it.
We decided to go up Pike’s Peak when my dad was in town. Me working in the railroad industry was immediately attracted to the Pike’s Peak Cog Railway. We made our reservations and heading down to Colorado Springs to ride the train up the mountain. During the drive down, we could see snow blowing off of the top of Pike’s Peak in the wind. It was very gusty. Unfortunately, this proved to be a problem for us.
The train couldn’t go all the way to the summit (14,110 ft). The winds when we got to about Windy Point (12,129 ft) were incredible. The windows on the train banged in their frames and the train rocked back and forth. Crazy. So it sucked that we couldn’t get out of the train and walk around at the top, but we could see this:
Cog trains are kind of neat. I won’t try to explain how they work; read here for details. I will say, though, that they can climb very steep grades, and the one we were on had front and back facing seats. We had back facing seats and had to fight gravity to not tumble face first into the people’s laps in front of us.
We made a stop on the way back down so we could walk around and use the “facilities” (a picnic table or two and a port-a-potty). I had a chance to take some obligatory pictures of the train and rail at that point.
I would venture that people think there’s something unique about their state that may not really be that unique. “We have THE WORST or THE MOST AGGRESSIVE drivers here.” Or the one I want to talk about today: “Our weather is THE MOST unpredictable — it’s sunny in the morning and snowing at night!”
I lived in Michigan for 28.75 of my 29 years. I thought the weather in Michigan was very odd. People blamed it on being surrounded by lakes. It would be 30 degrees and 80 degrees in the same day with sun, clouds, rain and snow at almost the same time. I thought that was a claim to fame for Michigan. When I traveled, I would exclaim, “You don’t know anything! Michigan weather is craAaAAzy!!” But I’m not so sure anymore.
Colorado weather is as unpredictable as Michigan’s. I’ve experienced it go from mild and sunny to freezing and snowing in an hour. It’s windy and cold when you get home and then sunny and sweaty hot when you go back out a few minutes later with a jacket on. Wednesday it was 83 degrees. Wednesday night it got down to the 30s and snowed by morning. The high on Thursday was 43 degrees.
It’s just as crazy as Michigan. I can’t imagine Colorado and Michigan are unique. Are there just a few areas that have unpredictable weather? Or do all states claim they do and think it’s unique to them?
Update: The “Michigan Left”! There’s another thing that I’m sure doesn’t happen in just Michigan. It’s where you have to turn right and then U-turn to make a left turn.
Have you ever had natural, unsalted peanut butter? If not, you should. The transition may be rough at first, but it’s worth it. It tastes like.. well.. peanuts. And that’s it. I don’t understand JIF peanut butter any more; it’s overly salted and smooth. It makes me feel like something good was ruined. I’m a peanut butter snob. When I get my Blendtec, I’m going to make my own.
My dad was in town last weekend, and he didn’t realize that he was in for a weekend of physical activity. We had him walking to and around the dog park, walking to the bus and around downtown and the ultimate challenge: hiking up a small mountain in Colorado.
We wanted to take him hiking somewhere and found a nice looking hike on Bald Mountain in book of easy day hikes. It offered a great view at the summit, was short and wasn’t a there and back hike where you had to re-walk the same trail. The only question mark was this pesky 240 ft of elevation gain. I wasn’t sure exactly sure how bad that would be.
So we packed up on the day of the hike, drove to Boulder and up some serious inclines to get to the trail head and finally set out on our hike. The first thing we see is a warning about mountain lions. The sign says to throw stones and sticks at mountain lions you run into to scare them away. I wasn’t too worried though. I’m confident that Kuma would have tried to hump any mountain lions until they ran away in frustration. That’s just what Kuma does.
When we finally did start climbing the mountain, it turns out 240 ft is a lot more difficult than I thought. We wanted to give my dad a nice easy stroll, and we ended up putting him in front of a difficult inclined climb. To his massive credit, he was a trooper and impressed big time with his gumption. He made it to the top and back down without a peep. The reward at the top is a bench with a nice view:
The boys also made it to the top without any trouble:
We like hiking a lot. I think I enjoy hiking more than skiing. We definitely need some better hiking gear though before we do anything too adventurous. I’ve been hiking in running shoes which aren’t good for protecting the bottom of my feet from sharp rocks or for stopping my ankles from rolling over. The book bags we’re using for carrying supplies really don’t provide the needed support for hours of use. I think the things we need are:
Hopefully we will hike frequently during the summer. I want to try to get up some fourteeners (peaks over 14,000 feet) this year so I can summit Pike’s Peak next March when there’s still snow at the top. That’s my goal!
I just came up with the most amazing food. Here it is. I’m going to eat it now. Are you jealous?
Denver
|
vs |
Flint |