We made two stops in Colorado, one just west of Denver and then a few days in Colorado Springs.
While in the Denver area we had a wonderful time catching up with a friend from my grad school days and her family before gearing up… for snowboarding! We spent our last 2 full days near Denver snowboarding at Arapahoe Basin, or A-Basin I quickly learned to call it so I didn’t look SO touristy! Ha!
Major props to Josh, taking on some hills that were the steepest ones even I had ever been on! Mind you I am, let’s say mediocre at best having snowboarded on/off since high school and this was Josh’s only 3rd and 4th time ever on a board! And NO broken bones… solid win… ok we were both sore in ALL sorts of places from some pretty YouTube worthy spills, but it was a fantastic two days!
After a solid butt kicking from the mountain at A-basin it was time to relocate to Colorado Springs. While in Colorado Springs we had 3 things on our to-do list and all the stars aligned and all three happened!
First on the list was a visit to Garden of the Gods. This was a beautiful park with crazy rock formations. We decided to take the 4 mile round trip walk around and through the park to see as much as we could… and a nice, long, slow walk sounded quite nice since we were still feeling ALL the soreness from snowboarding.
Day two in Colorado Springs was a bucket list item for Josh… we drove to the top of Pike’s Peak! The climb was 20 miles up to >14K feet elevation where the wind was INSANE! We snagged some “world famous” Pike’s Peak Doughnuts, found the illusive Sasquatch (I am clearly way more excited about this rare sighting), and tried to not blow away before driving back down. Charlie our truck handled this drive like a total champ… maybe he should race next year?
Our 3rd to-do in Colorado Springs was the butt kicker of butt kickers. We did the Manitou Incline Staircase Hike… or the hike of death… whichever you prefer. This was >2700 steps in under 1 mile up to an elevation of over 8000 feet where the air was ~72% oxygen of that at sea level. We were preeetty confident coming into this hike, less than a mile… psh, how hard could it be, right? HA, sike! This was H.A.R.D. with the air getting so thin making it hard to catch our breath. We made it bottom to top in 45 minutes which we were really pleased with! The way back down was more challenging mentally looking down an almost mile long flight of stairs that you really didn’t want to fall down, my descent being a bit more challenging than anticipated due to biting it on the way up just shy of the 2000 step mark and landing on a metal grate on my right knee. More of a blow to the pride than anything but boy this really made us work for our sticker! …Yes we have a sticker from every place you’ve read about in the Blog… it’s the little things right??
After making it back down to solid ground and once our legs stopped shaking, we enjoyed a local coffee and got ready for a loooong drive north.
Next up… our final “destination” before we meet up with some friends on our way to Memphis for Thanksgiving…. Mt. Rushmore here we come!
Getting Lost and Eating Cake 