we’re back…part 1

I’m back and scrambling to catch up with real life, work life, and bead life! I’ve been trying to figure out a way to talk about the trip…it was just huge. We saw a ton of everything and missed a ton of everything. We’ve already discussed whether we’d return to each place…and we would. We’d go back to every single place! I’m going to divide up the trip description into several sections. But you can go here to look at a select few of the hundreds of photos we took.

Part one of the Epic 2008 Road Trip:
Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado is a fantastic park. They were the most organized of the parks we visited. They had free shuttles that would take us to different areas of the park for hiking or visitor centers. All the hiking trails were well marked with mileage to the nearest destinations. The rangers even handed out trial maps of the area you were interested with mileages on the maps as well. This was sooo nice when we were on the trails so that we could decide what we were in the mood for.
We arrived in RMNP on Sunday afternoon and the day before they had had a decent snow. Some of the roads had been closed off, and the mountain peaks were snow covered. We set up camp and with in minutes it started to rain, and then pour, and then hail. We watched as puddles formed around the tent and quickly dug trenches to try and lure the water away. Luckily we didn’t leak! Since there wasn’t much we could do but watch the water dry we drove into town and found a local brewery in Estes Park. It had free tastings and we tried them all. Stinger and Staggering Elk were two of our favorites. They had a really nice porter that I think the Dude would have enjoyed. We bought some beer to go and headed back to camp for a salmon dinner. That night was possibly the coldest night we had on the entire trip. Temps dipped below 40, and I hadn’t layered up as much as I should have, plus we weren’t quite used to sleeping on the ground yet.
Day 2 we packed up camp (b/c we were going to try out a different campground that night) and packed up a lunch to take with hiking. This was our biggest and longest hiking day of the trip. One of the nicer things about our trip was that each park was very different from the other. RMNP biggest difference was that we were actually up in the mountains. We started at Bear Lake, an elevation of 9400ft and climbed up to see Nymph Lake, and then farther up to see Lake Haiyaha. This was the highest we climbed which put us up 10100ft. It was a cool lake surrounded by huge boulders that needed to be scaled to actually see the water. From here we cut across some dense forest to go up to Mills Lake. Mills was probably the most striking of the lakes, surrounded by snow capped mountains and ledges with dense green trees (see photo above). The water was blue and clear and seemed to go on forever. It was truly a memorable site. At the end of the this we looped back around to the shuttle pick up for a grand total of 7.7 miles of hiking.
That evening we were exhausted. We’d already seen a lot and had to set up camp and cook a dinner. We drank up our tasty brews and enjoyed the new view the campsite gave us. The next morning we woke early to watch the sun come up and the moon go down. We packed up camp and were on the road by 9ish…off to Utah and the Arches!

The last two night’s I’ve been picking up my beads again and thoroughly enjoying it. As BE told me in an email…I’m due to make some flowers!!! I finished up the petals for a new flower last night. I’m really excited about it and hope to stop by the store tonight to look for some finishing materials.

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