The drive over from Colorado Springs, on Hwy 24, was very pretty, and a remarkably easy climb, even for Martha. Here is a herd of bison we saw along the way:
We went from camping at 6000 feet outside Colorado Springs to camping at 9900 feet, and up here, it's easy to see that we're in the Rockies. There are mountains in every direction, much like the views from Estes Park. The thunderstorms have deposited a little snow on the mountainsides, just to decrorate them. The air is clean and the sky is extremely blue. Mark says that this is the prettiest public campsite we've had (I tried to argue our site in Hot Springs, which has been on our "best and worst" list, but we weren't right on the water then, and we are now. Here are a few pictures:
After we settled in and had dinner, Mark tried to convince Katie to try riding her bike without her training wheels. This is as close as she got:
He got a little closer himself:
Then of course Katie found out that there were girls camping nearby: a family with a girl just Katie's age, next door, and a family of a civil engineer with two older girls across the street. Katie invited herself over to where the civil engineer's family was roasting marshmallows. We chatted with him about living and working in Colorado, and his girls took great care of Katie. He asked me if I'd like a brownie, and when I said sure, gave me one that was probably once half a pan. I guess his girls didn't like brownies. But even I couldn't finish it.
Wednesday, August 24
Mark loves to hike, and I've been holding him back, unintentionally, for years now. So when he realized how great Colorado was, he went out and bought himself a new pair of hiking boots. Today, he went off to try them out on the second highest peak in the state, Mt. Massive. It got its name from its massive size. Most of the fourteeners (peaks over 14,000 feet), if sliced off at 14,000 feet, would have less than an acre and a half of flat-top up there, but Mt. Massiff has half a square mile. It actually has four peaks on it, but Mark only climbed the highest one. Here are a few shots. The trail started out in forest:
And then went up above the treeline. I think this is it:
Near the top he met a fellow who offered to take Mark's picture:
You can't see the blisters in this one: he got one on each ankle, from his new boots. Here is the view from the top. He said it was well worth it, and he plans to do more peaks while we are here:
When Katie and I woke up this morning (long after Mark left), I discovered that the fridge was out again. Luckily we had some ice left over in the freezer from the last time it happened (just a few days ago). I tried banging on the coils outside and turning the unit off and on every couple of hours, but I don't have the relationship with the fridge that Mark does. I think it fears him a little. I never did get it going again.
Katie and I lounged around camp, she painted some rocks red and we invited the little girl next door, Josie, to come paint too. She is a week or so younger than Katie but looks a full year older. They had a good time painting and playing with Katie's toys, and after lunch, Josie's mom, Joli, took the girls to a nearby swimming pool to swim and shower (we're all dry camping here, there is no electricity or water hookup, and Josie's family had run out of water and hadn't had showers in days). Katie swam a lot, they said (with her floaties). Josie has been swimming without floaties since she was three, and I hoped that seeing Josie would encourage Katie to put her face underwater.
While the girls were swimming, I sewed up a couple little rag dolls for them, to play with and remember each other by. Also I read my latest novel, Lonesome Dove. I know everybody else read it years ago, but I'm just getting into it and ain't it great? I've never read a western before, but I love it. It's fun to be reading it out here in the west, although maybe Texas would be even more appropriate.
We all headed over to our civil engineer friend's campfire again tonight, for more s'mores. No brownies this time (whew). He had a bottle of Jack Daniels, but knowing his portion size, I didn't ask for a sip.
Katie got a little wound up from all the sugar, and had a really hard time falling asleep. She just kept crying, couldn't seem to calm down, even with me rocking her and singing. I gotta remember to keep track of how many s'mores she has in the future.
Thursday, August 25
This morning, Katie's little friends all left for home. Here is her friend Josie:
I found out that Joli (the mom) had to head back to Evergreen (in the pretty hills above Denver) for a parent-teacher conference for her older daughter Jenna's new school. It's a Montessori high school, and she's had to work hard to get in. They will be going on a hike over one of the passes in a week (with her school), and then they'll go to the Four Corners region to aide in an archeological dig. Later in the spring, they'll go to San Diego, where they'll learn to sail, and then they'll sail to Catalina. Wow! I'd love for Katie to learn all that stuff someday. If we can't find (or afford) a school like that, we'll just have to do it ourselves.
After saying our bye byes, we drove across Independence Pass (12,000 ft) from Leadville to Aspen. Here we are at the top, along the Continental Divide:
It was a gorgeous drive, and here's one picture from the road (most of them came out blurry):
It started raining and sleeting as soon as we hit the Divide; apparently it snowed too, after we left: we saw the snow on the return drive.
If you could just get rid of all the rich people, Aspen would be an idyllic place to live. We saw "power broker" types walking around doing deals on their cell phones, we saw folks dressed to the nines and tens at just 2pm, and we saw lots of homes that could pass for lodges. We saw a modest home in town, for sale for $2.9 million. All that was a bit much for us, but on the other hand, we saw amazing stands of aspen on the mountainsides, wooded ski slopes covered in tundra (it looked just like grass that had been recently mowed), a wonderful city library (like a lodge inside, with free computer access and a great kids area), and the best city playground so far. Here are a few pictures of town:
Everything seemed horrendously expensive in Aspen, but Mark managed to find us a couple of camp chairs for only $27 each (our nice wood ones finally fell apart). Oh, and then he also found a new hiking pack for himself, for $130 (ugh). Oh well, we managed not to spend anything else in Aspen. Oh, except for gas. As we were leaving, Mark noticed we were empty. We stopped at the nearest station, which didn't have a sign, and choked when we saw the price for unleaded: $3.09. I actually took a picture of it. We bought five gallons, to get us home. Back in Leadville, it's only $2.77.
On the drive home, we saw an old ghost town by the side of the road. There has been archeological work done there, and you can hike around it. It was raining and late, so we just took a couple pictures. The best buildings were too far away to shoot:
Friday, August 26
Today we had to leave our spot for one just as nice, but without the view (someone had reserved that spot for the weekend). So now we are at Father Dyer instead of Baby Doe, and about a half mile from the pretty lake. Mark ran around part of it this morning, and I walked some of it. Then we said bye to the lake and drove to our new spot.
Here is our new spot:
The fridge started working after lunch. I think it liked the drive. We ignored it, and headed for town to do laundry and upload this stuff.
Saturday, August 27
We drove over to Breckenridge and Vail today. On the way, we passed the biggest environmental cleanup I've ever seen. Here is just a small portion of the valley:
This sign explains that the area used to be home of three gold mining towns; now it's just this big, ugly stretch of cleanup. But they plan to let it become a meadow and resort back to nature (if nature can live there anymore):
Breckenridge is a really sweet town, and not as snooty as Aspen (although not as gorgeous, either). Here are a couple shots:
The main street is lined with shops, not Gucci like Aspen, more like T-shirt shops and sports shops. We found a cute blue vest with white faux fur trim for Katie, and I found some beads to make myself a little bracelet. Katie and I found a wonderful jigsaw puzzle shop, and it was hard not to buy one or two. Then we got caught in a sudden thunderstorm. Lightning struck somewhere across the street (it seemed), simultaneously with a huge thunderclap. Katie and I retreated to the bead shop while Mark waited it out in a tiny outdoor alcove where he had a good Internet connection and was able to pay some bills. When the rain had subsided to a reasonable pitter patter, we made a run for our car. The temperature had dropped 20 degrees, it felt. By the time we reached the car, it was all over. These mountain storms are funny that way.
Sunday, August 28
This morning, Mark climbed the highest peak in Colorado, Mt. Elbert (14,433 feet). It sits next to Mt. Massive, but is shaped more like a triangle. Here's a picture I took from far away:
Mark was reading to me some statistics about folks who climb all of Colorado's 14,000-foot peaks. The youngest person to climb them all was a seven or eight year-old girl! The fastest time to climb all 54 peaks: like 15 days. Mark asked Katie if she wanted to start climbing with him, but she said no. She stayed with me, and we started the morning by sleeping in (she slept till 9am). We had turned off the heater the day before to conserve our battery: in this cool air (it gets down to freezing at night now), our big batteries are losing their juice faster, and so is the little battery that starts our generator. Yesterday, Mark had to start the RV's engine just to get enough juice to start the generator, so that we could charge the big batteries again. Thinking of all our batteries going at once makes me a little nervous. But Katie and I pulled ourselves out of bed at 9am, and it was 41 degrees in the RV (oddly enough, it was actually warmer in our non-functioning fridge (47), and in two tries, I managed to get the generator going, and we warmed up ourselves and our batteries.
Mark got an early start on the mountain, hitting the trail at 6:45am, and although the forecast for clear skies turned out to be wrong, he got up and down without getting wet. Here are some pictures he got from the summit. Boy does it look breathtaking from up there:
He was back at the RV by noon, which surprised me a bit. We had had some rain at 10am, and I had worried that it might have hit him as snow. But it didn't, and also his ankles fared well, and he said he saw a lot of hikers on the trail.
Katie and I had explored the path from our campground to Turquoise Lake, finding pretty pine cones and toadstools (I can't seem to keep her from touching them). That's about her speed of hiking, and it suits me fine, although it would be fun to do an easy mountain hike with Mark (if there are any).
We are out of water in the RV, so after Mark got back and had lunch, we headed into town, to use the school's indoor pool & showers. It was closed till 2pm, so we went to the local bookstore first, which was tiny but had lots of great books. There were like seven books about Leadville history alone (and not all written by one author either). I couldn't believe it, so I started looking at em all. I found a book by a guy from Leadville who had found 70 food cans & other goodies under his house, when he was crawling underneath to fix his foundation. The stuff had been left there in a pile by the contractors who built the place in 1880 (Leadville was a boomtown then, and lots of houses date to that period). The labels were beautifully preserved, and boy were they gorgeous. He took them to Antiques Roadshow and the assessor told him they were extremely rare, so he started researching and decided to write a book about all the stuff he found out (about the local companies who had canned foods back then, and all the town history that his finds revealed). It was called something like "Labels, Leadville, and L---" and I kinda wish I'd bought it. Instead, we bought a magazine for Mark, a John McPhee book neither of us have read, and some postcards. The bookstore owner was an old guy and I kinda wanted to ask him about Leadville, but there were a lot of people buying stuff, so it didn't seem appropriate. Instead we headed out for the pool, but I saw a Moving Sale sign in front of a little old house off Main Street, and it looked interesting, so we stopped. It turned out the house is owned by a guy in his 70s who is selling and moving back to Denver, where I think he has a girlfriend. He chatted with Mark about Mt. Elbert and Mt. Whitney, which he'd like to climb someday. I really liked him, and it would have been fun to chat longer. We bought a ball-and-cup game for Katie and a red tartan wool muffler for me, and gave him our web address--maybe we'll hear from him again.
Whew, what a long paragraph that was. I hope you are still reading!
Here are a couple of the Leadville houses decorated with neat shingles:
The swimming pool is very nice; it's indoors and open all year, and they have lockers and showers too (it's attached to the middle school and high school, so the kids can use it too). Also they have a big hot tub and a sauna, and we hung around for a few hours, trying to get Katie to put her face underwater (she did it once, but only by accident), and trying to get Mark to do a cannonball off the diving board (he did a fine one). I tried my hand at a nice dive, and played a little water basketball with Mark. It was a lot of fun.
We had a fire tonight, using up our firewood. Katie had fun finding pine cones to put into it. I baked up some homemade peach strudel with much too much strudel on it (I didn't know you could have too much, but boy was this rich). We decided to forgo the heater and just pile on the blankets again.
Monday, August 29
I can hardly believe August is almost over. Boy has this year flown by. Thank god I had this website (and a few people actually reading it) to get me to write this diary, or all the details would be a blur. If it seems I write too much, I'm trying to compensate for my brain's poor memory later on.
Last night I was woken up four times by hearing a chipmunk or squirrel, or maybe a raccoon it sounded like, on our roof. It sounded like he was trying to gnaw his way through our bathroom's plastic vent, which can open up to the roof. I was annoyed, but it didn't sound like a big enough animal to bother waking Mark or even getting out of the warm covers, so I ignored it as much as I could.
When Mark went to the bathroom in the morning, though (39 degrees this time, and ice on the ground outside! Fall is coming!) he discovered what I'd been hearing. Some critter had been gnawing on our bathmat! From the miniscule size of the poops throughout the RV this morning, it seems to be a small mouse. Here's a shot of the bathmat:
So we did a little detective work, and Katie found this hole, near our fire circle:
We found a few tiny TP remnants near our RV and the hole, but I couldn't find any torn TP in our RV, so maybe that was from the previous camper. I didn't find any of our rug outside, so it's possible he has made a nest in the innards of the RV. We hope not. We'll have to set a couple traps tonight, just in case. As of now (almost 2pm), we haven't heard him again or smelled any burned-critter smells (we're on the road now).
After the little mouse discovery, I vaccuumed up all the poops, Mark swept the ice off the roof, and we headed into town to have breakfast. We went to the Cloud City Coffeehouse, which has free wi-fi as well as the best veggie quiche I've ever tasted, and wonderful, bottomless coffee too (also they make incredible salsa and sell it to folks like us). Here is Katie at our table this morning:
Katie looked over their book selection, and I found a first edition of Bambi (in poor shape), which I thought would be fun to read her, since she loves the movie. Turns out their library is an exchange-type one, and I found another great book written in 1904; it's a big illustrated book on All Common Knowledge of the time. So we headed back to the RV and I gathered up a bunch of books and took them over and exchanged them for those little treasures. I felt that great feeling when you feel you've found a treasure at a garage sale or someplace unexpected.
So now we are on the road north to Steamboat Springs. We've driven away from the encircling peaks in Leadville, and we're on a high plain with mountains to the east, just northwest of Breckenridge, on Colorado Hwy 9. Mark has heard that in Steamboat Spgs there is a dude ranch where folks can come work around the cattle and horses for a day, they're the type that do cattle drives and you can pay to help (I bet old time cowboys would feint to think of that). He might check that place out, and I'm thinking I might get a massage--my back has been bothering me since Williamsburg, and besides, do you really need an excuse to want a massage?
Here is one last look at Leadville, a little Cafe across from Cloud City. I recommend this town, as a place full of history (gold mines and great stories that go with them) and beauty, and without the slickness of Aspen or Breckenridge. Here you can still find old timers who skied the mountains before there were lift tickets, and treasures in coffeehouses and bookstores.
