Hike! Hike! Hike!

I’d add photos now, but don’t have time to crop them down to a manageable size to upload.

We’ve hiked a lot in the past couple of days; yesterday we headed to the Bear Lake trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked to Alberta Falls, where we met a couple that were setting up a virtual geocache. We chatted with them about that for a while, then tried to go on to Mills Lake, but there was too much snow on the trail. As it was the trail was mostly snowcovered to Alberta, so we were pooped and called it a half-day. Then we drove over, on a naturalist’s recommendation, to an area behind the town of Estes Park called Twin Owls. There’s a historic old ranch back there, and the trail access is at the back of it, so we wasted time looking for the trailhead until we realized it was inside the MacGregor Ranch property. It’s maintained as some kind of history museum by the state, apparently. We hiked along the lower edge of the rocks and tried to spot eagles and hawks, but no luck. I think I saw a bald eagle in RMNP on the way in to Bear Lake, though. It was high in a tree with a good view of some hunting grounds, so I’m pretty sure I saw what I thought I saw.

Puddy tat.

Anyway, then after all that hiking we went to the Mary’s Lake Lodge chalet restaurant for filet mignon — oh, momma that was some good eating — and there was a great view, unfortunately obscured by people eating in the tavern section, who got a better view than we did! They sponsor live folk music on Fridays… it would be fun on a return visit to work it so we can be in Estes Park for Friday and Saturday nights, because we missed a lot of fun things by arriving on a Sunday.

We’ve got about 300 megabytes of photos so far. Be afraid. There’s going to be a lot of it printed out in large formats and framed, too. And then there’s the redrocks country yet – more hiking, more pictures, more eating.

We’re meeting up with Arne, Jenni and Liam tonight for dinner “in” and ice cream “out,” and this should be fun.

We’ll probably have to buy a big, big bottle of Tylenol soon; we’re going through it fast.

Tomorrow is Timmy’s birthday – happy birthday, Tim!!

Tomorrow is also a long, long driving day, and probably no internet access (the crowd goes wild) until we get to Moab 3 nights later.

And so now I’ll bid adieu from this funky little Internet cafe in Boulder, which features typical Boulderites, not to mention a very nice red Lab who likes people a lot.