Misha has been touring apartment in Boulder for the past couple of weeks trying to find something within her price range that wasn't built in the 1960's (and looked like it). She has a tour on Wednesday after work at Weather Van Apts. She is looking at a studio apartment, but it is so much bigger than her current studio.
Floorplan
She is waiting on background and financial checks, but her fingers are crossed that everything goes through as it should. She hopes to move in next weekend.
Misha came home Friday night and joined us for a hike to the Crag's and Devil's Playground on Saturday morning. A couple of weeks ago, we hiked the Elder Fehn Trail outside of Woodland Park.
So we could leave as early as possible on Saturday morning, I packed our lunch as much as possible on Friday evening. We were all up early and left the house by 7 am. The drive to the trailhead took about and hour and fifteen minutes.
The circled area is the top of the Crags hike and the overlook from our Elder Fehn vantage point on July 4th. The bottom pic is the North Catamount Reservoir.
By the time I hiked back up to Misha and Chris, I was already out of breath, but we kept on going. At the fork in the trail, we went right to the Devil's Playground trail. The Crags trail veered to the left.
This was such a hard hiking day for both Misha and I. Neither she nor I were feeling stellar and had to keep stopping to catch our breath. It was mostly uphill with very few flat sections. Chris finally went on ahead and stopped at an overlook to wait for us.
Misha's posture here pretty much sums up how we were feeling! (Click on the pic to enlarge it.)
Misha and I finally made it to the overlook, but neither of us were anxious to continue on. Chris wanted to go further, so I asked for a hiking pole and Misha and I would go back down.
Chris wasn't happy about us not wanting to go further. He headed back down the trail in front of us and ended up waiting for us again just before the fork in the trail.
We continued on to the Crags. It was not nearly so much elevation and just two miles past the fork.
View of the North Catamount Reservoir
We reached the top of the Crags and stopped for lunch. There were a lot of people there as many people hike both the Crags and the Devil's Playground hike. The Devil's playground continues on to the top of Pikes Peak (about 14 miles one way). Explains why we were lucky to find one of the last parking spots.
Lunch was a nice break before hiking back down to the parking lot.
At the end of the day, I had over 30,000 steps. The hike was 8.7 miles and almost 2,200 in elevation gain.
Some days are just harder days to hike than others.
Misha attended a Rainbow Kittens Surprise Concert at Fiddler's Green in Greenwood Village, just outside of Denver. It didn't start until late on Saturday evening, and after a long day of hiking, Misha was tired.
The opening act started playing at 8 pm; Rainbow Kittens Surprise after 9 pm. She had tickets for open grass seating (first come first served), but stood most of the time. If you wanted to see, you had to stand too.
She still went and had a lot of fun. She texted around 11:45 pm to say she had made it home safely.
Amy and a bunch of friends (Ella, her sister, the sister's friends) attended a concert at the USANA Amphitheater (aka Utah First Credit Union Amphitheater) in West Valley, UT.
They had lawn seating and arrived early in the afternoon to stake out their spot. The concert didn't start until much later in the evening.
Misha has taken up hiking on the weekends. For awhile, all of our girls were anti hiking. It is nice to see that she is picking it up again.She chose Maxwell Falls about 45 minutes from Denver and just past Conifer.
Unfortunately with the drought-like conditions in Colorado this summer, the falls were barely a trickle.
Kristen had a lot of time on Saturday at work after completing the mandatory work in the morning. She got started on doing some family history work on the Kline family line.
She successfully found and connected a wife to Abraham Klein that Chris had found using AI a couple of months ago. She was so excited by her discovery and wanted to show Chris.
Once he joined the conversation, and added in some AI, they were able to make some good connections.
Kristen is excited to do the temple work and has already printed off names.
Amy and a bunch of friends went boating at Deer Creek State Park. Her hairdresser, Ellie, invited Amy and her Ella. They spent the day wake surfing, lazing on the boat, and enjoying a picnic.
Amy applied sunscreen in the morning but forgot to reapply! Ouch.
Everyone was able to get up on the wakeboard.
I haven't been able to participate in previous blood drives with our stake, but was happy to do a little therapeutic phlebotomy to help lower my red blood cell count. I have to say, these people know how to insert a needle without a lot of pain.
We started for home today but took a short detour to Creede for a hike and exploration of the cute little town.
Once again, this hike was fully exposed. The trail starting from the Deep Creek trailhead was fairly easy to traverse so we kept up a pretty good pace. We made it to the "Hiker's Bridge" and decided to continue about a half mile more to a pond.
We stopped in Creede to explore for about an hour before beginning the 4-hour drive home. Creede is an old mining town and if you continue on the road that goes between those two mountains, you'll find some of the old mines and a beautiful drive.
I think both Chris and I agree that Pagosa Springs is a place that we'd like to come back to every summer.
It was kind of nice to have 9 am church in Pagosa Springs instead of our usual 1 pm time.
We attended Sacrament Meeting and then rushed back to the condo to pack a lunch for another hike. This hike was back up the Wolf Creek Pass and up to the Lobo Overlook.
We hiked the Lobo Overlook in the Weminuche Wilderness along the Continental Divide Trail section 813. It followed along the ridge line of the mountain for a couple of miles and than transversed around the mountain until we finally stopped for lunch at Rock Pond.
We hiked for 4.5 miles until we turned back. If we had someone shuttling us with our car, we could have kept on hiking to another trailhead. I think it was a total of 20 miles from trailhead to trailhead.
I was grateful to finally be finished. It was a lot of ups and downs throughout the hike with the biggest uphill section at the end. That's never fun!
We returned to Pagosa Springs for dinner and then drove awhile to explore the town. There was a lot of road construction in the downtown section, so we tried to avoid that. But this cute little church was definitely worthy of stopping for a picture.
Kristen carried on the tradition of stopping for a free Slurpee at 7-11 on July 11—Slurpee Day.
We had to be up early on Saturday morning for our sunrise hot air balloon ride at 6:45 am. Fortunately, the meetup place was less than five minutes from our condo. We decided to have breakfast after our ride.
Kind of funny, but once we arrived, the hosts loaded up the vans with all the people so that we could drive around the corner and unload.
We received some instructions and then watched and "helped" as they unloaded the balloon, set it up, placed huge fans at the opening to the balloon, and began to fill it with air.
Because there were so many of us, we were divided into two groups. The groups were divided by numbers and total weight. Yes, we each had to tell them how much we weighed when we signed up!
The first group climbed into balloon basket and prepared for take off. The rest of us stayed on the ground and watched for a bit. Then we loaded in the vans and tried to follow the balloon as best we could to where it would land and we would exchange passengers.
Since there really isn't any steering of a ballon, it just goes where the wind currents blow, there was no precise landing spot. The ground crew kept in touch with balloon pilot via walkie talkie and we finally pulled over by a random field in a neighborhood as the balloon descended.
To keep the balloon balanced, people on one side of the basket climbed out while some of the second group climbed in and then the process was repeated on the other side of the basket.
Once the basket and balloon were back in the trailer, we loaded up and returned to the adventure company's office for an orange juice or champagne toast and a brief history lesson.
Chris and I were quick to be on our way since we needed to have breakfast and then get ready for a hike on the Four Mile Trail to the Four Mile Waterfall. It was actually 3.5 miles but that's a little harder to name a hike.
The drive to the trailhead was about an hour away. This trail and some shade, but not a lot.
I sat down in the dirt and slid the rest of the way down the hill until I could safely stand and hike down.
We set off back down the trail and were almost back to where the horses were grazing when all of a sudden a twenty-something cowboy races down the path,
"Have you seen some horses?" The horses were just ahead of us and the cowboy was grateful to finally catch up to them. Apparently two cowboys had rode their horses up to the lake but hadn't secured the horses well.
The second cowboy—apparently not as fast of a runner—appeared. They climbed on the horses and continued down the hill.
We found a place off the trail shortly after encountering the horses and enjoyed some lunch.
After returning to Pagosa Springs, we cleaned up and went in search of dinner followed by a walk along the river next to Pagosa Springs Hot Springs and an exploration of the area.
Pagosa Springs Hot Springs Resort
