Kristen's Whirlwind Visit

Kristen came to town a little over a week ago and I took some time off work to do the whole vacation thing with her. It was actually pretty great timing because there was a Ben Harper show at Red Rocks that we bought tickets to way back in the pre-Boulder days.


The first day, Kristen and I just walked around downtown Boulder and did a little bit of shopping. We went to a few artsy stores and I ended up buying a creepy doll photo (cooler than it sounds, I swear). Kristen bought a Tarot book and something on Feng Shui beauty, if I recal correctly. Anyhow, the obvious highlight was that we got some Ben & Jerry's ice cream for the walk back to the car. We made a quick trip to the grocery store to get provisions for that night's outing to Red Rocks and then took a rest until we were ready to go out.

That night, we headed out to Red Rocks, which is just a bit west of Golden, also known as the hometown of Coors beer. It was a pretty quick drive out there (less than an hour) and we approached the park around dusk to the sounds of Damien Marley in the distance. It seemed like pretty smooth sailing at first, but then we were diverted by the traffic wardens down a side road and, seeing as how we'd never been there before, we parked along the road like everyone else. It turned out alright and, after a quick look at our map, we found a trail that hiked us up to the ampitheater. One slight caveat is that we were probably at about 9,000 feet elevation and hiking up a steep hill, so you can understand how delighted we were when we actually arrived at the ampitheater. Now imagine our dismay when we saw another 10,000 steps. 9,000 steps later, we took a bathroom break and bought a few Coors Lights. We got there just in time to see Damien Marley's last couple songs, settled in, found our seats and enjoyed an amazing performance by Ben Harper.

The next day, Kelly had work off too, so we all headed down to Denver for some big city excitement. Our first stop was 16th Street Mall which is just as it sounds: one gigantic outdoor mall. We wandered around for a bit and eventually Kelly and Kristen settled in at Forever 21 for two hours (I'm not exaggerating...at all). After 45 minutes, I had to bail out and go over to the Virgin Megastore. We grabbed some food and decided to head out for a place called the Santa Fe Art District. Unfortunately, as we were driving over it started to rain, but we decided to tough it out anyways. We saw a few galleries that had some pretty neat stuff. We'll probaby go back again some time when we know all the galleries are going to be open and its not raining. Then, realizing we didn't know what else to do in Denver, we headed back towards Boulder and caught a showing of "Little Miss Sunshine" (six thumbs up). We then headed home to rest up for our big outdoor adventure.

On Friday (also known as my birthday), we headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park, which is only about 45 minutes from Boulder, for a nice mountain hike. Kelly and I had been out there before and took a drive on Trail Ridge Road, as mentioned in a previous post. This time, we wanted to do a bit more hands-on nature action. We got down to the Bear Lake trailhead around 1 o'clock and decided to head up to Dream Lake and then possibly go a bit further to Emerald Lake. If we thought the 9,000 foot elevation was ambitious, we were now around more like 11,000 feet and looking at a 495 foot ascent during the 1.1 mile hike. Contrary to our assumptions that 495 feet is not a great increase in a mile, it turned out to be quite challenging and full of many rest stops (or as we like to call them, "photo ops"). We finally broke all the rules and accepted some candy from a stranger with his assurance that it would help us handle the altitude better. On the way up, we got to see Nymphet Lake, where we had our first encounter with a little duckling and a smattering of rain.










From there, we continued on up to Dream Lake. The lake itself was a beautiful green and was inhabited by more ducks. We hiked around a little further for a more secluded area and settled on a small outcrop of rocks that sloped right into the lake. We busted out our delicious meal of cheese and crackers and sat down for a well-deserved rest. Unwittingly, we attracted the attention of a rather boisterous duck. After doing a little dance for us, his crew decided to come over and swarm us. Our guess is that they probably met the likes of cheese and crackers before. But we didn't give them any, I swear.









After our snack break, we continued up to Emerald Lake, elevation unknown (at the time). It seemed like only 1/2 mile more for something with the word "emerald" in it is probably worth the hike. We headed on up and saw some pretty cool streams and quickly realized that we'd be climbing quite a bit more. Luckily, they were kind enough to provide us with some log and (loose) gravel steps. This is when we realized that hiking shoes were probably a good investment (which we remedied this weekend). We finally made it up there and it was definitely nice, but I imagine on a sunnier day it could've been magnificent.

All in all, it took us about 2.5 hours to get up there (about 1.6 miles total) and about 25 minutes to get back. At this point we decided it was probably about time to head back to civilization, so we drove down to Estes Park for a snack and some art browsing. I got myself a pretty nice ceramic casserole dish so that we could make some proper birthday mac n' cheese. We then took Peak to Peak Highway over to Nederland for a great meal with a not-so-great waitress. We got home and decided to rest up for a grill out that we were hosting the next day.

We woke up nice and late, headed out to the grocery store and bought some grilling supplies and then "borrowed" the Webroot keg. A bunch of our friends showed up and we hung out. I got to do all the grilling and we had a nice porch fire going, thanks to the unseasonably cool weather. We headed downtown for a little nightlife exposure and then Kristen and I woke up bright and early the next morning to get her to the airport.

Kelly and I had a really great time while Kristen was here. We got to do a lot of the touristy things we don't do on our own. Hopefully Kristen had an equally good time and maybe even wants to come back out.