Rocky Mountain High
Like Santa Clause and his reindeer, except make it summer without the hooves, we’re heading North! Spent a glorious week in NM with Barb and the gang. We’re stocked up on red chile, green chile, and Grandma-made burritos for the road (though 3 of the 6 burritos are now being shipped across state lines via our stomachs) and we’re spending the week in Colorful Colorado!!
First stop - Durango for some R&R (from the very stressful eating and drinking we have to endure) with the padre. The “what day is it?” brains are starting to kick in, but in my case that’s not really unique to the life-break situation
Second stop - Gothic. B and I have camped a lot. We’re pretty spoiled in that we’ve seen some drop dead gorgeous places through a tent door, but we have to give a shout out to the newest parents in town, DJ and Katy, for showing us Gothic last year after our wedding. There are mountains - and then there is Gothic. This is some Julie Andrews, The Hills Are Alive shiz that is well worth the cost of whatever percentage of oxygen you may lose as you climb up to the campground situated at about 9,000 ft. But if you’re not throwing down at least 10 stacks, then you’re not getting that real Rocky Mountain hiiiiiiigh! (Oh, sorry…no, no…so you’re not a hip hop fan, it’s fine. 10 stacks means 10,000. No, really, it’s fine.) If you keep going down the dirt road you start climbing up past the Maroon Bells mountain range and you better bring some WD-40 to lube up that TMJ of yours, because your jaw is about to drop with the mountain top views of Emerald Lake and Paradise Basin (the pioneers were not creative name people, but accurate name people). It’s a round trip that takes you through 11,300 ft mountain passes, glistening golden meadows and back through Crested Butte for a mind-boggling, eye-popping, breath holding, dirt road drive of a lifetime. Careful for the cows though. They do not respect the rules of the road.
Our buddy Adam West joined us for a couple nights, which made for some excellent fireside chats, and driving chats, and meal prep chats, and swimming chats. You wanna chat? We’ll send Adam’s digits your way!
Dropping some serious elevation heading down to the Mile High City tomorrow (we basically have the lungs of a cigarette smoking Michael Phelps at this point, which is still verrry impressive as far as lung capacity goes) and then on to Jackson Hole with Lisa and Jack starting Saturday.
Got those hot hot recs for WY or Montana? (Honestly, I’m always afraid I’m going to assign Montana the Missouri abbreviation - like is it MO? MT? MN? - so we spell it out here, alright?) Send us those Google pins!
And almost forgot…HOT DAD (but not Dads) BOD PICS from Gothic for your mid-week eye candy in the Gallery!!
