A Lovely Life

Yesterday, my hiking buddy and I set out to explore and hike in Rocky Mountain National Park...another beautiful place that has been on my list to visit. The original plan was to hike Sky Lake, then picnic.  What ended up happening was better! We drove into the park which is about an hour and a half away from where I live. You drive in and start going up and up and the views are insane, y'all. It's apparently wildfire season and there are some big ones in Wyoming, so the air quality was not as clear as it could be, but it was still beautiful.  This place makes me feel so small... One of us would be like, "Let's pull over!", and we'd get out of the car to stand on the edge of the world. We did this all the way up and back down the other side of the park before realizing our planned hike was all the way across the other side of the park. Oopsies. After a little research and expert map reading by yours truly (I SUCK at navigation and have no sense of di...

When I first moved to Colorado, the house I was staying in at the time had a book titled, "The Colorado 14ers". I had to Google what a "14er" was and quickly ascertained that hiking one of those bad boys was completely and unequivocally out of the question. Living in the snow at 9,000 feet was going to have to be enough for me. For those who have no idea...a 14er is a mountain peak with an elevation of at least 14,000 feet. There are 53 of them in the state of Colorado. 7.5 months after saying "never will I ever", I climbed one of those bad boys on a day that will no doubt be remembered as another massive accomplishment achieved in the first year of living in Colorado. Mt. Bierstadt is rated one of the "easy" ones. It stands at 14,062-ish feet (depending on what damn boulder you stand on, I suppose). "Easy" is a cute term. You begin at over 11,000 feet and climb up a literal mountain to get to the peak....the peak, by the way, is...