Telluride and Kristin's Wedding

After Arches, we headed off to Telluride, which was only about 3 hours away. I had been back in December, and perhaps you'll recognize some of the shots again! The trip was for Kristin and Wil's wedding and we had a great time with everyone and the trip was full of activities. I don't think I've ever been to a wedding that had activities for so many days - it was great! The day after we got there, we took the gondola up from Telluride to the mountain village. The town of Telluride is so beautiful and very cute with a lot of older, colorful homes. I don't like the mountain village as much because it's very new and just like any other ski towns you go to. But Telluride has a lot of class! Up at the top, Scott and I found a boulder to climb (with a little help of foot and hand holds in the rock). It wasn't all that high, but I was still a bit scared without a rope.























I'm including a few pictures to show the difference between Telluride in the winter and summer. These first were at a very similar spot on the mountain across from the ski mountain. The red rocks came through in both the winter and summer! The next has a different group of people in the two pictures, but is the same spot atop a black diamond route. I didn't go down in winter or summer! The third is the same group of girls who went up in December for wedding planing (that ended up being more skiing) and then again a couple of days before the wedding.





















I had headed to the Telluride airport to pick up Carol and James and caught this picture. This airport is the highest in elevation in the US and James said it was quite a flight flying in with the plane bumping around. I'm not sure I could've handled it, but I'm sure it gave some night sights. There was a BBQ in the park on Thursday night and it was a perfect backdrop for a nice evening to get together with everyone who was in town. After the BBQ, we headed back to the girls' house that used to be a brothel back in the day. It still has the red lights and everything red insight - it was quite a house! We meet some very cool guys that night that I'll include in the next post after this.






















Kristin and I went on a beautiful hike on Friday, but unfortunately I didn't have my camera. You'll just have to take my word for it! On Friday night, there was the rehearsal dinner with lots of really yummy food and deserts - since Kristin is such an amazing cook, she knows how to pick other good cooks! There were lots of really nice speeches and I think the soon to be bride and groom loved all of the love in the room. Afterwards, a lot of us headed up to this fancy bar atop one of the mountains where they had mine and Scott's favorite new beer - called Delirium Tremens - on tap! If you get a chance to try it out, I definitely recommend it. Scott and Nancy's brother, Jeff and I enjoyed lots of this yummy beer while most others drank fancy wine.



















On Saturday, before the wedding, Nancy and I took a beautiful hike up to the falls that in the winter, we saw was frozen. I'm including both pictures again here. The hike was pretty tough and very uphill, but it felt good to get out there and it was so beautiful all around us. If you have the right kind of car, you can actually drive up almost to the falls and then hike more, but we just hiked up to the falls. The views looking out on Telluride and the waterfalls were breathtaking.




















The wedding itself was definitely one of the most beautiful I've ever been to. The mountains in the distance, the ponds on the property, the cloud formations constantly changing while we were there.... incredible (not to mention the bride!) There was a lot of celebrating and dancing and eating and drinking and I think everyone had a great time. The bride and groom even seemed to be loving it and seemed nice and relaxed! Scott one some money with the guy by winning the bet for the length of the wedding - 15 minutes!
























We didn't do much on the long drive back since it was about 14 hours, but we did stop at the 4 corners since it's the only place where 4 states meet. I had one limb in each of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.

Arches National Park

On the drive the next day from Bryce, I felt like we were in the middle of another beautiful national park the whole day. This had to be one of the most beautiful drives I've ever taken. If you ever get a chance to drive along highway 12 in Utah - definitely do it - you'll be amazed! The rock formations and colors were awesome. We even stopped at one site that had petroglyphs right off the road - very cool!



















We got to Moab in the afternoon and after dinner, went to see Arches at sunset, which was quite beautiful. Scott made fun of me as a sunset mad-woman because I was driving like crazy to try to get all of the best spots for sunset viewings - we did, though!


















The next day, we spent a few hours in the park at Arches. I had kind of expected the park to have Arches everywhere you looked and it wasn't like that at all. It was cool and the arches were amazing, but the park was much more spread out than Bryce and had a lot of area that was more flat, with arches and other rocks interspersed throughout. Still amazing, but not as great as Bryce in my opinion. We first drove and did a short hike into see the Landscape Arch, which is probably the world's longest arch. It's even longer than a football field! A piece of it fell off a few years back and you can no longer hike under it, but just seeing it from a distance was wonderful. We then went to see the Delicate Arch, which is probably the most famous one. This is the one that is on the Utah license plate! We didn't hike all the way to walk under it, but could see it from a viewpoint (still sore from backpacking!) The last stop we made was to Windows and this was really cool because there were arches everywhere! This is more what I expected of the park. We could even sit under one of the big arches in the shade and just hang out for a while. It was cool to see spot where other arches were starting to be formed. Over time, the current arches will likely be destroyed by the same thing that creates them - water and nature breaking down the weaker rock. But there will likely be others that are formed over time, so this park is likely to look completely different in a few thousand years!

Bryce Canyon National Park

Utah has to be one of the most beautiful states I've ever seen. From the beautiful city of Salt Lake City to the wonderful mountain towns and the desert and parks.... wow! After leaving the Grand Canyon, we drove a very beautiful drive through Arizona and Utah to arrive about an hour away from Bryce where we stayed the night. We didn't take too many pictures on the drive, but it was beautiful. We did stop at one point after crossing a bridge over the Colorado river at the Lees Ferry crossing. This is the only bridge to cross the Colorado for hundreds of miles and it was pretty spectacular. There are two bridges - a much older one that cannot handle automobiles and a more recent one built that can handle lots of cars and traffic, but it looks just like the older one.


















Bryce Canyon was our stop for the next day and it is by far one of the most amazing parks I've ever seen. I was blown away by all of the hoodoos everywhere we looked! We were pretty exhausted and sore, still from the backpacking so we didn't do any major hikes in Bryce, but we drove to all of the lookout points and did one small hike down into the canyon. The hoodoos have all been formed over time all by water! This area used to all be underwater and the water flowing caused this amazing landscape. Erosion and snow freezing and melting over time adds to this as well. Although I couldn't possibly describe everything we saw, these pictures do a pretty good job to start to show so that you will want to go see if for yourself! You really can see the whole park in a day if you don't do any major hiking, but you can also do a lot of extensive hiking and spend a lot more time if you want. We got a nice campspot and were able to go and see the sunset (well, actually, Scott went to see the sunset while I worked on the fire - teamwork!).

Havasupai

To start out our summer vacation, we decided to do a backpacking trip into the Grand Canyon to the Indian reservation called Havasupai. I had heard of it last year when a few friends went down and knew that the falls at the bottom were supposed to be quite beautiful. What I didn't realize is how incredibly difficult the 10 mile hike down into the canyon is when it's 100 degrees and you have 35 pound packs on your backs! We headed down at 4 in the afternoon at probably the heat of the day. It was amazingly beautiful all the way down and through. Once we were down in the canyon, it was at least shaded and not as hot as directly in the sun. We didn't have enough water and were very happy when we hit our first blue-green stream of water where we could purify some more water to drink. We were still pretty dead by the time we got to the bottom, not to mention the fact that it was dark. After 8 miles, you walk through the town of the Native Americans and it's quite amazing to see a town down in the middle of what seems like nowhere. There were plenty of houses, a school, post office and just about everything you would need. No cars - but plenty of horses. The sun was started to set while we were in the town and it was very pretty. A mile or so later, we heard the falls and when I saw it, I almost started crying. Granted, I was exhausted and dehydrated, etc... but it was more beautiful that I could even start to describe or than the pictures could really start to show. We pitched our tent and pretty much collapsed.


















The next day, we hung out by the falls most of the day because that was the only place where it was cool. Our campsite was still very hot. The water at the falls was very cool and quite refreshing - even cold if you sat in it for too long. You can see that there are lots of pools all around it that people would just sit in all day - such an amazing place. Because it's such an awesome place, there were lots of people there, though I suspect that many of them took helicoptors or mules down and many probably had mules take their bags - I was amazed at the size of some of the tents and all of the things that many people had. We had very little and still felt like it was too much due to the fact that we were bruised and sore from our bags. We may be done with backpacking for a while (or maybe forever?). Car camping and day hikes are so much better! :-) We're just getting too old, maybe. ;-)
















We hiked up very early the next day and after the 2 miles into town, we had to wait for the office to open so that we could pay for our stay. We heard that there was an option to get carried out by a helicopter and I was all ready to go, but Scott said that we came down to backpack, so we needed to go the rest of the way. It almost killed us, but we did it! The day we hiked out, I actually felt really lucky because it was overcast and MUCH cooler and so not nearly as miserable as the way down. The last mile where you're pretty much hiking straight up was rough, but I didn't think the rest of it was too bad. I'd definitely recommend taking this trip, but do it in the spring or fall and have mules carry your things. Also, take a lot of friends and stay for a few days!