Outdoor Adventures

Garden of the Gods in the Snow

The best part about living in Colorado is the landscape and the sweet opportunities that it provides for outdoor adventures. Sarah and I both love being outside, and have quickly set about doing everything we can find to do out here. Our first adventure was in the famed Garden of the Gods park, a place of amazing red rock formations that rise out of the mountains. The rocks are awe-inspiring and we spent an afternoon walking/climbing around gawking at the beauty of God's creation. The best part about that day is that it was snowing, making for an even more exciting landscape with the contrasting while snow and red rocks. We will definitely by coming back to this place to do some rock climbing this summer!

Admiring the scenery

Our next adventure was to try what literally EVERY single person asked us if we would do when we told them we were moving to Colorado: skiing. Skiing is no great thing in PA, and while I had always had fun doing it, it had never been something extremely exciting that I would deem "worthy of writing home about." But seeing as how Colorado is clearly known for its world-class ski areas/resorts and we had about 1,000 people tell us that we should do it, we decided to investigate. It turns out that everybody was right (go figure). Skiing in Colorado is seriously amazing!  For our first trip, we decided to try Monarch Mountain at the recommendation of the Outdoor Recreation employee on base. It isn't one of the huge resorts, which means less people and subsequently shorter lift lines and less people to run over going down the slopes. The snow conditions were amazing, with a 69" base of 100% real snow powder. Neither Sarah or I are very good skiers, but on this quality snow with the superb rental skis we were able to secure, we turned out to be pretty good. I think each of us only fell a couple of times, and by the end of the day we were both skiing on some of the intermediate slopes. Now before you laugh at us for having to work-up to the intermediate (blue square) slopes, you have to consider that here you are skiing on a legit mountain (the base elevation was 10,500 ft.) and the trail rating system is way different than back east (a black diamond trail at somewhere like Ski Round-top compares to one of the blue squares here). So yea, we were doing pretty darn good and had a blast!

View from the top of one of the ski trails (click to enlarge).

At the summit

Most recently, we went to check out the Manitou Cliff Dwellings and the Red Rock Canyon Open Space. The cliff dwellings are an old Anasazi Indian village that they built into the side of a cliff. It sounded pretty cool, but after paying $8 a person and walking around for an hour, we decided that it wasn't really that exciting. It was rather small and un-exciting, with many of the signs talking about "mother earth" and other hippie mumbo jumbo. So we moved on. We then spent the afternoon exploring the Red Rock Canyon Open Space with tucker and messing around with our fancy new camera. The canyon has rocks very similar to those of Garden of the Gods, hence its name. We discovered numerous rock climbing routes there, which we will be utilizing at some point this coming weekend. I hope you all enjoy the pictures, and use them as reason to start making travel plans to come visit us out here! (we are lonely and desperately want visitors!)

The Manitou Cliff Dwellings

Atop a rock formation in Red Rock Canyon (with Garden of the Gods in background)