Happy 4th Weekend!

Seagal and I are doing a 2 night backcountry camping trip starting this weekend. Should be interesting! My sleeping bag is huuuuge (!!) and I have about negative room in the pack for anything else. you know, minor stuff like food and clothes. It's all good. I do have some mean dried food waiting for dinner for me...Hawaiian Chicken and Turkey Stroganoff....yummmy! You know you're jealous. If we don't get eaten by bears and my camera makes it through the abuse I'm going to put it through this weekend, you'll get an update on late Monday maybe. Hope everyone has a great weekend!! - R

Blodgett Peak

Colorado adventures are back!! Doing hikes like this in my backyard after being away for a month makes me appreciate just how awesome it is to live here. Seagal and I have talked about doing Blodgett Peak for a while now and it definitely turned out to be a great adventure. I still think it's amazing that such a sweet hike is just 20 min north of my house.

We had a great crew come out for this hike with me, Seagal, Amy, JB, Brady & Annie, and John & Ellen. Definitely way fun with a lot of people to share it with. The hike started out pretty average, but then it got real steep with a lot of loose gravel to deal with. I've read that you gain 2400 ft in 2.5-3 miles, so it's a pretty challenging ascent! We def took a bunch of breaks on the way. The final push to the top is sweet though...climbing or hopping up a big boulder field. Looks hard but it's way better than the loose gravel (and definitely a lot more fun!) The summit is worth all the hard work with beautiful views of CSprings and the region to the west.

Being that the trail is so steep, the way down was a little risky. Lots of sliding and some sweet moves. John definitely got the award for most awesome scrape.

All in all, it took us 1hr 50min up and 1hr 10min to get down...not a bad Sunday morning adventure! Definitely a good workout. Next time Seagal and I do this, we're finding the plane the crashed on the north side of the peak...

Overdue Update

Well my 29 day trip is finally ending today! A 3 hr layover in Minneapolis is perfect time to do some long overdue blogging, don't you think? Sorry for the lack of updates...being without a computer for a week and all of my city-hopping definitely didn't help at all. Get this...when my computer crashed, I lost all of the roadtrip pics from before Pittsburgh! sucks! Can I say again that technology has NOT been working my way lately. Anyways, onto the update!

On a 1-day stopover with Al and Sarah in DC a couple weekends ago, we played kickball on the National Mall! How awesome is that?? We played on the grassy area between the Washington Monument and the WWII Memorial on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately, our team was not very good. I scored half of the team's runs in my first at-bat (= the team only scored 2 runs total). So that's about it. Al is probably going to kill me for putting this picture up, but I think it's funny!