From New Mexico we travelled up a pretty mountain drive to Carbondale, Colorado. During each of our three full days in Colorado we did pretty intense but gorgeous hikes up to mountain lakes. The dogs handled it like champs and they adored the lake and stream swims along each hike. I’ll go ahead and pat Jason and myself on the back for a pretty good job as well, although we both might admit that starting a mountain hike at 9500 feet and going up from there is not as easy as it used to be! Jason and I both agree that the town itself with the adjacent mountains and surroundings of Aspen, Colorado might be one of our favorites anywhere.
I am enamored with aspen trees and I don’t think that I have ever seen groves of aspen trees as pretty or as vast as those on our Colorado hikes. We also got to see the entire remaining ghost town of Ashcroft which is just amazing. On our day of departure we enjoyed a beautiful drive on the pretty part of 70 through Vail and cut down through Frisco and Breckenridge to wind down to Colorado Springs to have a fabulous BBQ lunch at Rudy’s with Pastor Bob (he married us and has been a special part of our relationship and lives for many years) and great walk around Garden of the Gods. It was touching to see all of the tributes of love to the firefighters in that area and eerie to see the blackened mountainsides in that area. We loved our time in Colorado, until we hit the monotonous pre-Kansas flatlands on our trek back to Georgia.
