Colorado Hiking Adventures

*No promises on the frequency of posts after today. The wedding shindig-er is in less than two weeks and I am sure you don't want posts about packing and organizing all of our wedding crap. The GREAT news is that I have an AWESOME SAUCE guest blogger who is going to post for y'all a few times next week... plus, and INCREDIBLE house crash on Thursday... stay tuned! A few weekends ago, my friend Sarah took me on a wildflower hike to Silver Lake. What resulted was us sucking air at above 12,000 feet and having a great day together. It also culminated in about 2390584023984 pictures. Some of which are below (and by some, I mean, a crap load). The next day I did another hike outside of Nederland, and the next Friday, Andy and I went up to Estes Park to hike to Bierstadt Lake. I go hiking when I am stressed... and apparently, I go hiking a lot.

This hike with Sarah also took place on my brother's birthday. So it was bittersweet, but mostly a lovely time with my friend. I got to tell Sarah some of my favorite Trenton stories that involved nature: mainly that when he was 9, he wanted to go deep sea fishing for his birthday in July. In Washington, it is freezing for half of July. Thus, there are a ton of pictures of me making a horrible face while wearing an equally horrible turtleneck, and wishing I could get off that damn boat. It makes me laugh because even though he was also wearing a turtleneck, and very rarely smiled by the time he was 9, he is grinning from EAR TO EAR in all of his pictures... probably because he knew I was miserable.

This tree was just super cool looking. It seems as though some ravenous animal took bites out of it and tried to peel it like a potato. Although which wild animal would actually eat potatoes or tree-like potatoes is unclear...

Typically you have to wait to get to the top of the hike for beauty such as this, but this sweet hike had this lake as a teaser to encourage us to keep going. I loved that we could see the lake almost the entire way up.

This is the Colorado state flower, which means that it is categorically better than yours. It's called a Columbine.

And this was the payoff:

Just two Colorado girls, doing our thang.

How do you enjoy your home state in the summer? Ever come to the Rockies for a visit? (If you haven't, you REALLY REALLY should).

Kansas

I have waited a good long while to post these pictures because I just couldn't pick a few that I liked. I loved this day in the fields. It all started when we pulled off of the freeway to check out this farm. After futzing around here for a while, LB noticed a super low flying plane off in the distance.

Check out how cool the cobweb looks on this wire...

There is something about going from a single blade of grass like this to the desolate field below. That's how things go, I think. Feast, famine. Ups, downs. But there is always a circle, a rhythm a consistency in the inconsistency.

As we drove down the road towards the plane, a guy pulled along side us and said, "Oh if you take a right up there you can see him doing some work over Jim's field." Right. Jim's field. On it.

The pilot then put on a show for us. Once he spotted me out with my camera, he started dive bombing right at us. It was incredible. My favorite of these pictures I did not post here because I am going to post in my Etsy store soon-ish. I think it would look great framed in a ton of people's houses. Especially mine. :)

I like to think that he is giving us a thumbs up in this picture.

Getting some of these pictures of this plane really made me start to love photography. I just can't express how fun it was to see the shots all lined up and scroll through the photos to see the plane dive bombing at us over and over again. I loved it.