Random Adventuring...: Catching up on Life

Well, its been a good while since my last post, and a lot of cool stuff has gone down.

First and foremost, I got married to my longtime sweetheart on June 3rd. The State of Colorado is kind enough to allow consenting adults to handle that all on your own, so that's what we did. We celebrated with a fun trip to Vancouver and Whistler and here is a pic of the beautiful couple on honeymoon...

We've kept a pretty good pace of Random Adventures since we returned. Lots of local hiking and biking, but here's a quick recap of some of the more memorable escapades...

Ski & Ride Quandary Peak 14-teener:
Both of us had climbed Quandary before and I had skied it once, but Talai had not snowboarded it yet, so we decided that would be a fun goal. We needed the snow to soften up before the descent, and we figured that to be around 11am, so we kicked off the hike around 7am. We did a combination of hiking, skinning, and bootpacking and reached the summit about 10:30.... right on time...

A couple shots of the ascent:

The descent was perfect, slushy, hero corn snow, but we were having too much fun to take any pictures. There was one lady so amazed that we would drag our equipment up there that she insisted on taking a summit pic so we obliged:

Slacker Relay - 3rd Place Baby!

Late June we teamed up with our buddy Mike for a half-marathon relay race from Loveland Ski Area down to Georgetown. As the name implies, there was nothing terribly difficult about the race, but it was fun to bring home a little hardware for our efforts!

Later that day Talai and I booked down to Creede and got a room before an early morning climb of San Luis Peak. San Luis was a beautiful hike along a section of the Colorado Trail that I'd never seen since its located inside the La Garita Wilderness and bikes aren't allowed in there. Its one of the easiest 14-teeners, but it was the first this season for both of us so we considered it a nice warmup for future adventures. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but this was over thirty 14-teener summits for both of us:

Finally, just this past weekend we did a spectacular 2-day, 23-mile backpack trip through the Flat Tops Wilderness. On day 1 we hiked over the pass near the Devils Causeway but continued on the East Fork Trail to pass a great number of gorgeous lakes before finally settling on a campsite at West Lost Lake.

While day 1 was a foresty lake and creek hike, day 2 spent virtually the entire day above 11,500' in the alpine tundra. I have no words to express the beauty on this hike, so I would only suggest that you do it yourself if you have the chance. The wildflowers were just amazing.... take Deat though, because so were the mosquitos...

Some pics:

Max relaxing after a long hike to camp...