Road to the Stars...

Going to the top of a 14,000 + foot mountain is exhilarating... The view is indescribable and breath-taking! We are hoping to hike one before the winter weather starts, but our first trek to the top was on a paved road nicknamed the Road to the stars...

Mt. Evans has a paved road that twists and winds it way up to the peak at about 14,000 feet! A short hike about 150 feet up takes you to the peak!

Here are just a few of the views we saw along the way and at the top!

Horseback Riding through the Mountains...

The Breckenridge Church scheduled a horseback riding fellowship event. We met at the stables in the morning and took an hour long ride through the mountains...Zeke was old enough for a horseback ride...I went with him...

NoahJJ
and Seth got to do Pony rides around the coral with Dad while we were gone...
And we ended the day with a fabulous lunch is a beautiful Mountain cabin sponsored by a couple of church members!

The Yurts... Leadville Backcountry...

What a beautiful place... There are some members of our congregation who own a couple of Yurts in the Leadville Backcountry. First we drove in our van for a few miles on blacktop... Then we drove on a dirt road for about 2.5 miles. Then the church members loaded us into a 4WD truck for another 2.5 miles of what may or may not have been a road.This is the view we saw when we made it to the top!We went for a hike to the second peak (somewhere over 13,000 feet in elevation). As we were walking along we passed a cattle ranch...

And stopped to take in the view from several different places...
And we hiked... The second peak in this picture is our final destination!
And then we reached the top...
When we weren't hiking we played a few games...
So what exactly is a Yurt... It is a little insulated tent on stilts (with a floor and beds and a cooking stove to make camping fun)!

Leadville Trail 100 Foot Race...

A week after the Trail 100 Bike Race is a 100 mile Foot Race over a similar course. Most of the racers go for over 24 hours.
We set up a Brat and hotdog stand for the race supporters and family of the racers...
With a view like this you know it had to be a great day!

Foolers Gold Rush...

Living in an old mining town means that there are lots of tailings to climb around on...

Tailings are the left over rock taken out of the ground when they are searching for the ore...

One of the fun parts of climbing around on these is that there are lots of sparkly rocks... Fools gold to most... A fun gem hunt for our boys!

Salida Hot Springs...

In Salida they have a pool that is fed by Hot Springs. The temperature is cooled to 98 degrees in the summer months. Thursday nights are family nights so we took a trip and played in the pool for a while on my Birthday! I could get used to swimming in water that warm!

Seth's Birthday...

We didn't forget... Seth turned 5. His birthday happened so quickly after we moved that we spent a couple of days trying to figure out what Birthday's were going to look like this year! There is so much of Colorado that we want to experience and some of it is rather expensive, so we decided to use our Birthdays as an opportunity to do some of the more expensive things. The boys gave up presents and we said we would pick one activity for each Birthday.

Seth chose white water rafting! We were so excited to go, but it got put off until August 16th because of scheduling conflicts!

We went (I didn't bring a camera and unfortunately the company that took pictures of our boat had some technical difficulties that afternoon... so there is no picture record of it...) We took a trip through Big Horn Sheep Canyon! Our guide was great and even taught us how to surf the rapids! The boys thought it was great as we got ourselves stuck and flooded the boat over and over!

Definitely a good pick for a birthday celebration!

Happy Birthday to my baby! He is growing up so fast!

Oh and we did have a cake with the members of our church at our welcome dinner which happened to be the same day as Seth's birthday (8-4)... I just didn't have my camera along that day!

Skyline Drive

After our whitewater rafting trip we took a drive on this ridge in Canon city called Skyline Drive. You drive right along a ridge. There are a couple of places to get out and take pictures and walk around, so guess what we did!

Dirt Bike Ramps...

We have found a park in town where there is a dirt bike trail for the kids... Needless to say, the kids love it!

Leadville Trail 100 Bike Race...

We got up bright and early to see the start of the Trail 100 bike race... While the air was a bit chilly yet (the sun wasn't even over the mountains yet), it was a neat sight to see the 1600 bikers riding down the road all at once.
This was the first group to go past....and then they kept coming.... and coming for about 10 minutes...
This is a picture of the back of the pack clumped up on their first of many hills... After heading through town and down to the fish hatchery the rest of the race is on dirt trails through the mountains....
It was quite the sight to see and the Zeke said they were going by so fast they looked like they were changing colors...

We also do have work to do here...

While it may look like we are out having a lot of fun (and we are), we also do have "work" to do here...

This week and next week we will be baking 100's of dozens of cookies for the upcoming Leadville Trail 100 bike race and the Trail 100 foot race. These are 100 mile races on bike and foot through the mountains. They call them the "Race Across the sky"
Here we are baking and wrapping the cookies (the individually wrapped cookies are for the bake sale that we hold along with these events. We don't individually wrap all the cookies for the racers.)

After baking the cookies we all pitch in to serve a dinner and fellowship a little!

A new tooth for Noah...

It was December of 2007... Noah was 3 1/2 and the boys were on their way to bed when JJ and Noah bumped heads. The next morning we took Noah to the dentist where they decided that one of his front teeth was too badly damaged to save... They also said that the other one would likely fall out on its own soon and sent us home to watch it. The goal was to keep it in his mouth as long as possible while avoiding infection... In July of 2008 it got looser and looser and darker and darker and it fell out too...

This was 2 1/2 years ago... Today on our train ride, I noticed something that we haven't seen there for a long time... A tooth starting to poke through where there has been nothing for so long! Welcome back to the world of corn on the cob Noah!

Hagerman's Pass Part 2...

The other day we found this great hike, but it was too late to go very far, so today we explored further...We started off looking for Windsor Lake, but we missed the turn off and wound up experiencing a whole different part of the Mt. Massive Wilderness...We were hiking up and discovered a ghost town... There are several buildings like this all along the trail...We kept hiking and found a cute little lake... We were told this one was Opal Lake.
We kept hiking and we found the highest train tunnel built during the "boom days" of mining. We stopped at the opening... There was snow in the opening and about 100 feet into the tunnel you could see a cave in...

We love Leadville....

This is a wall that we believe was once part of the railroad here in Leadville.