Our first venture over the mountains
So we forced her. (See previous post about getting O to be in the snow.) A friend (!) here in Boulder offered us her condo in Keystone and we jumped at the chance. Cute little one-bedroom where the bedroom is a loft accessed with a spiral staircase. The girls loved the spiral staircase and sleeping in their sleeping bags almost as much as we loved marveling at the unbelievable landscape.
O before the whining and crying and asking to be carried started.
O after the whining and crying and asking to be carried started. We rewarded them with hot cocoa when our flat 1/2 mile "hike" was done.
We don't know what M is doing here, but she's having fun.
Keystone is a little less than two hours from Boulder, and it's a pretty easy drive. It's essentially the first major ski place west of Denver, about a half hour east of Vail, and is just a few minutes from Copper Mountain. (Yeah, if you're not a skier, don't worry. It was all blah blah blah geography to me, too, until I went there, so don't worry. The places you may have heard of, Aspen, Steamboat, Winter Park, and Telluride are all in different parts of the state from this and are not close to one another at all. It's kind of like knowing that Ithaca and Buffalo are both in upstate New York, that's about all you need to know unless you are going to go to one of them.)
Anyway, Keystone was named by a gold prospector from Pennsylvania (the Keystone state) in the mid-nineteenth century. The ski resort opened in 1971 and was the first major Colorado resort to have a fancy lodge at the base of its mountain. This at a time when most ski lodgings were rustic cabin places, so it caught on. Today it is the only major Colorado resort to offer extensive night skiing. That and its proximity to Denver make it pretty popular.
For now, however, there's not much snow so the place wasn't very crowded. We enjoyed a couple of hikes around the area and took in some beautiful views. This also meant enduring a lot of whining. We poked around the town feeling like a mix of local and tourist, trying to figure out a little more about the ski business machine. We weren't really there for the skiing; we wanted to see more of Colorado and more of the Rockies. We wanted to explore. We're not big downhill skiers, though we both enjoy the sport and plan to introduce our kids to it at a young age -- goodness, if they're in Colorado, it's practically a right to learn to ski. We're just going to wait a few years. Oh, there are plenty of ski programs for three-year olds, and I'm told they are not only adorable, but they're fearless. We thought we'd try cross-country skiing since that seems more manageable, but there hasn't been enough snow yet. The slopes have snow-making machines, but not the Nordic ski areas.
One sad note is the damage the Mountain Pine Beetle is doing. We'd heard a bit about the damage this bug is doing to Colorado's forests, but it hasn't hit Boulder County very hard yet. Literally half the trees in some areas were dead, very sad.
After just 36 hours away we returned feeling like we'd not only had fun, but we'd made a kind of personal progress. See, we were lame about exploring outstate Minnesota. Though we told ourselves the toddler twins were a good excuse, it's still sad to think we spent two years in a part of the country with so many beautiful lakes and cabins and we didn't really take advantage of it. So we've vowed to do more and see more in Colorado. We're three months in and we've taken our first venture. Not bad.
Keystone is a little less than two hours from Boulder, and it's a pretty easy drive. It's essentially the first major ski place west of Denver, about a half hour east of Vail, and is just a few minutes from Copper Mountain. (Yeah, if you're not a skier, don't worry. It was all blah blah blah geography to me, too, until I went there, so don't worry. The places you may have heard of, Aspen, Steamboat, Winter Park, and Telluride are all in different parts of the state from this and are not close to one another at all. It's kind of like knowing that Ithaca and Buffalo are both in upstate New York, that's about all you need to know unless you are going to go to one of them.)
Anyway, Keystone was named by a gold prospector from Pennsylvania (the Keystone state) in the mid-nineteenth century. The ski resort opened in 1971 and was the first major Colorado resort to have a fancy lodge at the base of its mountain. This at a time when most ski lodgings were rustic cabin places, so it caught on. Today it is the only major Colorado resort to offer extensive night skiing. That and its proximity to Denver make it pretty popular. For now, however, there's not much snow so the place wasn't very crowded. We enjoyed a couple of hikes around the area and took in some beautiful views. This also meant enduring a lot of whining. We poked around the town feeling like a mix of local and tourist, trying to figure out a little more about the ski business machine. We weren't really there for the skiing; we wanted to see more of Colorado and more of the Rockies. We wanted to explore. We're not big downhill skiers, though we both enjoy the sport and plan to introduce our kids to it at a young age -- goodness, if they're in Colorado, it's practically a right to learn to ski. We're just going to wait a few years. Oh, there are plenty of ski programs for three-year olds, and I'm told they are not only adorable, but they're fearless. We thought we'd try cross-country skiing since that seems more manageable, but there hasn't been enough snow yet. The slopes have snow-making machines, but not the Nordic ski areas.
One sad note is the damage the Mountain Pine Beetle is doing. We'd heard a bit about the damage this bug is doing to Colorado's forests, but it hasn't hit Boulder County very hard yet. Literally half the trees in some areas were dead, very sad.
After just 36 hours away we returned feeling like we'd not only had fun, but we'd made a kind of personal progress. See, we were lame about exploring outstate Minnesota. Though we told ourselves the toddler twins were a good excuse, it's still sad to think we spent two years in a part of the country with so many beautiful lakes and cabins and we didn't really take advantage of it. So we've vowed to do more and see more in Colorado. We're three months in and we've taken our first venture. Not bad.
Comments