The Hiking Club outing last week was to a trail in the mountains near Echo Lake. I normally don't go on club hikes to the mountains, because people in Colorado think any trail less than 1,000 ft in elevation change is "easy." But I thought being near a lake, the trail would be flat... wrong! They have lakes in the mountains, one higher than the next.
I'll have to admit, the trail was very pretty though very rocky. I kind of wondered if it was one of those prehistoric glacier trails that cut through the mountains leaving loads of rocks as the ice melted. We not only climbed up, we had to climb over rocks most of the time.
There was a prayer circle along the trail. I was excited to find it, because I can check off the "reflection hike" on mine and Janet's 52 Hike Log.
Before we left, I did a little online-research and found out they have a campground right next to the lake. So we decided to turn it into an overnight affair and packed up all our camping gear. This time I took our dining fly to give us a good spot to sit outside away from bugs (mostly flies).
But I've discovered that July is not the best month to go camping in Colorado. It's usually very sunny and hot during the day, but that builds up the pressure and causes massive thunderstorms in the afternoon. We tried sitting under the roof of the dining fly, but the wind kept blowing the rain through the screen walls. I was bummed, because Bruce had planned to spend the afternoon fishing and I was going to do some sketching by the lake. We ended up just reading our Kindles inside the tent. We could have done that at home on a much softer bed.
In other news, the Bike Club asked me to design a t-shirt logo. I passed around the first design while we were on our snack break at Panera's. Everyone seemed to like the EKG design. But on the bike ride back home, I about killed myself pedaling up "heart-attack hill." Our neighborhood (appropriately called "Hilltop") is actually 1,000 ft higher than downtown Denver (which is already a mile above sea level). So as a joke, I modified our logo to show a bike rider flat-lining. The other bikers said we should stick with the first design.
On Sunday I decided to check out Denver's City Park. It reminded me a lot of Forest Park in St Louis only smaller.
I parked next to a rock garden. I wanted to take some pictures, because we're thinking of taking out some of our lawn and turning it into a rock garden. I spent all last week submitting a proposal to the city of Aurora for their landscape design program (they do the designing; you do the work). I like rock gardens, but I'd like one that has a few more flowers.
There was a lily garden in the park (at least that's what the sign said). It looked to me like it'd been several years since any water or lilies had been in this pond.
