This is where Michelle and my friend Seth and I spent last Saturday. We discovered Middle Earth, South Park, snow and the joys of pirating (don't ask about the pirates; that's completely Seth's doing.)
Needless to say, we only hiked 5 miles of this colorful trail - Durango was not the destination as we had only an afternoon to complete our trek instead of the three to four days it would take to cross the entire trail. But we were handed a beautiful, early fall Colorado day complete with the bipolar weather for which this state is so well known. Cold and very windy, we began our journey with windbreakers, hats and mittens to block the needles of cold attempting to reach our resisting bodies. Then the sun broke through and we threw off our coats, only to return them to our shivering shoulders when the snowflakes began to float from the fog that rolled up from the valley.
We found tee-pees which reminded Michelle and I of building our own and singing in Navajo with Grandpa Art and Kathy Auntie on the banks of some lake in Iowa long ago. We sat in long grasses and ate our peanut butter and honey sandwiches and trail mix while comparing what heaven is like in each of our dreams. We imagined Rohan, complete with fluttering banners, on a perfectly New Zealand-looking rock conjured up in the vivid imagination of Seth.
We found and savored the perfect red-orange Aspen, the definition of a Colorado Autumn.
We hiked. We talked. We laughed. We enjoyed.
