A weekend in Aspen

My life is difficult, boring, and not any fun. 

Or, Emily and David came out for a weekend visit and we headed to the mountains! I think this makes me a real Colorado girl!

So I'm just going to go ahead and jinx myself: my residency is awesome. I asked to leave just a little bit early on Friday to try and beat the weekend traffic into the mountains (East coasters, it's like the traffic to the shore for the weekend).  They pretty much threw me out of the office at 11am - what great people to work for.

If you travel a particular way into Aspen, you get to go through Independence Pass, which reaches a height of 12,095 feet.  Holy crap, I could barely breath when I got out of the car.  My heart felt like it was pounding out of my chest!   

I did a science report on the tundra in elementary school, which is why I look so excited about this sign.

Emily and David also enjoyed Independence Pass

The other thing that is cool about independence pass is that the continental divide cuts through it. 
This is me "hiking" the continental divide.  I wanted to touch the snow, but it was far away.

Because David had spent many summers at the Aspen music festival and had himself some connections, we were able to get free tickets to the orchestra concert on Friday night, which was an all Shostakovich event. Tickets came with a complimentary glass of wine before the show, as only tickets in Aspen would.  After the concert, we headed out to dinner on the patio of Jimmy's, where I had the most delicious buffalo burger.

On Saturday, we traveled up to Maroon Bells for some hiking, which looks like this:

We were going to do the usual hike up to Crater Lake, but there was a lot of excitement going on that day: 

If you feel like reading the Denver Post's coverage of this story, it is hardcore, as things around here tend to be.  Plan B (NOT the pharmaceutical kind) was to turn back and hike in the other direction, which was lovely, until we ended up in the middle of thickets filled with delicious looking berries and all started thinking about how tasty that probably looked to a bear. 

But before we turned back, we got to do some hiking through an avalanche boulder field. 

It was an awesome feeling looking up into this thing.  We learned that frequent avalanche sites have 3 distinctive features, all of which you can see pretty easily here.  The snowbowl, at the top, is where all the fun begins.  Then the track/chute is the narrow middle part where the snow gains all of its momentum, until it ends in the runout zone, which is where we were standing.  Awesome sight!

The weekend ended with plenty of tennis, eating, and shopping in town before a long drive home.  What a great first mountain experience!