Why I loved today
Memorial Day Weekend. The pharse rings of camping trips, smokey clothes and that wonderful feeling of sleeping heavily in the wild and not minding the layer of dirt and debris that accumlate over your skin and under your finger nails. Last night I took a last minute offer to spend the evening with my sister and bro-in-law in Littleton and then head into the mountains for the day to hike, laugh and workout those summer legs.
After a quick breakfast of homemade muffins, we loaded the car with dogs, snacks, water, cameras and sunscreen. (I should mention that we also loaded after my strange inability to be content with my hiking attire led Tim to donate a pair of perfectly good blue jeans to be hacked into fashionable shorts.) We landed in Estes Park just in time for not-so-great pizza and a trip into the visitors center for maps of Rocky Mountain National Park. Gladly paying the $20.00 for the car load to keep the park open, we ventured to a sweet trail called Lawn Lake and started our way up.
A short distance in we lost Tim. He disappeared ahead of us as we stopped for a photo-op and never again surfaced. As we hiked further into the mountain with no sign of him, discussion turned to how we should best handle the situation. He could be in front of us, having easily out paced us. Or, he could be behind us, having left the trail, despite the signs of significant erosion, and then turned back down towards the trailhead. Seemed to me that the best place to try and reconnect with a lost hiker would be at the car, so we turned around. Other parties headed up the trail were asked to tell the man with the purpleish shirt and grey shorts that we turned back.
We got to the car to find Tim sitting patiently in the drivers seat. Like a magic trick where he disappeared and reappeared where we didn’t expect. Appartently he was trying out his hunting skills and stalked us for some time, unnnoticed, before losing sight of us and turning around himself. He got to the car just before we did.
I am glad he wasn’t really lost. He would have been stuck in the downpour that caught us on the way back. Silly boy. 🙂
Essays and Excerpts 
No trackbacks yet.