Many, many moons ago – like all of the way back to the 2010 holiday season, I received a pretty cool gift: a 6-hour photo safari with a guide in Rocky Mountain National Park. Fast forward ten+ months and an entire lifetime, and we arrive to last week when I finally made it up there. A good friend of mine (Adam) and I went up there for the six hours with a fella by the name of Jared and spent an amazing morning touring around the east side of the park playing with photography.

Since sunrise and the hour immediately afterwards are perfect lighting opportunities for photography, we met early: 6am in Estes Park…which means that there is a leave-the-house departure time of 430am. During October, the front range of Colorado’s weather fluctuates all over the place: snow one day, 80 degrees just a few days later. But up in the foothills and mountains, things aren’t nearly as up and down…they are just simply trending colder….and this morning was no exception from that trend. The air temperature wasn’t too bad – just below freezing at sunrise – it was the wind that was difficult: 25-30mph gusts. All that means is that you quickly learn to manipulate the camera with gloves on.

We enjoyed a beautiful sunrise at Moraine Park before heading over towards some aspen trees. The aspens were my initial goal from the experience, but two things played against us in that hunt: a foot of snow a few days prior to our trip, and the high winds. We did find a few remaining stands of aspen trees, but nothing earth shattering. Rather, both Adam and my favorite part of the trip was doing the macro photography. In order to really accomplish this well, you need a very specific camera lens, and a special tripod capable of making those angles. What makes the experience so fun is that you do all of the photography, you use your camera body, and you can use the guides lenses and equipment were wanted. The macro shots, and a few long shots were where we used his stuff (the long shots were simply an excuse to use a $6,000 lens and didn’t really amount to anything). Oh, and those cold temperatures for the morning? Turns out that when you slip into a stream and get your shoes/pants wet up to mid-calf, the wind doesn’t seem to help dry it quicker….instead it makes it really, really cold for a while – like ‘get back in the car, turn the heater on, change socks, and hope for feeling in your toes’ cold.

Anyhow, I’m pretty stoked about how these pictures turned out and I have already planned for one of them to make it’s way to large canvas print – come by the house sometime and take a look. It was a blast to be up there with Adam, Jared is a really nice guy, and if you are in need of his information for yourselves, I’ll gladly pass it along. What’s that? You want to buy one? Send me an e-mail, let’s talk.

my favorite from the day

moraine park at sunrise

Can it get much better than a birthday gift of snowfall on Oct 8? Well, obviously it can, but a winter teaser this early in October is pretty tough to beat as birthday weather goes. I had the fortunate opportunity (you can read sarcasm or not) to work over my birthday, which has some pretty clear negatives, but also some unexpected positives. Because I wasn’t with my family on the actual day, the birthday celebrations got spread out a little; and because I was with my firehouse family on the actual day, I got teased a lot….oh, and we got to have some pretty good ice cream via Ahna and Ezra stopping by. There was also a mini-celebration with some close friends that featured (for the first time ever for me) birthday donuts, and a trip to the museum with Ahna and Ezra. Oh, and as far as a gift goes? To find out what I was lucky enough to get, you’ll have to join me out here on the slopes of Arapahoe Basin sometime this winter (ps – season has already started).

Inspired by what seems like a near non-stop exposure to HGTV (I admit that some of that is my doing), I embarked on an attempted surprise for Ahna that featured a one day makeover of our study. The study has been a place that was mostly lost in the house, and as it’s the first thing that you see when you come in, it was sorely in need of some help. We had planned on painting the entire house earlier this year, but circumstances prevented us from being able to financially commit to that project. So, some overtime came into the picture, and with that extra income, a fun project like a room makeover came into focus.

Disclaimer: here was lots of lying involved. White lies, or otherwise, I still had to hold to a story that wasn’t entirely what was actually happening. After we got the first paycheck with the overtime included, Ahna asked if we could use some of that money towards redoing the study……sorry, nope, we needed it elsewhere. For over a month, I would have to concoct some alternative answer to questions about my day, or suppress any further digging into what was happening. And then there was the reliance upon luck that she wouldn’t see some of the things that were happening for the project: like expenditures, like things hidden around the house, like things stored at my parent’s place, etc (it’s interesting to write all of this down, because as the back story is shared, I am near certain that a surprise like this will never be able to be pulled off again). And the day of the project? I had a meeting to go to, of course.

So all of the planning, all of the pieces, and all of the parts came together exactly at 0730, just minutes after Ahna left for school (this was the first time in 10 years that I have been glad that she had a long day at school of parent-teacher conferences that would keep her there until 7pm). Room evacuated of stuff, painter arrived (extra expense, but needed to make this happen in one day….and he did a fine job by the way), and movement of things into the basement began. Everything going according to design. Then the first and, really only, disaster speedbump reared it’s head. While my Dad (the extra set of hands that were needed for this project) and I were moving an old bookcase into the basement, we heard a loud bang and crash/shatter. Rewind a few minutes with me, and when Dad was staging the bookcases in the room for removal, he had a gut feeling that he shouldn’t have placed one of them in the middle of the room, on carpet, with nobody holding it. If you take anything from reading this story, it’s this: listen to gut feelings. Ok, back up to the crash/shatter noise. That bookcase? It fell into another piece of furniture (no big deal, that one was leaving too) and then straight into one of the slider pieces on the front window – shattering one of the panes of glass (since this is essentially the only good story to come out of the day, we are spending some extra time on it now).

A quick cleaning of the large and small shards of glass and a few four letter words – aloud and silent – later, we embarked on fixing the problem. A long story shorter, we got tremendous help from the neighborhood  construction supervisor for Meritage Homes, and were able to find a slider piece that would work in the interim until we can get the original fixed. It’s amazing how quickly blood pressures can rise and fall.

The rest of the makeover went pretty much on schedule. We spent a long time putting furniture together (thanks IKEA for making it not too difficult), and then an equally long time putting the room all back together. After starting the transformation at 0730, we finished it all up at 501pm, some 10 hours later…and just a couple of dollars over budget. The surprise went of flawlessly, and Ahna was shocked. Part of me wishes that we had a camera filming it, but a large part of me is excited that Ezra and I get to keep that reaction to ourselves; it was just so awesome. We are really happy with the room, and it has take a large load off of our dining room table. When surprise meets organization meets design meets function, it creates a wonderful space – an even better story.

And for the record, Ezra was the first one to use it.

the 'after'

the 'before'

This year’s venture to the mountains to find the changing aspen leaves took us back to the traditional promised land of Kenosha Pass. It’s our default location to visit, and although we have found great success in other spots, this one is a sure thing….and sure things are important with kids. We have been going to Kenosha to find the trees on and off for a bunch of years, and this time around the timing of our schedules worked out to full advantage. The other thing that apparently works to our full advantage is having a kid that rises early – and therefore allows us to hit the road early, and therefore arrive at our destination before the masses get moving. Kenosha is a popular spot because of the amount of aspen trees, and it’s accessibility – right off of 285 about an hour from Denver, so it fills quickly on weekends.

Our trip up into the mountains was actually just before the ‘peak’ time for the leaf changing, but that’s our current favorite time to see them. The leaves change from green, to yellow, to orange, and to red before finally falling off – all within about a three week time frame. So when we started into the mountains and got our first glimpse of the changing leaves, we knew that we were in for a good showing. We arrived at the parking lot, and took off on our hike into the woods. Every single time that we have gone up to see the trees at Kenosha Pass, we have left the parking lot and gone right to the hike. We even found a ‘secret’ trail that leads out the back of one of the campgrounds and down into a valley where no other trail ends. For the longest time, we thought that we had the perfect viewing spots for the trees….until a random request from Ezra to hike to the left this time around. We embarked down the road, then found a trail that took us through a stunning meadow framed by aspen trees, and finally ended at a running stream with amazing views. The wisdom of a three year old is serendipitous sometimes. We enjoyed a nice long hike – even though it was a touch on the warm side – before heading back to the car. On the way home, we found a nice spot on the side of the road, and backed up to a river, for a tailgate lunch.