Colorado Days 3 and 4

Day 3

Day 3 was scary. We drove for hours up an extremely bumpy, hilly, dangerous, and rocky cliff-side trail to St. Elmo, a ghost town in the mountains, with our little Jeep-car thingy, an ATV, and a motorcycle. Extremely dangerous. 

St. Elmo was hot. Very hot. Very very hot. Very very very hot. We ate sandwiches in the shade of an abandoned shop and watched people feed chipmunks. And we decided that feeding chipmunks sounded like a lot of fun and bought a bunch of sunflower seeds to feed them with. I think they have learned not to be afraid of humans (because we feed them), because I have never been that close to a chipmunk before.

Tristan!

Day 4

We went white water rafting on Day 4! :) We got to swim da rapids. :D

We also went to the Black Canyon in Gunnison. Really, it's just some black cliffs, but they were pretty and we hiked to the bottom and across. At the bottom was a huge river.

Colorado Day 2

Hiya! On Day 2 of our trip to Colorado, we went to our little log cabin in Pitkin, a rural town in the mountains. Pitkin is at an elevation of 9,241 feet. Look at what the low air pressure does to our bags. xD

all puffy

 Well, anyways our cabin was beautiful. Inside, there were 2 floors, or maybe 3 floors, if you count the tiny loft you can get to by a ladder on the 2^nd floor, but I think it's too small to count. The loft is really fun to be in because it overlooks the parents' bedroom. We would go up there and play Pokémon cards and stuff. Us kids also had our own bedroom with 3 beds and a really cool alarm clock that projects the time onto the ceiling. ere 2 bathrooms total, which I don't think was enough for all 8 of us, even though it was supposed to be a 14-person cabin. There's also a balcony overlooking the driveway, but that wasn't as awesome as most would think because it was covered in sap. Downstairs, there was another bedroom which had a bunkbed and another queen-sized one. There was also a mini kitchen, a dining table, a random other table, and 4 sofas around a fluffy rug in front of a fireplace, where we cooked s'mores.

In the morning, we walked around outside of the cabin. It's extremely dry in Colorado, so our lips cracked after a while. Pitkin is only 0.3 square miles (I just found that out) so it isn't easy to get lost. The roads are mostly dirt and gravel, but the main road is paved.

Later we went up the mountains to the Alpine Tunnel, which I believe used to be a train that went through the mountains that transported cattle from Colorado to California. The drive up took about an hour and ½. We took the "Razor", which is kind of like a Jeep® except without windows, and I think it's a little smaller, but I may be mistaken.

This is the razor.

 On our way up we encountered a waterfall. No, actually we were waiting for our uncle to catch up on his motorcycle and randomly started hiking and found it.

Unfortunately, when we got up the mountain to the Alpine Tunnel, a hailstorm started. We ate sandwiches with some difficulty in the hail and then drove down the mountain at like 20 mph, which was about double the speed we went up at.

The rest of the day wasn't interesting; the hailstorm stopped, but we just hung out around the cabin. We ate taco soup/salad/I'm-not-really-sure-but-it-was-tasty for dinner & then played Apples to Apples all night. :D



Colorado Day 1

Hello!

    I just came back from Colorado. We stayed at a lofty cabin in a small town in a valley between some mountains called Pitkin. (Pitkin is a 4-hour drive from Colorado Springs, and our plane didn't land there; it landed in Denver, which is an hour and ½ from Colorado Springs, so on our first day, we stayed at a hotel and went to places around Colorado Springs.) 

Day 1

Day 1 was not exactly the most exciting. We drove from a hotel in Denver to Pikes Peak. There, we waited a few minutes for our cousins to arrive, and then hiked a bit up the mountains. We got back down just in time to board the cog train up Pikes Peak. The way up took about 2 hours (ugh) but the views were beautiful. I took the picture ↑ above ↑ from the train. Cog trains are pretty cool because they can go up mountains at a 25° angle, powered upwards by spinning gears. That is also how the train can control its speed on the way down. When we reached the summit of Pikes Peak we were allowed 40 minutes to go to the bathroom, look around, buy a donut at the gift shop, etc.  Pikes Peak is at 14,114 feet up so I became quite dizzy, but it was fun. :D 

This is me, Tristan, my cousin Sawyer, and my cousin Dawson in front of the train.

After we got down from Pikes Peak, we went to the Garden of the Gods. I think that was more fun than the 4-hours total train ride. When we got there, we all ran about collecting quartz and red pebbles from the rock formations. There were some climbing hooks where people were climbing the structures, but they were too big for us to climb up...

Tristan, Sawyer, Dawson, and me on a small rock at the Garden of the Gods.

This picture has a pretty good view of the bigger rock formations and in the grass, there's a random deer. :P

After that was lunch/dinner combined at about 4:00 (Colorado time of course) and the rest of the day wasn't interesting. We went to the grocery store and then was the 4-hour drive to Pitkin. We arrived in Pitkin sometime at night and went to sleep.