First June Visitors

Karla's high school BFF Penny and her husband Matt came from North Dakota for a long weekend in Denver.  It was great to see Penny after 8-ish years!!  There was a little confusion since there were two Matts though.  If you said "Matt", you'd get two responses.  :)

It was quite a busy weekend that included...a Rockies game, hiking at Red Rocks, pedicures (for the women), beer tasting (for the men), pizza at Ignite, multiple servings of ice cream/gelato, competitive games of Carbles, brunch at Snooze, touring the Coors brewery and grilling some delicious steaks.  Whew.  What a fun weekend!!

Here's a picture of Penny and Matt at the top of our Red Rocks hike.  We were so excited to get outside and do a little hiking...they were troopers for coming along!  (Penny even jogged a bit!)

First 14er of 2012

We saw on 14ers.com that Quandary had summer conditions, so we decided to give it a shot. Having a peak without snow at the top is very rare this early in the season!  Our friend Ryan came along to attempt his first 14er. After getting up at 4:30am, we were at the trail head and on the trail by 6:45am. All was going well until the last mile, which was straight up. Karla started feeling the altitude a little bit more than our last 14er. However, Matt and Ryan walked (slowly) with her providing encouragement and they all made it to the summit! We saw some semi-threatening clouds in the distance so didn't stay at the summit long and started a quick descent, even jogging the last mile. It was well worth the effort of getting down fast since it started pouring about ten minutes after we got in the car. Here is a picture of all of us at the summit...hopefully more summit pictures to come later this summer.