Frog Rodeo

Empire is the town Brian drives through everyday on his way to work. This past weekend they had a Frog Rodeo. It is where you can either buy or rent a frog to race. Brian and I have never raced frogs before so we decided to try our hand at it. (Turns out we weren't as good as we were hoping to be, although I did almost get 3rd place in my heat.)

Brian getting ready

His frog took two big jumps and then stayed right where he was until he finally decided to keep going then once he got to the edge he decided to try to escape.

Getting my frog into the cup to get ready to start

Ready

Go

The wrong direction, my frog decided to hop in circles for the first probably five or six hops

Finally going out of the middle

Finishing and just barely missed third place.

The frog car in the parking lot

Overall the Frog rodeo was fun for at least saying we went. We definitely saw some interesting people but it was fun and we enjoyed it. The rest of our adventures of the day are in the next post.

Silverthorne

Saturday we decided to go to Silverthorne so I could see these fun outlets that Brian went to when he first came out. It was a super pretty place. The outlets were split up into three categories, with walking paths between them that was right by the river. It was fun to just walk around and explore, even though we did find some fun deals and buy a few things. The way to get to Silverthorne is to go through the Eisenhower tunnel and the Johnson tunnel on the way back. Brian actually talked to some people and the way we went is actually closed about 2/3s of the year because of how steep the roads are and bad weather conditions.

The tunnels, they are celebrating 40 years.

Happy to be in the super long tunnel and headed for home.

Exploring

Awhile ago I found a road above our house and it lead to a couple different trails. This weekend we decided to explore one of them and see where it went. After being on it for a mile or so we ran into a couple people coming down the trail and they told us the trail goes no where. It is a nature trail that goes on and on for a long time. We were already on it and decided to go for a little ways to just see what we would find.

We found a little old town

They even had piping up there.

This sign made me laugh. Please do not roll rocks. People below.

If you look closely you can see tents. They had a huge concert going on.

The hike gave a great view of our little town. It was fun to look at the lake from up high but even more fun to see the Sonic Bloom festival from up high. We had seen the huge amounts of cars all parked by one lake but we had no idea that was the second parking lot and that they were all camped out in a little wooded area down the road. We could even hear some of the music from that far up. It sounded okay but we heard that it was a drinking and smoking great time at the festival and decided not to even think of checking it out, not to mention the ticket prices were outrageous.
Overall that day we walked/hiked a total of about 10 miles. It was great.

Rockies again

Brian has a co-worker who offered him tickets to the Rockies game this past week on Wednesday. His wife is part of the Women's Club and gets tickets to every Wednesday home game, but this past week they had something else come up and couldn't use them. The tickets were super close and we enjoyed the game with the company we had around us. Although we lost really bad it was still fun to go.

You can't tell but I pulled out my monopod for this picture. You should have heard the comments of everyone around us. It was really funny. But I knew we had a good picture before it was taken due to everyone behind the camera saying it looks great.

We decided to leave a little early so we could get home and get Brian in bed.

See there mascot? Brian and I think he looks like Barney's friend that was yellow but we can't remember that guy's name. The mascot has a "great name" (not), he is Dinger.

Georgetown

On Sunday, we decided to spend a little bit of our time exploring the streets to our own little town. Here are a few of the sights we saw (I didn't take a ton of pictures since it was a relaxing walk), we also have a few pictures of us since a guy from Ohio offered to take some pictures of us.

Silver Dollar Lake

Since we are in Colorado and it is such a beautiful place we plan on going on probably a hike a week. After looking for some ideas, I thought we would go to Silver Dollar Lake first because it was a short, difficult hike considered intermediate. When I brought it up to Brian he thought it would be a good hike for our first one........well we got more then we expected. The trail was hard to follow, I am almost positive it was much further then it was listed at and we had snow and water galore (the snow was so deep that if you stepped in wrong you ended up at your waist). It was quite the experience but we meet some fun people. When we were lost at one point one guy helped us and he actually knew someone Brian works with (I guess he does the guys taxes), we then met three people from Boston who were here for a fun hiking trip, then a few other locals. We had quite a fun day and were pretty tired after the long day hiking.

Beginning our drive up

Cool, large waterfall

Beginning of our hike with snow right on the trail

Second place we were lost, first place we were truly lost but we saw a glimpse of the first lake

Full view of first lake, when we came back down it was more melted and the ice cracked then our first glimpse

Muddy, creek that we were really happy to have rocks to climb on through

Finally fully past the first lake

We made it.

We climbed across that crazy snow bank twice, luckily after all the snow we only fell down to our waist once or twice

We took a shortcut on the way down so we didn't go back through the place that got us totally lost.

On our way up we were really sure we were lost until we saw this sign and it was a good place for the sign because it pointed to a snow pile and it would have been a confusing place for us for a little bit.

One of the several lakes we passed on our way up.

The prettiest lake that we have seen and it is for sale

Along with these two places, definitely a pretty spot

Another waterfall that I tried to catch on the drive down

Overall, it was a beautiful hike, with some crazy adventures, and we both got some sun. It was a great first hike once the hike was done and we had some time to just relax.