Meeting Up With The Boys

We woke up to rain and low clouds, got ready, loaded up and took off to meet the boys at the trailhead at 9 a.m. The boys were going to hike down, meet us and help us bring out stuff back up (translation: they were coming down to help us take Courtney back up because we weren't sure how well she would do on a 2 mile hike).

Well, after a 10 minute delay in Arvada then a 40 minute "we got lost" delay, we finally made it to the trail head at about 9:45...and the boys weren't there. Since it was raining and didn't look like it would let up soon, we debated whether or not we wanted to hike at all. We had left them a voice message on Grandpa's phone to let them know we were late, but knew they would have to drive a while before they got service. We hiked around the parking lot and waited for them to show back up. It was only about 30 minutes before they got back. Courtney was the deciding factor. Ethan didn't want to hike back up but she wanted to be like the boys and go on a hike, so we loaded up and began hiking to the camp.

It wasn't too bad of a hike. It took a while to get Ethan smiling again and even Grandpa's "Billy Roundup" stories weren't enough to get him smiling at first. But then I snapped him out of it and he was begging Grandpa to tell stories. Grandpa is a huge champ and so creative!!

Ethan hiked without a problem and Courtney hiked 2/3 of the way on her own. Bryan carried her the last part of the hike. But I was very impressed!

When we got to camp we were right next to a snow drift and it was beginning to rain. So we all got into our tent, tried to organize things and took naps. That was easier said than done. The kids played around for quite a while before they fell asleep. We all felt better afterward.

The rain would let up for little bits at a time and we would be able to get out and look around. Ethan, Bryan and Courtney were even able to go fishing but they didn't catch anything. (Bryan caught 2 fish on this trip and the last one was 10 inches long!)

It was a gorgeous place that I thought would have been better without the rain, but it was nice. Most of our time was spent in the tent though and the kids got stir crazy. After a while we realized that the tent was dripping from the top and leaking from the bottom. We really debated whether or not we should pack it up and hike back home. But it was raining when we were talking and we didn't want to take everything down in the rain. So we waited it out. It was cold out but the kids slept great!