Fall in the Mountains

As my training is near Colorado Springs, and my brother and his family live just south of Colorado Springs, I have had the opportunity to spend my weekends with them. They have spoiled me with big-screen HDTV for all the football games and TiVo'd Grey's so I wouldn't get too far behind on the lives of Seattle's best surgeons.

The whole time I have been here, the MTI staff have been talking about how we really need to go up in the mountains to take in the fall leaves, especially the aspens. Today, Hal, Karen, Michelle and I did just that.

My niece, Michelle, was none too excited about spending the day driving around looking at leaves. She tried hard to worm her way out of the day of family fun, but we were having none of it. She occasionally tried to feign happiness, but you can see from this little group of pictures that she eventually gave up and let her true feelings about our adventure show.

We started out with a drive through Phantom Canyon. Check out the websites here and here for more information about this area. It has an interesting history and it is a beautiful area. This first set is of the McCourt area, elevation 6,483 ft. (You can click on the collages to see a larger version of them.)

Further up we began to see more aspens and blue spruce trees. The yellow of the aspens and the blue-green of the spruce trees makes for a very cool contrast. I also found out from Michelle that aspens' roots connect and intertwine so aspen groves are one organism, not just independent trees. I am sure there is a lesson in that somewhere about teamwork and community, but I am pretty worn out so I will work on it another day.

After the drive through Phantom Canyon (which included driving through snow,) we went to the old mining town of Cripple Creek. There I was promptly mauled by a bear. Also, if you look very closely, you can see some snowflakes falling in Cripple Creek, too.

When we left Cripple Creek, we drove through several other towns (Divide and Woodland Park) which are all near Pikes Peak. I was able to get pictures from several different angles.

Finally, we drove through Garden of the Gods which is incredible. We got there just in time to see the sunset over some of the rocks.

A big thank you to Hal and Karen for hosting me these past two weekends and giving me the grand tour of Colorado today . . . and to Michelle for humoring us :)

Click on the web album below to see pictures from the weekend in "non-collage" format.

Colorado Weekend