Snow+Mountains=Avalanches

And it is because of that equation that we did not make it to the airport on time to continue on our journey to Arizona and had to spend Saturday night in Denver. We made the best of it, OK it wasn't that hard, the hotel had a hot tub, we ate at Macaroni Grill and John attempted to teach me how to country dance.

Hope you enjoy the pictures I got while waiting in traffic, the road had been closed for avalanche blasting right before the tunnel, one of the only ways to leave the mountains. The other option was to go over the mountains, by the pass, which was closed due to poor visibility (and avalanche risk).

Avalanche: The reason why the road had been closed.

Wind: The reason why the pass was closed.

Evergreens

This sign made me laugh since we were moving at such a dangerous speed of 10 miles an hour.

Saphire Point

This is the view from Saphire Point Trail that we hiked. It was freezing cold, windy and John and Andrew had to break the trail for me, the snow was past my knees. The snowy area at the bottom of the mountain that you see above is actually the frozen Dillon Resevoir, it supplies water to Denver. It was worth the snow and the cold, the views were gorgeous.

John's dog, Faith.

John, Kim & Andrew

Skiing

Yes, that would be the ski "trail".

Famous last words: "Hey guys, watch this!"

Lightning Tree

John: The smart one with the helmet.

Self Portrait

We're Back

Our vacation was great. We barely made it out though, there was a huge storm sweeping the northeast part of the country and we got about a foot of snow overnight (Feb. 14th). Our flight was one of the only ones that wasn't cancelled.

Over the next few days I'm going to post some of my favourite pics from the trip. Hope you enjoy. The first few today are from the Denver Zoo, Feb. 14th.


Jaguar: I've got a couple of pics of cool animals (snow leopards, mountain lion, sea eagle) but they have the cages blocking the view. I couldn't pass up this one though, I love his eyes.

The zoo has a large flock of peacocks that just wander around and make themselves at home.



Snow Fox

Giraffe

Elephant playing ball

Mountain Goat

It's Playtime

I'm SO excited. This has been stuck in my head all day. This is what I wanted to jump up and do while I was plugging away at paperwork to get ready to be gone for a whole week. So how excited am I about going to Colorado to see John and then to Arizona to see Rob, Laurie, Risa & Brandon?
This is how excited I am.

Snowshoeing

I went out snowshoeing this afternoon, it's the first day we've had in awhile that has been nice and sunny. Here's some pictures from my trek.





This is the creek that runs down one side of our property, it's frozen and snowcovered right now.

Bullet

Ivy & Alice

And for my favourite picture of the day, Dakota.

Icy January

We had a couple icy days at the beginning of January. I did some photo experiments and tried to capture the beauty. I picked a couple of my favourites. I found out that it's a lot harder than it looks to take good ice pictures, at least hard to do it justice. Make sure to click on the first two to see them in a larger format. The ice details are amazing.