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We had a fabulous weekend out August 18-20. It started out as a camping trip but quickly evolved into something different.

How would you like to see (or maybe not see!) this coming at you in the middle of the night while you are sleeping in a tent? After arriving at our campsite around 10:30pm and setting up our tent in the rain, we finally got settled in around 12:30am. That's about when we heard the first of four large rumbling drawn out sounds. The first one I thought it was just a pickup driving by on the gravel. The second one followed soon thereafter and when I looked outside to see how a pickup could be so loud (and thus close) without seeing any lights I was confused. While I deliberated over this enigma Molly suggested: rock slides?

A third one came by a little later to the point where I was now scared and several other campers were obviously driving away. By the fourth one I decided to abandon camp (literally) and search for a hotel room in nearby Buena Vista. This was of no avail, no vacancies, (people get away quite a bit around here for the weekends) so we returned to our campsite for a peaceful sleep now that the rain had completely subsided.

The next morning I took a walk through the woods to investigate a little, there were many chutes splitting off of about 5 or so main arteries near our campground. This one came the closest, I believe it encroached upon a camp site across the street from us. While it does not look old, I do not think this particular one was fresh from the previous night.

This is the largest of the chutes that what we woke up to realize was not too far from our campground. Imagine a 1 to 2000 ft active rock slide pointed at your tent, car... It really is beautifull though. I think this chute was about 200 yards from our tent and probably caused the loudest of the four slides that we heard.

These fabulous "Chalk Cliffs" are located in the canyon just south of Mt Princeton on the way up to Cascades campground. Since we arived in the dark Friday night we didn't actually get to see them until Saturday afternoon when we left. Boy were we surprised how awesome these were. We thought we had seen enough impressive stuff that day already and yet there was still more to come!

Since it continued to rain on and off on Saturday, we decided that we did not want to spend the night in a tent again. We started driving north past more of the collegiate peaks and eventually decided to hook west at the Twin Lakes to head up over Independence Pass. After a very impressive ride up the continental divide we were afforded views of massive peaks in every direction. This is what the south east view looked like.

Leaving Aspen we discoverd a wonderfull lush valley with a "Roaring Fork" river in it. It was amazing to see the variety of landscapes before us: red cliffs and butes, white cliffs, lines of tall cottonwood trees along the river and the lone Mt Sopris outside of Carbondale where we spent the night. Such a contrast from what was just on the other side of the divide. More scenery than imaginable in one day.

We returned to Aspen on Sunday morning to have lunch in the downtown area. There were water fountains and mini streams (seen here in the foreground and background) for Renee to play in along two walking streets. Molly particuarly enjoyed hanging out at the playground with the Aspen ski slopes as a backdrop.

Leaving Glenwood Springs heading east on I-70 we faced the most fabulous gorge that I had ever seen. We rode on a elevated highway at the bottom of Glenwood Canyon along the Colorado river for a good 20 minutes. We enjoyed seeing the many water sport enthusiasts below.

Stunning. Well worth the drive anytime. It's about 1/2 hour past Vail from Denver.