Monarch Lake:

Six bodies of water form the Great Lakes of Colorado: Grand Lake, Lake Granby, Shadow Mountain Lake, Monarch Lake, Willow Creek Reservoir and Meadow Creek Reservoir.


Today, our posse circumnavigated Monarch Lake, located on the boundary of the Indian Peaks Wilderness area. In the early 1900s, Monarch Lake was built to store logs before they were transported to a nearby sawmill via flumes and rivers. There were a few relics of the old industry along the trail.


Given that about halfway through the hike, Scott and I realized we'd left lunch back at home, it's a miracle the kids made it. Sawyer hiked the entire loop. Arden hiked about half of it.

Where's lunch? Thank goodness Scott found a couple granola bars buried in his pack.

During the course of our four mile hike, we crossed a dozen swollen streams and scrambled over more than 50 fallen trees. Here is something I wrote about the unusually strong winds these past few weeks that have brought trees tumbling down in neighborhoods and forests. With the pine beetle epidemic that has swept through Northern Colorado in recent years, the U.S. Forest Service estimates that 100,000 trees will fall EACH DAY in the Arapaho and Roosevelt national forests this summer. Because they are only allowed to use hand saws to clear fallen trees from trails in wilderness areas, this could become quite an inconvenience. (You'd think they'd try to get that law changed, given the 100K per day estimate, huh?) The possibility of trees falling on you anytime the wind blows adds a whole new thrill to the forest hiking experience.

Some of the creeks had only rocks, or a log, or a two-plank bridge like this one to carry us across. The sight and sound of that much water moving under you is quite the rush. Yes, I was holding her hand.

Gear heads

Yesterday, I hit the second hand store and scored a pair of Merrell Hiking Boots with Vibram soles for Sawyer for $9, already broken-in.

One thing we've had to stock up on since moving to Colorado is a butt load of gear, particularly for the children. Had we been living here the past decade and been here when they were born, we would have accumulated a certain amount of gear from baby showers, friends and through slow accumulation. But, arriving last October, I found us in desperate need of gloves, hats, winter socks, boots, snow pants, helmets, skis, sleds ... you name it.

One of the worst items to buy are socks. I mean Smartwool and other wool/wicking socks that stay warm when wet and keep feet warm and cushioned skiing and hiking. One single pair of even children's socks like this can cost $10-$14. And they could seriously wear these socks every day in the winter. We barely made it through the winter with one pair of warm socks for each kid — both were Justin's socks we had saved from when he was a baby in Leadville. Hard to believe those socks traveled across the country with us twice.

Actually, it's amazing to think about all the gear that has traveled back and forth, and how old some things are. Because we didn't really use our gear in Virginia, a lot of stuff was preserved. I have a down vest that I've owned since 1995. My hiking boots are 10 years old. Most of my long underwear traveled with me to Patagonia in 1994. There is some advantage to being a gear snob and investing in quality stuff from the get-go.

So today, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, as we were driving home from an Alpaca festival, I pulled over at a garage sale. And then another. And another. I kid-you-not, I spent $7 and came home with a $65 snowboard helmet, five pairs of Smartwool socks, a pair of kids ski gloves, a garbage bag full of good quality clothes (thank the local Lutheran church for that one), a purple Barbie car, Candyland and four puzzles for Sawyer.

So, the lesson here is that I should have gotten up earlier this morning. It didn't even cross my mind that the whole town would be having yard sales today, not to mention selling off valuable gear for pennies. Given that I was shopping at noon, who knows what I could have landed at 7 a.m. The advantage of hitting the yard sales later in the day is that people are willing to sell entire garbage bags full of clothes for $1. I plan to start going to as many yard sales as I can over the coming months and stocking up on anything I can to outfit the kids for the next few years.

And just because it's sometimes more about form than function, these silver beauties were $2

The social life of a ditch dog

We went to our first Colorado party last night since returning west. Thrown at a cabin on a lake, it had all may favorite ingredients, music, mountains, Mexican food and margaritas. The party was something of a who's who of town politics. Everyone there either worked for the newspaper at some point or for one of several towns in the area. It was also a who's who of Sawyer's preschool, which I didn't expect. Five families from the preschool were there, not all brought their kids, but enough did that the party was overrun by little boys.

Arden, typically, was the only girl at the party. Which turned into an interesting conversation. I mentioned that Arden is almost always the only girl in social situations. She's the only girl among the Armstrong side of the family. She's the only girl with her babysitter. She's the only girl when we hang out with several of our good friends back east (like the Tovskys or Emerys). And this other mom I was talking to said it's like that for her daughter too (who had a babysitter unlike mine). In fact, she said it's like that at the public school preschool. In the younger preschool classes (2-4 year old), boys outnumber girls by 2-to-1. Yet, in the older classes (5-7 year olds) the opposite is true. Seems to go in waves.

Like any good Colorado party, this was a dog party. In Colorado, people bring their dogs almost everywhere they go, and dogs are almost always welcome to the party. At one point I counted six large dogs — a german wirehaired pointer, a white german shepard, a labradoodle, a chocolate lab, a boxer mix and Duncan — and one a little white Scottie, plus seven preschool children and three tiny babies at the party.

How could we not have adopted this pound dog?

Duncan, who isn't as well socialized as other dogs I've owned after all those years of isolated living in the Northern Neck, has been getting a schooling in proper dog behavior since we moved here. He's a little standoffish with most dogs he meets still, hackles up and all, but he's getting better. I was so proud of him though — he made friends with all the new dogs right away (he knows when he's outnumbered) and he ran around with them until the seven-dog situation became so overwhelming that he found a nice place on the couch and curled up for the rest of the party. I have to say he was the best-behaved dog there.

24 hours later

I can't help myself. This is just one of those prideful parenthood moments. The video I posted yesterday was taken after dinner, around 7 p.m. and it was Sawyer's first solo ride after just one week of owning his new 14-inch Tony Hawk Freestyle Climber (in green). He spent most of the first week looking at the bike. Thinking about the bike. Talking about the bike.But not riding the bike. He was pretty intimidated by the size, the gears, the handbrakes and the peddles, I guess. The break-through, for some reason, came when I told him it was a dirt bike. A switch flipped inside of him and suddenly he was all: "We're going to do this thing." This video was taken after dinner this evening. So, it's 24 hours of improvement right before your eyes.

We initially told Sawyer that we'd get him a bike for his birthday, but when I realized that the summer would be more than half-over by then (and realizing just how short a Northern Colorado summer can be), I decided to bite the bullet and do it now. Sawyer's only request for his new bike was that it be green. It's hard, when bike shopping on a budget, to find bikes that aren't plastered with Barbie and Spiderman. As we were looking around, we debated whether to get a 12-inch or 14-inch bike. (14-inch bikes are very rare. The 16 is clearly too big for a 3-year-old, and we were worried that he'd outgrow and outride the 12-inch too quickly.) He does have to tip toe to touch the ground, but he was used to that since we kept moving the seat on his training bike up. And, it definitely doesn't seem to be slowing him down.

Bike riding appears to be Sawyer's "Thing." He's tentative on a lot of fronts, but he's always been really, really into his riding toys. (Go figure that his dad was a professional motocross racer in his early 20s.) It also helps, I will add, that we have a lot of unused pavement in our neighborhood, giving Sawyer some freedom and room to learn.

I, myself, recall learning to ride on a somewhat hilly but low-traffic suburban street around the block from my house. I think I was closer to 6-years-old at the time. I can actually remember the sensation of riding alone for the first time and the total freedom of being able to bike to my friends' houses.

I can't even begin to imagine the sense of independence it gives a 3-year-old. It's actually somewhat terrifying.

Scrapbook moment

After this beautiful first moment, Sawyer made a couple runs up and down the road entirely on his own. We've definitely got to work on braking. I attribute the ease with which he picked it up to the training bike his Uncle and Aunt gave him several years ago. He road that bike to pieces (literally). So it was time for the next step up. I'm just not prepared for the first big crash.

House of hand-me-downs

Like this old ammo box that's full of letters and cards.

And my great grandmother's sewing machine that's filled with wooden buttons and 5 cent wooden spools of thread and an instruction book that's turned oily brown it's so old.

But here in the dry climate of Colorado, wood so easily dries out and cracks. I could go through an entire bottle of lemon oil every time I clean the house. Our poor dining room table cracked so badly that it's currently in salvage mode, upside down on the floor. We're debating the best way to fix the poor thing, which has traveled back and forth across the country twice. It used to be a high school lab table in Buena Vista. (It still has holes from the Bunsen burner and turning it upside down for the first time, I found gum stuck to the bottom.)

(from the house in Leadville)

I'm thinking some wood glue, a few wood blocks and LOTS of lemon oil will do the trick.

Phil: The true story of an incredible house plant

In 1995, I moved into my very own house in Boulder, Colo. One of the first things I did was buy myself a little philodendron. I hung it from a wooden beam at the edge of the kitchen, and over the two years I lived there, one choice tendril grew along that beam until it made a perfect little curl on the other side. I named him Phil.

When I graduated, the plant went with my college boyfriend Jason Wilson, whom I was supposed to move in with after a summer of travel. Sometime during that first post-grad summer, however, I decided I didn't want to play house and — on a whim — I moved back east to Maryland to work on a farm, leaving the plant with him.

Somehow, Phil survived that first winter. It was a feat given that the cabin he lived in was heated with wood and often went cold. Few living things prospered in that house after the breakup. But, eventually, the ex-boyfriend found a new girlfriend, Annie, and she helped Phil along, bringing him back from the brink of death.

That following spring, in March 1998, I returned to Colorado (realizing I had made a big mistake in leaving — are you noticing a theme?).

I had remained friends with Jason and Annie, and in the summer of 1999, when I bought my house in Leadville, they came to visit me on my very first night and brought me Phil. Still in his original light blue pot, his long tendril had vanished but his core was intact and healthy.


I hung him from a wooden beam at the entrance to the kitchen, and slowly a new tendril began to loop up and down over nails I had tacked into the wood beam.

In 2002, when Scott and I decided — on a whim, of course — to take a fourth-month sabbatical in Virginia, we left Phil in the good hands and green thumb of my pal "Sarahgirl."

When we realized that the mud-season getaway was going to last longer than we initially figured, we sold the house and moved everything we owned to Virginia. We granted Sarahgirl permanent custody of Phil.

So, when we pulled up the stakes last fall and moved BACK to Colorado — on a whim — one of our first road trips was out to visit our pal Sarahgirl, who now lives on a funky farm with three children, two dogs, three cows, a cat, 10 chickens and an occasional llama or two. Sitting in her kitchen sipping a beer after we arrived, I looked up on top of her kitchen cabinets and saw a philodendron that had literally TAKEN OVER the entire corner of her kitchen.

It couldn't be, I thought. Is that . . . Phil? Too good to be true, it was. I shed tears. I hugged his curly little arms and kissed his shiny leaves.

Sarahgirl clipped me off a few tendrils, and I have been trying to get them to sprout roots in water for the past six months. One tendril thrived, and I just transplanted it into a pot with these mums. (The butterfly pot, incidentally, I received from my dad on my 21st birthday).

So here I am, back in Colorado for the third time, 15 years later, with a piece of that very same plant I started growing when I was 21 in a butterfly pot I got from my dad that same year. Now, how cool is THAT! Life really does come full circle. Especially, it seems, for me.

Arden

This girl is a complete crack up. More from today's dance party:

The Naming of Things

Ok. I get that the seven of you who read my blog don't think I need a name change, but I'm looking for a little more anonymity, something more universal. Given my cutback in hours, I want to spend more time writing about mountain living and giving children meaningful outdoor experiences. (Maybe REI will sponsor me. Maybe I can use it to get some writing gigs. Maybe it will be you same seven people reading it a year from now.) With that in mind, I think it needs a new name. My other choice would be to create a second blog, but that just seems like way too much to maintain. I'm leaning toward "Roughing It" because the name works on many levels — It's the title of one of my all time favorite books by one of my all time favorite authors (Mark Twain) about his journeys out west. It plays into the outdoor adventure aspect as well as the fact that my little family never seems to have it easy. But, perhaps its too cliché. Please help. Vote in the poll on the left. You can pick multiple choices.

Mud season is no joke

Evidence of Utah's red dirt brought in on the winds of a recent snow storm.

There is dirt everywhere in my life. It gathers around the edges of my rugs and baseboards. It dangles off my dog's chest hair and settles in between the pads of his paws making him sound like a lady walking across a marble floor with high heels wherever he goes. Grit ruins every barefoot step I take in the kitchen. The treads on all our shoes are caked with mud. One forgotten item on the way out the door leaves tracks that will take 20 minutes to clean. I look down at my pants on the way to a meeting and, somehow, mud is smeared across the back of my calves. Like I sat there and let some kid make a mud pie on my leg, that's how bad it is after I walk through the parking lot at Sawyer's school. I don't know how it gets there. I leave the vacuum plugged in. We take our shoes off at the door. It doesn't help. The mud infiltrates every corner of our lives. You hear them talk about mud season. I'm here to attest — it's no laughing matter.

Pioneer Envy

This is a spoof on one of my favorite bloggers — The Pioneer Woman — who writes about life on the ranch, homeschooling, photography and has made her claim with her wonderful online recipes, full off dozens of photos for each recipe.

Tonight, I cooked. And, that, my friends, is the headline and the punchline wrapped into one nice little package. I cooked.

Halibut and horseradish mashed potatoes with winter greens

Peel and wash potatoes, preferably red or white. I bought Yukon Gold.

PLUNGE the peeled potatoes into cold salty water to prevent browning.
Then dice into even pieces. Boil until translucent and tender.

Crack open a beer. Preferably a better beer than this. Or, even better, a glass of wine.

Cooking bacon is nowhere in the recipe; however, I couldn't resist.
This is our favorite, easy cleanup way to cook bacon.
I chopped it up and mixed it up with the kale and some balsamic vinegar.

Mash, or — if you have an awesome sister-in-law who gives you a ricer
— rice the potatoes into a huge heap.


BUT WAIT! Don't forget to save a cup of the water you cooked the potatoes in.

Add olive oil, salt, pepper, water to desired consistency and horseradish.

This is my favorite kind of horseradish.
Steam greens. I used kale but the recipe calls for Swiss chard. Anything bitter will work.
Coat the halibut with olive oil and salt.
Cook fish in skillet over medium heat flipping once until white and flaky.
Set the halibut on the bed of potatoes and greens.
Drizzle with balsamic.
Serve.

For the kids I left aside some potatoes, fish and greens and bacon in separate piles without all the seasonings. Sawyer tried a bite of everything. And, he actually loved the fish.
Arden ate the bacon.