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.