As in living at high altitude. Friday night we were in Leadville Colorado, 10,200 feet above sea level. That is close to two miles high. We walked the town from second street to ninth street and just a short flight of steps leaves you puffin and blowing. It is an interesting town because many of the buildings in the historic downtown were built in the 1870’s and 1880’s. The city was a boom town with 15,185 inhabitants in the 1880 census. So many of those 19th century buildings are preserved and functioning as businesses to this day. Leadville’s mines produced 136 million of dollars in silver over a ten year period. After silver it relied on tin, lead and other minerals.

Before that we spent three days visiting Judy’s nephew, Wayne. We bicycled two of the area’s excellent bicycle paths. Wayne also drove us to Independence Pass at over 12,000 feet of high living. Then he took us to see the Maroon Bells above Aspen Colorado. These are two mountains that are over 14,000 feet high. Now we didn’t climb them mind you, but they were very beautiful. At the end of the Glenwood Canyon trail we hiked a mile long trail to Hanging Lake. It was a thousand feet above the canyon floor. The hike was well worth the effort; Very beautiful.

We have now moved on to Colorado Springs, Colorado. The weather is beautiful, but those darn weather prognosticators like to scare us with words like “snow” and “cold.” I have always had an aversion to four letter words. That is why I got rid of “work,” another one of those dratted four letter words. Anyway we are going to start to move to lower elevations. We are still over six thousand feet here in Colorado Springs.

We have been busy here. We rode over to a park called “The Garden of the Gods.” It was about six miles over there then three miles around the park loop. We encountered several stiff hills on the way and “hill” is another one of those four letter words. The park is a very miniature, urban version of the Arches National Monument that we visited earlier in Utah. Our recommendations? “nice, but go see the real thing!”

Finally this afternoon we located a nice “level” trail called the “Pikes Peak Greenway,” near our camp and rode another ten miles just for the fun of it. I suspect we will sleep well tonight.

“So long” from Colorado.

Gary and Judy