CKS Paddlefest 2017 - Dane Jackson competing in the C-1 Preliminary (plus a shoutout to his sister!)

And here's a video of one of the runs I was having so much fun taking pictures of. This is Dane Jackson, son of super-famous whitewater guy Eric "EJ" Jackson, he probably can't remember the first time he was put in a boat! Each paddler gets 2 runs like this; Dane took 2nd place.

More about Dane!

Addendum a little later - Just did a quick trip back to YouTube because as a paddler who's a woman, I thought it would be nice to mention that Dane's sister Emily is also a kayak rockstar; went to find a supporting video and oh my gosh this one's incredible! She does a great job of explaining how the rodeo competition works and gets into how they actually do the tricks. But there's something extra-special going on...just go watch! BTW she was at the Paddlefest and won her event (pro women's K-1), we just weren't there to watch that. Would've been great!

Super ACTION Filler Post - CKS Paddlefest Men's C1 Rodeo Competition, 5/27 afternoon

Nah, nah, nah, just kidding - I'm still working like crazy wrapping up the September/early October reporting but this isn't a filler post in the same way as Sunday's was, where I thought "Hey, haven't posted for a few days, wonder if any of the pictures I took during the Saturday morning drive would be worth sharing?"

Colorado being SO scenic, it turned out they were. But that brings us up to something I've been looking forward to posting about since we got back - the CKS Paddlefest! I had so much fun taking pictures; in fact I took so many pictures I wasn't sure how I was going to break 'em down into posts, but I think I'll just do 'em in order, by event. To begin with, click here for a Flickr album with 24 action-packed photos from the Men's C-1 Semifinal. And yes, everything going on over there is completely intentional. The riverside viewing area probably got jammed for the finals at the end of the day, but with this being the semi-finals it wasn't too crazy yet and I eventually found myself a seat right next to the wave where they were doing their stuff! Enjoy!

This is a big Memorial Day paddling festival held every year in Buena Vista; the main producer is Colorado Kayak Supply, and the event features 3 days of all sorts of competitions, exhibitions, races, classes (mostly run by the Rocky Mountain Outdoor Center, about which I shall rave more at a later date, they were awesome!), and more.

I found out about it through a very neat Facebook paddling group, the Church of the Double Bladed Paddle, which is a huge (23K members and growing) group, with members all over the world. The group is about sharing the fun of paddling and the love paddlers all have for our sport; it's very attentively managed, with a few simple rules being strictly enforced -- like no safety lectures; if somebody asks for advice it's always fine to give but no unsolicited lectures and especially no name-calling. The moderators are all experienced paddlers and will take down anything that's seriously dicey, and beyond that we all just agree to be a little tolerant of others. Every now and then something will start go off the rails, but the administrators are generally able to shut things down before they get too much like the argument that inspired the name of this blog.

Makes for a very nice and friendly online community, and it's a FANTASTIC resource if you're going someplace new - there are members all over the world and pretty much anywhere you're going, somebody's going to have good advice about paddling there. I'd asked about recommendations for the Denver area a couple of months before our trip, and one of the members, Mark W., a very nice guy who lived* in Colorado and loved doing whitewater, clued me in about the festival. TQ and I had originally planned to fly home on Friday the 26th, but fortunately we hadn't bought our plane tickets yet so it was no trouble to extend our stay by a couple of days.

The plan was to watch the rodeo competitions on Saturday, take a class ourselves on Sunday, and then drive back to a hotel near the airport on Sunday evening, catching a flight home early on Monday. That worked out perfectly.

We got to the rodeo competition during the pro semi-finals and watched the men's C-1 and junior women's K-1. TQ and I have whiled away a good many hours watching whitewater videos on youtube (I think we would do more of it if there was any closer to NYC, he loves it and my few attempts have been great, although I'm always terrified until I'm actually in the boat and having fun), and it was really neat to actually see it being done live and in person!

 

*Sadly, Mark W. passed away in a rafting accident a little later in the summer -- in a post about another paddler's passing, he talked about having had a mild heart attack a while ago, knowing that he might still be at risk, but choosing to accept that risk and continue paddling because paddling brought him so much joy. I was so glad I had at least been able to thank him, share a few shots from the paddlefest, and let him know what a wonderful time we had before he passed away. Miss him very much even though I only knew him through the group -- he didn't post that much but the occasional things he chose to share tended to be quite beautiful and you could just sense a very kind and thoughtful person was on the other end of the keyboard. 

Super Scenic Filler Post - Colorado May 27th, Breckenridge to Buena Vista

September rattles on into the final week, with the usual work craziness threatening to slop over into October, so here's some more pictures from Colorado! The drive from Breckenridge to Buena Vista was through more drop-dead gorgeous mountain scenery, and we went through some pretty cool weather too - I suspect Colorado is one of those places where they say "If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes".

Colorado must also be a great place to be a biker of either ilk - human powered or motor-driven.

We got to Buena Vista in the early afternoon, as planned. It actually took us a little while to find the festival we were there for, as our first inquiries at the town information center got us directions to McPhelemy Park in the middle of town; there was a pond there where there were vendors set up offering kayak and paddleboard tryouts, promising but not quite what we were after. There was a food truck there selling sandwiches and wraps, and we were ready for lunch at this point, so we took advantage of that, then one of the folks at the park told us where the competitions we were hoping to catch were being held and we set off again.

Somehow it wasn't hard to tell when we'd gotten to the right place!

More pictures, not a whole lot, click on the first one for a slide show view.

Breckenridge, Colorado, May 26, 2017

One more look at Clear Creek in Georgetown, Colorado

Having reminded myself in my last post that I had some catching up to do on our last few days in Colorado (which were quite glorious), here's the first catch-up post. In my last Colorado post, we'd begun our drive from Lafayette to Buena Vista, and I'd gleefully dragged TQ off on a scenic train ride, which was not part of our original plans but I kinda love old steam trains, and I'd been looking at this one with a lot of interest as a possible day trip from Lafayette but written it off as a little too far, so when I realized we were driving right past it (and I was driving) I just couldn't resist. 

After that we headed on for the day's final destination of Breckenridge, which had looked to me like the perfect place to spend the night on the way to the CKS Paddlefest - and indeed it was. Click here for a Flickr album from Breckenridge - such a pretty town deserves full-sized photos! 

Georgetown Loop Railroad, Colorado, May 26

Oh, I have not been having the summer I'd hoped to. This was supposed to be the summer where I got out on the water lots and lots - just hasn't worked out that way. There have been some good weekends but stuff just keeps going on at work and then I got a cold that lasted a full week and a half, bleah...well, all work and no play makes Bonnie a boring blogger. How about some pretty pictures from a lovely choo choo train ride  in Colorado back in May?

TQ and I said goodbye to my aunt and my cousins on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend and headed southwest, heading for the town of Buena Vista. We'd decided to make a two-day drive of it, allowing time for some sightseeing en route. Now, earlier in the week, looking for something to do on Thursday, I'd been looking in some magazines with things to do in the vicinity of Denver with the idea of taking Aunt Pat out to do something fun; my eye had been caught by the Georgetown Loop Railroad, a tourist attraction offering rides that lasted a couple of hours, traveling through gorgeous scenery, on antique narrow-gauge trains pulled by antique steam locomotives. I'd written that off after seeing that it was a pretty good drive from where my cousin and his wife live, and we ended up just going for a walk along Boulder Creek, which was lovely.

However, on Friday, as we were driving towards Buena Vista, I saw a billboard for that selfsame railroad, and it turned out that our route was taking right past Georgetown! TQ was not terribly enthusiastic when I suggested a train ride, he's got less tolerance for flat-out goofy tourist stuff than I do, but I really wanted to and I happened to be the one driving at the time (ha ha!) so we ended up going. We got there just in time for the 1:00 departure, and it was great! Here are some pix - if you ever find yourself in the Georgetown, Colorado area, I would definitely recommend this. Click on any photo for a slideshow view, as usual. 

Wednesday in Colorado - Big Five-Oh Over the Hill Drive, Hike, Beer, and Cake!

I'm having a really crazy week at work, in fact a crazy month, we have a big in-house move coming up so we went straight from year-end close (Scholastic's fiscal year is tied to the school year, running from June to May) into packing for the move. Perfect time to circle back to my Colorado trip pictures!

Wednesday of the trip was actually the day of my 50th birthday; TQ would've been happy going back for another hike at Chatauqua West, which would've been fun, but when we'd been discussing possible things to do with my cousin and his wife, they described a drive that would take us right up into the Rocky Mountain National Park, with a possible stop for a short hike at Lily Lake, and lunch in Estes Park. That all sounded really great to me, so that's what we ended up doing, and wow, was it gorgeous.

The drive up into the mountains was really interesting, we went from 5,200 feet in Lafayette, where we started, up to just shy of 9,000 feet at Lily Lake, and we could just see the spring rewinding as we went up - aspens that were in full leaf in Lafayette were just in that tender green of early spring up here. We had perfect weather for hiking, in fact it turned out that we really made the right call in heading for the heights, it ended up being downright hot lower down and hiking closer to Boulder might not have been quite as pleasant as it had been on our first hike there.

There was an interesting possibility for the Lily Lake hike in that the area had actually had a big snowstorm the week before we were there, and we were seeing trail reports talking about hip-deep snow. No problem, though, my cousin and his wife are proper Coloradans (she's from there, he's adapted very well) and have all the snow toys, so they loaned us a couple of pairs of snow shoes, just in case. I actually loved the idea of trying something I'd never done before on my 50th birthday, but as it turned out, there had been enough warm weather between the time that the trail reports we'd read were posted and the day we were doing this that most of the snow had melted. Still plenty to add drama to the scenery, but the trail was completely clear.

The Lily Lake trail that we'd picked as sounding the most likely to be accessible had 2 options, you could stay down by the shoreline of the lake, or you could take the Lily Lake Ridge for a slightly longer hike over a ridge that offered an incredible view of the lake and the mountains around it. So I didn't get to try something totally new on my 50th, but as I did mention in my first Colorado post, I did actually get to go over the hill, which I think is supposed to be a bad thing, but with such a beautiful hill to go over, I thought it was great (as you can tell from the grin I have on in the picture TQ took of me).

We stopped at the Estes Park Brewery for lunch after the hike  - good solid pub grub and some very nice beer, I had a Stinger honey wheat and I think TQ had their Renegade IPA and we were both very happy with our choices (in fact my one souvenir of the trip was an EP Brewery baseball cap, they happened to have one in my favorite teal and blue and I couldn't resist it). After lunch, we hit the road back to Lafayette, where we were meeting most of the family for dinner.

On the way back, there was a moment when I thought that the Google navigation seemed to be steering us strangely, and ordinarily I might have said something (Google navigation is pretty good but we've had situations it just wants you to go a way that doesn't make sense), but I'd overheard the tail end of a mysterious phone call of TQ's that morning, something about "Yes, she'll like that", and I thought this might have something to do with that.  That turned out to have been a call to the Button Rock Bakery to order a birthday cake for me, and the detour was so that we could pick that up. That was a fun surprise, I suspected TQ had been plotting something nice, but i didn't know what. 

And of course dinner with the family (with beautiful sparkly cake for dessert)  was the perfect end to this perfect day. I couldn't have asked for a better 50th birthday!

More photos from the day - click on the first one for a slideshow view. 

Colorado!

Rocky Mountain sunset, snapped from my cousin's car, near Denver.

I'd never been to Colorado before, but last year during the great lazy lake vacation in Michigan, my mom called her sister, who moved to Colorado a couple of years ago after my uncle passed away. I got to talk to my aunt for a bit, and during the conversation she mentioned that she would really enjoy it if TQ and I might venture out that way for a visit sometime.

We couldn't do it right away because our Fall trip ended up being that great Erie Canal excursion on our nameless Nimble Nomad, but when TQ started being asked about spring vacation plans earlier this year (in the NYC Parks Department they like people to have their vacations planned pretty far in advance), I floated the idea of a Colorado trip, and he liked the idea. My aunt and I have birthdays around the same time in May, that happened to be a good time for both TQ and me to take a week off, and that's how I ended up celebrating my 50th birthday in the beautiful Rocky Mountains!

It was an excellent trip, lots of visiting with my aunt, my cousin and his wife who live there (and very kindly put us up at their place), another cousin and her husband who happened to be coming in from Idaho (wonderful timing!), and then cousins once removed and twice removed. We had some great great visiting, there was lots of catching up to do as I hadn't seen some of these folks in years!

TQ and I alternated visiting with the family with some side trips on our own: a hike in the beautiful Chatauqua park just outside of Boulder; a drive further up into Rocky Mountain National Park with a shorter hike around a lake; and a visit to the Denver Museum of Science and Nature, where we went to see a very well-done exhibit on Vikings and also enjoyed their Prehistoric Journey exhibit, followed up with a visit to the Redstone Meadery, because what's better than quaffing mead after learning about Vikings? :)

The Lily Lake hike was actually on my birthday. There was a loop trail with an option to go up a ridge for the extra-scenic version. We opted for the ridge. So here I am, going "over the hill", just like you're supposed to when you hit the big five-oh, right? Heck yeah!

   O

:D / >
O

(kayak smiley, patent pending)

 On Friday morning, we said goodbye to the family and headed south for more sightseeing, stopping in Breckenridge for one night (we saw a moose there! I never saw a wild moose before! I'm not sure I've ever seen a moose in real life at all in fact!); we were originally going to do more hiking there but I was driving and it turned out we were driving right past this great old choo choo train that I'd been investigating as a possible good jaunt earlier in the trip. The next day we continued south to Buena Vista where we finished up our vacation with a couple of days at the great CKS Paddlefest. It was a wonderful visit and of course I have loads of pictures to share!