Rocky Mountains

It's a lovely day in the lowlands. Hot, humid and rainy. It's just not a pleasant time to be in Missouri. On the other hand, in the Rocky Mountains, it's a gorgeous day. I never knew that the mountains could be so freaking awesome, but let me 'splain.

My friend Tim is getting married in a couple of weeks, so Chuong and I decided that he'd have to have a trip to the mountains before his wedding. We got Gear and rented a car and headed off to Rocky Mountain National Park. We left after work on a Thursday and drove all night through Kansas and Colorado until we got to our friend Becca's house. She was gracious about putting up four boys in her little place (even when we got there at 4 AM) and made our stay there really fun. Many thanks to Becca!

Anyway, the next day we got up and headed to the park. We hiked some trails, saw some rapids and found the thing to do that day: hike from the Glacier Gorge trailhead up to Alberta Falls in the Eastern part of the park. We hiked for a lot of the afternoon and got to the top of the falls in two hours (only about 1.5 miles, but a long way up).

Here's the falls. If you're ever there, they are well worth the trip.


What's funny is that this is probably the most documented trip I've ever been on. All four of us (five on Saturday, when Becca was with us) were carrying cameras so there are almost 2000 pictures between five cameras of that trip. There are many shots where a picture was taken of people taking a picture. At one point we stood in a large circle and took pictures of each other taking pictures. It's all to get a panorama shot. It looks freaky, but it works, after a fashion:

I like it (though I'm the dumbass who had his finger in front of the lens) and I'd like to try it again, the next time I'm at a place that needs a good panorama. Maybe the top of the Liberty Memorial?

Anyway, this all brought to mind how many chapters of our lives aren't documented. College, for myself. It was a very formative time, but there's nothing but the recollections and a few pictures here and there. On the one hand, that's too bad. We don't have the photographs of the times when all we had to do was bond. On the other hand, that's good. We were too busy living those bonding times to worry about documenting them. Either way, I'm glad they happened. If they did. There's no record, after all, and a lot of the people might have difficulty remembering them, whether from poor recall or legal reasons.