I see trees of green, red roses too

For the past 5 years, we have lived in extraordinarily beautiful places.  Hawaii's natural beauty is so abundant, no matter where you are on the island, that it's almost beyond belief, sometimes.  Colorado is similar.  It's a different kind of beauty - not as lush and sensual, but rather starker and grander and more dramatic - but in-your-face beautiful just the same.

And sometimes I take it for granted.  It's easy to get bogged down in the minutae of paying bills and getting the kids to school and keeping track of everything going on in our lives, and to forget that if I pick up my head and look west, I am faced with some of the most magnificent mountain vistas in the world.

But when the weather is good, if we can't be surfing the North Shore, there isn't much that beats summer in the Rockies.  Within a 100 mile radius of where we live, there are thousands of places to hike and bike and swim and camp.  And now that the kids are old enough to enjoy it, we've decided to really take advantage of what Colorado has to offer this summer.  We're planning camping trips (both by tent and RV) and hiking trips for almost every weekend.

We started yesterday.  There is amazing hiking in the hills behind Boulder, which is 30 minutes from where we live.  J is going to do a 14er at the end of July, and is doing a bunch of hiking to prepare.  Saturday he went out and did a strenuous hike with a friend of his, and came home with a map of different hikes in the area, of all different levels of difficulty.  The kids love being outside, so we decided to go up on Sunday to do a relatively short (a little over a mile) hike with easy terrain, which loops off a larger trail near its summit.

As we drove up into the hills to our trailhead, the kids marveled at the vistas.

Zeke: Mama, it's really beautiful up here.  Me and Josie are psyched!

Josie: Look how high we are! It's really really beautiful! 

The hike itself was gorgeous.  We looked at crickets and pine cones and butterflies and lizards and wildflowers and cacti. 

We climbed rocks. 

We enjoyed the sunshine and the fresh mountain air.

And then we went home, happily tired and already looking forward to the next outing.

Sleepy girl.

Zeke stripped down to his skivvies to cool off.