Weekend trip

Steph came down for a visit the weekend before Halloween so we could take a trip to Glenwood Springs for their "Ghost Walk Tour" Check out the link below

Glenwood Springs Ghost Walk

It's pretty cool, we went two years ago and had a blast. The "Doc Holliday" ghost is pretty good. I'd say he does a better job than Dennis Quaid in the movie "Wyatt Earp". Anyway it is a lot of fun and if your ever rolling through G. Springs in October it is worth the stop and $15. I have to say it is also a bit creepy (appropriate for Halloween I guess) that there are actors pretending to be the very people that they are standing on. Kinda freaky.

Here is a picture of the old train depot right across where we stayed. It still functions as an Amtrak station, so not only is it historical but it still functions as a depot for folks traveling by rail.

G. Springs is laid out kind of weird. There is a downtown along the south bank of the Colorado River (shown below) but the the hot springs and historic Hotel Colorado are on the north bank and that area also has kind of a "downtown" feel to it as well. I guess the city planners thought that these two areas should be connected in a pedestrian friendly way, so there is a foot bridge you can take across the river and take pictures.

The first day we soaked in the hot springs which was pretty cool. Not as neat as some of the places I've hiked into but there is something to be said for having lots of room and being able to shower afterwards. [Side note: a buddy of mine and I hiked to Bagby hot springs near Mt. Hood Oregon about 15 years ago. When we got there we found the "hot springs" to be about the size of three bathtubs which were jam packed shoulder to shoulder with European folks. That was a little too close for comfort for me, especially since the youngest of them was probably 60 and half of them didn't have clothes on. Needless to say we turned around and hiked back to the truck without taking a dip.] So anyway these hot springs are not the 'great outdoors' but the pool was huge and you could wade around in it. The pool is 3 feet on one end and about 5 on the other so you can stand up if you get too hot. It's heated from geothermal water and regulated with filtered water from the Colorado so you don't cook. The next day was kind of a chilly morning so I walked over to see the steam come out of the pool.

Steph had never been inside a cave before so we thought a cave tour would be neat. We rode up to to the cave entrance on a gondola. Here is a view of the Colorado River valley from the window of the 'box on cables'.

Steph has been in mines before so this was kind of a treat because unlike a mine that's chiseled out of rock, caves have all kinds of cool stalactites and stalagmites. On the cave tour they had an observation deck that over looked a pretty neat view of the valley.

Here's a view from inside the cave. Steph thought this was pretty cool. I thought it was pretty neat but said to Steph, "if you think this is cool we should go to Lewis and Clark caverns, that is super awesome!"

We took the long way home. I've driven I-70 so many times it is kind of a boring route. So I suggested we take a detour from Aspen to Leadville. I snapped this picture along the way.

It worked out for the best anyway because when we left Leadville and were dropping down off the hill toward Copper and I-70 we noticed a ton of traffic heading south off of I-70. We thought "why the heck are so many people heading to Leadville on a Sunday night?" Well it turns out that just outside Vail there was a nasty semi-truck accident that dumped something like 3,000 gallons of methanol based nastiness and they had shut down a section of I-70. This stuff was flammable (and possibly explosive) CDTO was redirecting traffic off of the interstate. So had we taken I-70 we would have been sent on a detour anyway. Funny how things work out sometimes.