welcome to colorful colorado! (western slope edition)

i am now firmly of the opinion that seeing the western slope in colorado should be on everyone's bucket list. we roadtripped to the bluegrass festival over in telluride, and holy cow, this is one beautiful state. big (7 hours to do a diagonal in the middle of the state), but beautiful. i spent a fair amount of the 7 hours each way with my camera in my lap, snapping pictures through the car window - i'll hopefully get them uploaded this week.

brief recap of the trip: stopped in frisco for early dinner at the bbq challenge (i was meat-ed out after like 4 samples and had to get some lemonade and mini-donuts to recover), tried to figure out which 14er was which while driving down hwy 24, ran across a whitewater rafting competition in salida, enjoyed some completely gorgeous scenery, put up our tent after midnight both friday and saturday nights, played spades for approximately 6 hours on saturday while listening to bluegrass (and actually really enjoyed a few of the bands), got rained on twice at the festival, categorized the hippies (dirty hippies, aging hippies, crazy hippies, etc) and got very tired of the smell of second hand pot, rode a gondola in pitch darkness with white aspen trunks looking like bones around us and an amazing view of the stars above, almost got to see the black canyon of the gunnison on the drive home but didn't because they charge $15 admission and we only wanted a 5-minute peek. plus lots of great conversation in the car in the middle. whew.

anyway, it was loads of fun, and having driven through the western slope, i think everyone else should do it too. especially hwy 50 between salida and montrose - wow. the front range mountains are beautiful, for sure, but they're all lodgepole pine and aspen. the western slope has some great rolling ranch land with sagebrush hills and gambel oak valleys, and mountains of spruce and ponderosa and fir mixed in with plenty of big deciduous trees. plus rivers and creeks and reservoirs and canyons. it's pretty fabulous.