Burly in Boulder: Apartment Wanted

October 17th, 2006 | By Joshua | 2 Comments »

On your left: Annapurna Amber, after the mountain whose name, according to the Southern Sun beer menu, loosely translates from the Tibetan to “goddess rich in sustenance, chock full of malted barley with mild hop overtones.” Unlike the Sun’s lightest beer, on the other side of the picture: Quinn’s Golden Ale, “a shade of the hair of the dog for which it is named.” Now imagine the liquid hues swirling into a perfect ying-yang, the very dark and light forces that have been guiding us through the Boulder real-estate and rental scene. Perfect. Harmony. Riiiight.
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Good Hiking Redux: Why We Came to Colorado

October 3rd, 2006 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

The Odessa–Fern Lake circuit in Rocky Mountain National Park is a trail-lover’s trail. It links a half-dozen alpine trout ponds with 18 miles of well crafted paths and crazily diverse terrain: rocky ice ledges at 11,000 feet to soft elk meadows at under 9,000. I’m at a loss trying to take it all in: yellow aspen bling-bling peppers steep conifer carpets; greenback cutthroats flicker under glass; dawns, dusks, dawns; gold medallion leaves raining down and underfoot… You get the picture. A three-day solo walkabout, clockwise from the Bear Lake trailhead. Two-mile-high October-cusp air is crisp and cold and the weather is dry enough not to have to use a tent fly. Temperatures range from blustery sun and seventy to yak-wool cool in the mornings.
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Rocky Mountain Arrival: Howdy from the Hogback

September 26th, 2006 | By Joshua | 1 Comment »

Colorado greets us with winter, the first snow on the first day of fall which, apparently, has been cancelled this year. It is frosty on the Front Range, the sky as milk-white as my iPod, which means it is dumping in the mountains. Two feet of powder in Vail and Beaver Creek! The September 23 Denver Post shouts jubilation from the ski industry and frustration from aspen leaf lovers, their annual golden foliage show cut short by the cold.

Tay, my Colorado native wife, shrugs it off as not unusual. It has snowed on her birthday plenty of times, she says.
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Crested Butte, CO: Gone West, Looking East

May 12th, 2005 | By Joshua | No Comments »

The journey from Baltimore to Bollywood has begun, but not in any direct or linear fashion. That would be too easy and end too quickly. Rather, my vagabondage has started with a log-cabin Rocky Mountain tangent—a high-alpine, Colorado launching pad to the world, as it were.

At 9,000 feet above sea level, it is still quite brisk in Crested Butte, although much of the remaining snow is heavy and damp from so much wannabe spring sunshine. Generous familial ties of shared loved for the mountains have brought me to a veritable chateau on the hill outside town, a description of which would exhaust my superlative quota for the day and is thus beyond the scope of this report.
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