What the Hail?

Before moving here, Jason and I were talking about what kind of extreme weather we might get in Wyoming. It's pretty easy to rule out hurricanes and tropical storms. And although it's pretty flat here in Laramie, with mountain ranges on three sides, tornadoes are very rare. We figured about all we would get here would be blizzards. We did not realize that we were moving into "hail alley".

We love Colorado!

This is blog part 2 about our Colorado vacation. In addition to our whitewater rafting adventure, we also did a lot of site seeing in Denver and Boulder. In Denver, we went to the Museum of Nature and Science, the Zoo, and the Denver Museum of Art.

The Zoo and the Museum of Nature and Science sit in a big beautiful park just minutes from downtown Denver. The Museum of Nature and Science is freaking massive. You could spend the entire day there and still not see everything. We only stayed a few hours, but saw a lot of really cool stuff. We went to a very thorough exhibit about pirate life, with hundreds of artifacts recovered from the Whydah, a pirate ship that sunk off the coast of Cape Cod in 1717. (We thought of you, Sarah. You would have loved it!) We also saw a show in the planetarium about black holes. It was very informative, and I loved that it made no apologies for saying with certainty that the universe began with a Big Bang. The planetarium is also really nice, with comfy reclining seats and a giant half sphere ceiling that the show was projected onto. On the roof of the museum is an atrium and veranda, with great views of the city and the Rocky Mountains beyond.

The planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science

View of the Denver skyline, with the Rocky Mountains in the background

Rafting in the Rockies

This is part 1 of a 2 part post about how awesome of a time we had last week on our Colorado vacation. On Monday, our 7 year anniversary, we went whitewater rafting for the first time. We drove about an hour west of Denver, on one of the most spectacular drives I have ever been on, to Idaho Springs, CO to raft on Clear Creek. Now, I made the reservations a month ago, naive to the situation that was brewing in the mountains. All over Colorado and Wyoming, rivers and creeks are flooding. Usually, the snowpack on the Rockies melts slowly as temperatures gradually increase during May and June. This year, the Colorado snowpack was at 250% of the normal level, and the snow and cold lasted into the end of May. So instead of a gradual thaw, the snow is melting very fast and pouring into waterways.

When we got to the rafting site, we were warned about the dangerous conditions. The creek is so high and fast that the usual 2 hour path takes just 45 minutes, and most of the rapids had been increased in class (rapids are ranked class 1-6, with 6 being essentially unpassable). If I'm being honest, I pretty scared and was seriously considering downgrading our trip to the beginners (kiddie) trip. But Jason was brave and insisted that we would be fine.