I am operating in the future, trying to get back on track so I can blog the prior activities of the day before bed time. Here's to hoping I get caught up this evening, but as I sit here and type I find myself getting exceptionally sleepy.
Alright, so this is covering day two of our trip, where we went to Hanging Lake. And I mean. If we're talking about starting trips off with a bang as a way to determine the calibur of the trip...this trip is going to be a fucking disappointment for everyone but my dad. The dark horse of the day trip to Hanging Lake.
The drive up to Hanging Lake was very, very nice. It's a gorgeous drive, we all sat and chatted and had a nice time. About 45 minutes from the trailhead, we got stuck in a traffic jam because the 70 was closed for reasons. We drove down the grassy, hilly median and turned around, stopped at a gas station to pee and fume, and then took a different way to skirt around the traffic. We arrived to Hanging Lake right on time, got fantastic parking, got our shit together and made our way to the trail. It was such a gorgeous day!
The gorge on the way to the trailhead.
Obviously an ussie to start our journey. I didn't wear my keffiyah on the trail, I didn't want it to get ruined. And a fucking good thing, too.
The beginning of the trail! It was such a beautiful day, I was so excited to get going and make it to the top. The last time I did Hanging Lake was right after I broke my arm. Fairly immediately after, actually. My arm was still in a sling, and I hadn't really expected to do the hike due to my arm being freshly broken, so I wore flip flops. Derek and I made it to maybe the 5th bridge...he said the 4th when I asked him...before I was like, I don't know that I can make it, it really hurts my arm and I am not prepared sartorially for this journey. So Derek left me at a lovely, shady bench by a waterfall and I agreed to wait for him until he was done doing the hike. I'm not even sure he was gone fifteen minutes before I was like, "fuck this shit" and made my way up to the top, broken arm in a sling and flip flops on my feet. I made it to the top, which is definitely a feat in the state I was in, but I didn't get to take any photos, and the hike up is truly so fucking gorgeous that I wanted to go back with a camera and a tripod and take as many breaks as I wanted, in hiking boots and with two operational arms. When we landed on going to Colorado, one of the first things I said we had to do was Hanging Lake. I am still absolute TRASH at landscape photos, they are not my strongsuit. I can take a good one sometimes, but mostly I just take barely adequate landscapes, as will be obvious when I shitpost all of them after we get home from the trip. Anyway.
Here is Derek, getting ready to ascend ascend ascend! I stopped here to take a video of the first waterfall to send to the kids, and Derek fucked around with his cameras. Cameras plural. I would learn in about twenty minutes that he did not pare down his gear, he brought at least two bodies, both long lenses, the 180 macro (which is very heavy), and his tripod. For those of you playing the home game, that's a lot of very heavy gear. Derek and I are used to humping a shit ton of gear on hikes. We always have people stop us to marvel at our gear, ask how much we're carrying, and people always react with surprise when we tell them how much extra weight we're carrying up whatever moderately strenuous hike we're doing. I know I usually get a bit of a thrill out of that when it happens. I'm like, "what a special little beebee am I to be carrying all of this when most people seem to be struggling to carry their water!!" I suffer from main character syndrome a lot.
I was moderately worried about doing this hike, just because it was the first full day here for my dad and Caryn, and it would involve some strenuous activity with a 1100 ft elevation gain, and there was not a lot of time to adjust to the altitude between arriving and hoofing it up a big ass rock. I knew I could do it, I knew Derek could do it, but I was worried about my dad and Caryn. Well. I should have been more worried about Derek. We hadn't even made it an eighth of the way up before Derek stopped three times, looking more fuckin' raggedy with each resting break. After the third, I was like, "excuse me, sir, but no. No more". Derek protested a LOT, but even Caryn was like, uh...no, Derek, you do not look like, your color is off you're sweating buckets, you need to turn around. Caryn went ahead while I argued with Derek about whether or not he was, in fact, staying behind.
He ended up going back down.
I moved ahead, and honestly I was feeling pretty fucking great. I hadn't remebered the layout of the trail, and it was a lot more steps thaan I recalled from doing it the first time. When I saw the trailhead I was like...oh no. Maybe I should have been doing thirty miles a day to prepare instead of 10, PLUS doing this at altitude?? I was concerned. But I felt great. I wasn't breathing hard, I didn't have a headache, I was drinking water every time I stopped with Derek, I was feeling really good. I caught up with Caryn, and she told me she was going to head back down, her knees were hurting her and she was at her limit. I told her where to find Derek, and to not let him out of her sight because he could not be trusted to not push past his limits. And up I went. My dad was still heading up, and was about fifteen minutes ahead of me, so I texted him that Caryn was heading back down, Derek was already back down, but I was heading up to meet him. We agreed to meet up with each other, and he figured he wouldn't wait because I was a faster hiker and he was needing a lot of rest, so we would meet up eventually.
Another bridge! I took another video here for the kids, sent it to Rhyann because I still inexplicably had signal, and kept going.
I stopped at this petrified looking stump (as in turned to rock, not scared, though I can't speak for the log, maybe it WAS terrified) because Derek had tightened my camera bag straps to my body so fucking ttight that I could not god damn move, and I was having a panic attack. It took me two minutes to wiggle out of the straps. I sent Derek a message that said, "my straps are too tight". I fixed them, had some water since I was stopped and figured it couldn't hurt, and then started back up.
I passed by this gorgeous little fall, decided it wasn't what I wanted to photograph but I DID want to send a video for the kids, so I took a tiny video, sent it to Rhyann, and was getting ready to make my way forward when I noticed a pretty intense pressure building in my face. I texted Derek that my sinus pressure was intense, and it felt like my eyeballs were going to explode out of my nose (almost an exact quote). I moved along, but then saw these two kids just grabbing rocks and chucking them into the river and I was annoyed. This is disruptive behavior to ecosystems, and I was really angry about it. So I yelled, "HEY, LET'S NOT THROW ROCKS, IT'S DANGEROUS AND DISRUPTIVE". The person I am assuming was their dad, but was clearly their supervision, waved at them and was like, "oh hey, careful throwing rocks". I made my way past them, annoyed and thinking about what I would say to them if I saw them again on their way up and the kids started throwing rocks again. You know that socially anxious/ND thing where you just practice winning arguments in your head? I was doing that. For making an excellent verbal takedown...of children. I'm amazing.
My face started absolutely pounding. Just wrenching pain. And then I felt something dripping out of my nose. I figured it was snot, since I had noticed an uptick in my allergy symptoms when we got to Colorado, so I put my finger to my nose to wipe it away...and it was blood. And I could feel it getting ready to gush out of my nose, so I pinched my nose, found a bench, and then leaned over the bench and just let my nose gush. For about ten minutes, I was just leaking like a faucet. Blood all over the place. And just as I had been practicing my harsh word for the rock throwing shitheads, I began to hope they would cross my path on their way up so I could be like, "THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T THROW ROCKS!!!!!" When I said this to Derek, he laughed and said it really was a shame that they didn't see my nosebleed. I wouldn't know it until later, but they were on their way down, not on their way up.
When my nose finished gushing, I used my water to wash away as much of the blood on the ground as I could, texted Derek and my dad that I had a nosebleed and I was going back down, and then hated myself for having Von Willebrand's Disease. It's pretty much why I made myself stop ascending. I figured I had lost a lot of blood, and I didn't know that I wouldn't have another nosebleed. I had been telling Rhyann before Derek and I left that I had suffered nosebleeds fairly consistently when I first moved out to Colorado. One every couple of weeks. And they were bad nosebleeds. I was worried I would have one or two while we were here, and I had chatted with Derek about that, too. I gave myself a little pep talk that if I had any nosebleeds, I would chill out whatever it was that I was doing and take it easy for the rest of that day. So I did. I made my way back down, grumbling and fucking angry about my stupid fucking body and my stupid fucking nose.
Derek and Caryn were at the same little picnic area that we stopped at on the way in, and Derek was still upset about me forcing him back down. He wouldn't talk to me and was just looking for cool rocks, of which he came home with a pocketful.
Derek, Caryn, and I made our way back to the car, grabbed our lunches from the cooler, and had a picnic while we waited for my dad to make his way back down to us. We sat in very pleasant weather enjoying the scenery and our lovely lunches for about two hours before my dad made it back down. He's the only one of us who made it to the top, and I won't lie, I was fairly certain that, if the party broke up due to physical circumstances, it would be me who made it. I wouldn't have guessed my dad alone in a million years. Good thing I didn't put money on that.
We got back in the car and drove the three hours back to Denver. We had planned on making bulgogi that night, so Derek and I were like, YUSSSSSSSSS, time to go to GW Market!!! We had been super excited to check it out since seeing it a few days before.
We were unprepared for the glory.
LOOK AT THE ENTRY. We knew we were in for a fucking shopping treat the second we walked in. Literally, the entire time we were walking around the store, we were like, this is it. We found our neighborhood. If I get the PhD program I'm applying to, this is the neighborhood I want to live in. So many great looking restaurants, this grocery store plus another few grocery stores in the same vicinity...we were in a paradise the likes of which we haven't even dared to dream about.
We were greeted with an amazing quick eats section.
AND THE BUNS!!!!! So many buns. But the bun section could not possibly hold a candle to THE FUCKING VEG.
OH MY GOD. The mushroom selection? Premium. The eggplant selection? Choice. The cruciferous veg? Drool-worthy. Derek and I were so fucking excited the entire time
And then my vegan reading comprehension was tested. If it's imitation vegetarian steak, is it...is it real meat? HELP ME I AM VEGAN AND DUMB.
And then the seafood section was INCREDIBLE.
...who is she.
We were spending way too much time grabbing everything for bulgogi, but we needed to explore this immaculate heaven on earth. There was an entire other half of the building we hadn't yet explored. And it's where they housed all of the bowls and flatware and mostly non-edibles.
I wanted to buy these for my dad, I thought he would like them. He barely chuckled at them when I showed him the picture.
...sounds...illegal?
And look! The supermarket has games!!!
Derek and I really wanted to grab these, but decided not to. For reasons yet understandable to me.
I have no idea what this bowl was trying to tell u s, and I was so mystified that I wanted to buy it. But I will go back for it another time to unravel its mysteries.
This was my favorite little guy. Again, I did not buy it, because we were trying to get the fuck out of there. By the time we got out of there, it was already 8:15. I still had to stop at a dispensary for my dad and we were still supposed to marinate the bulgogi for an hour. Given that, and given that we were all hungry, we decided to get Seoul BBQ. I ordered it, stopped at the dispensary, and then we picked up food and headed back home.
We were sure in for a treat when we dug in to the food.
I didn't realize I had ordered fried yakimandu, but it doesn't quite matter, everyone reported them as delicious.
I didn't have time to fuck around with figuring out what everyone actually wanted, so everyone got dolsot bibimbap. It's fine, they all loved it.
Derek said the japchae was pretty good, but that my japchae is better. He may have said it's just because the egg I make is better, but I will still take better.
The banchan was GREAT. The radish? SPECTACULAR.
Ok so, in Chicago, Derek and I got this amazing kimchi pancake and I have been chasing the taste of it ever since. This kimchi pancake was damn fucking close to the one I got in Chicago, and I think the only thing that held it back was it was take out and not crispy. The taste was divinity.
This veggie pancake was great, too. Very onion forward, but also so mellow. It tasted like spring.
And then we all hung out for a bit and went to bed.
It is June 3rd, I am still a day behind. I am about to leave for the camera store, then the botanical garden, and then who knows? My dad wanted and easy evening, so hopefully tonight I can get caught up. Our next day trip is to RMNP, with mixed success.
No comments:
Post a Comment