House of Bennetts

*No promises on the frequency of posts after today. The wedding shindig-er is in less than two weeks and I am sure you don't want posts about packing and organizing all of our wedding crap. The GREAT news is that I have an AWESOME SAUCE guest blogger who is going to post for y'all a few times next week... plus, and INCREDIBLE house crash on Thursday... stay tuned! A few weekends ago, my friend Sarah took me on a wildflower hike to Silver Lake. What resulted was us sucking air at above 12,000 feet and having a great day together. It also culminated in about 2390584023984 pictures. Some of which are below (and by some, I mean, a crap load). The next day I did another hike outside of Nederland, and the next Friday, Andy and I went up to Estes Park to hike to Bierstadt Lake. I go hiking when I am stressed... and apparently, I go hiking a lot.

This hike with Sarah also took place on my brother's birthday. So it was bittersweet, but mostly a lovely time with my friend. I got to tell Sarah some of my favorite Trenton stories that involved nature: mainly that when he was 9, he wanted to go deep sea fishing for his birthday in July. In Washington, it is freezing for half of July. Thus, there are a ton of pictures of me making a horrible face while wearing an equally horrible turtleneck, and wishing I could get off that damn boat. It makes me laugh because even though he was also wearing a turtleneck, and very rarely smiled by the time he was 9, he is grinning from EAR TO EAR in all of his pictures... probably because he knew I was miserable.

This tree was just super cool looking. It seems as though some ravenous animal took bites out of it and tried to peel it like a potato. Although which wild animal would actually eat potatoes or tree-like potatoes is unclear...

Typically you have to wait to get to the top of the hike for beauty such as this, but this sweet hike had this lake as a teaser to encourage us to keep going. I loved that we could see the lake almost the entire way up.