A Goal from 30+ Years Ago

Colorado Travelog #21
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 5:50pm

As we wrapped up our hike at Box Canyon Falls a few minutes ago I asked Hawk to remind me how we planned this trip. "A few years ago we were looking up waterfall hikes in Colorado, saw a cluster of them in Telluride, and decided to go," she said. Indeed, we built a trip around the kernel of spending a few days in Telluride. But visiting Telluride isn't the only thing in Colorado that's been on our list. There's a place that's been on my list for more than 30 years. 😨

I got on the Internet for the first time in 1990. Yeah, I know, a long time ago! One of the fun things to do back then was scour public ftp sites for cool digital pictures to display. There was no Google back then; Google wasn't founded until 1998. Even Yahoo didn't start until 1994. Early internauts exchanged lists of site addresses in text mediums like Usenet News groups and then visited them one-by-one, browsing through their file subdirectories, to see what they had.

This is where a lot of wise-asses would say, "I bet it was porn!" And they would be wrong. Porn online wasn't a big thing back then. (Why? Frankly, because it was several years before a scalable e-commerce mechanism was constructed to profit from it.)

Here was one of the first pictures I downloaded online in 1990:



I was entranced by the beautiful mountain scenery. I made it my desktop background image for a while. At the time I'd only ever been on the east coast of the US (and an evening in Canada) so I'd never seen a sight like that in person. I knew I wanted to visit such places some day. But where was it?

The photo was identifiable only by its filename, lkmarron.gif. "Lake Marron", I thought. I searched various times over the years for Lake Marron but could never find it.

It turns out the file was misnamed. The scene pictured in it is Maroon Lake. Its name in 8.3 format should've been maroonlk.gif or lkmaroon.gif, not lkmarron.gif. That could've saved me years of wondering. But eventually search engines got good enough to show near matches, and I found the place I was looking for. Then I forgot about it.

I forgot about it until today, that is. And that's why I prompted Hawk to recall how we planned this trip. "Lake Maroon, which I've wanted to see for more than 30 years, is near Aspen," I explained. "What do you think about planning a trip to Aspen next year, or maybe later this year."

"Why don't we see if we can go this week?" Hawk responded.

[sound of needle scratch]

As I was literally driving on a city street at that moment I pulled over to a parking space, dug my computer out of a bag in the back seat (I'm glad I brought it with me today!), and started checking if we can still change our plans. We can!

Get ready, we're about to call a massive audible.

Update: It took a few hours of wrangling to line up all the reservations, but we did it. We're now rebooked to visit Maroon Lake on Saturday!

Cascade Falls

Colorado Travelog #22
Ouray, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 7pm

After we hiked Box Canyon Falls this afternoon we drove across town to the trailhead for Cascade Falls. It wasn't far; Ouray's not that big. And we could even see Cascade Falls from the Box Canyon trails.

From a parking area at the end of a quiet residential street in Ouray it's a short but steep trek up to the base of the falls.



There's a sitting area here where the falls come clearly into view. There's an even clearer view a bit further up, on the so-called Perimeter Trail that circles around the town hitting lots of these sights.



Although it was getting late in the day and the weather was still crummy (it began raining on us while I took the photo above) we headed up the next short but steep length to reach the base of the falls. This is actually just Lower Cascade Falls. Cascade Creek tumbles down over 7 different falls as it plummets from the top of Cascade Mountain thousands of feet above.

Replanning our Colorado Trip Halfway Through

Colorado Travelog #23
Ridgway, CO - Tuesday, 5 Jul 2022, 11pm

So. Earlier today I told Hawk about my bucket list item from 30+ years ago to visit Maroon Lake in Colorado, suggesting we plan another trip like this one to see it... and she said, basically, "Why not now?" Since that moment we've been reworking our plans for this trip to get there.

I started changing hotel reservations plans from my mobile phone while parked on the side of a street. I made more reservations and changes from my computer at a restaurant. And I've spend another few hours online after getting back to our vacation condo this evening completing the plans. Here's how we'll spend the rest of the week:

• Tomorrow (Wednesday) we'll hike in Telluride then drive north to Montrose to stay for the night. This is more-or-less our original plan for tomorrow, though while things were up in the air I canceled our hotel stay for tomorrow night and later rebooked it. It's a points stay, and the price went up from 23k points to 24k.


• Thursday we'll visit Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. That's also within the parameters of our original plan (we allowed some flexibility on whether to hike there or Great Sand Dunes) though instead of driving to Alamosa, near Great Sand Dunes, we'll drive back to Glenwood Springs for the night.


• Friday we'll hike Hanging Lake in Glenwood Canyon. Yes, I got a hiking reservation for it! Friday night we'll stay through in Glenwood Springs. Hawk got us 2 nights at the Marriott Residence Inn with a cert and points.


• Saturday we'll visit Maroon Lake above the ski resort town of Aspen. Maroon Lake also has a permit-based system, and Saturday morning is what I could get a slot for. It's about an hour drive from Glenwood Springs to Aspen. We're not staying in Aspen because hotels are, like, $500/night on up there.


• We'll do more than just visit Maroon Lake; we'll hike from Maroon Lake up to Crater Lake, a round trip of about 4 miles at high elevation. Saturday evening we'll drive back to Denver and crash at a hotel near the airport. Hawk booked that on points, too.


• We'll fly home Sunday morning. That's different from our previous plan of flying home Saturday evening. Yay, no change fees. But boo, paying higher prices for last-minute fares. It cost about $180 more to book Sunday at the last moment, but it's worth it to make this all possible.

Also a tradeoff is that we will not visit Great Sand Dunes National Park or Garden of the Gods on this trip. But since we've visited both before— and have been to GotG, like, three times— that's okay. Swapping in a trip to Maroon Lake is worth it.