August 16

Hello Everyone. 
This morning I woke up and was very, very drowsy from the play last night. Loves Labors Lost was hilarious! It rained steadily until intermission for the play but other than being a bit cold I enjoyed every bit of it. Oh, guess who we saw…Birthday Buddy (Rick)! The play went great and we got home very late so that might explain the drowsiness. 

I woke up and almost immediately had to leave to pick up Raye. She was so excited to see me, when we got to her house I saw her waiting outside ready to leave! For about four hours we just hung out and talked. At about noon we had a wonderful lunch, jumped on the tramp, baked an apple crisp, and made Ooblusk (a mixture of corn starch, water, and food coloring). After that we went down to Bear Creek and swung for awhile (we also went down the wet slides and afterwards it looked like we had wet our pants). Later Dad took us to REI where I got a new rain coat, new zip off pants, and we picked up my sleeping bag. Then we stopped by the store and got food for dinner. Raye’s parents picked her up at 7:15, I took Zindzi on a nice long, rainy, walk and the poor puppy got stung by a bee (or wasp) right above her left eye. When I got home we had apple crisp for dessert and ran down to the grocery store for food for back packing. I have been up way to late tonight trying to get some last minute packing in and getting this done. 
 
My eyes are getting very, very heavy so I should go get a good night sleep. 
Larissa

August 17

I woke up at 7:30 this morning to Zindzi whimpering. I got up and fed her and then went back to sleep, the second time I woke up at 8:15. I had already gotten dressed so I went with Dad and Zindzi to the kennel. Zindzi was not happy to be going to the kennel and when we got there she had her tail between her legs. But we still had to drop her off so finally she obeyed. We went back home, had breakfast, and packed the car. Then we drove the hour or so drive to Dumont to pick up Erica. 
 
We got to Winter Park, and Kels and Erica went and did there own thing. The first thing Dad and I did was ride the chairlift up to the Alpine Slide, we zoomed down the slide because there wasn’t anyone on it yet and it was so fun! We did the alpine slide about 2 more times then took a break to play some Mini Golf. Then we did 2 more runs on the slide and had lunch. After lunch we did the maze, which took us 10 minutes to complete, so we went and did more Alpine Sliding! Who knows how many slides we did and in the end we played three rounds of Mini Golf. We finished at about 4:00 and came to Peter and Sandra’s. Dad and Kels went and met Erica’s mom down at the stop light then came home and we had dinner at about 7:00. Later we watched some Olympics, and now I am working on school work and about to get ready for bed.
 
Goodnight! Larissa


August 18

Hola Amigos! 
I woke up early and did some math. Then we got dressed and had lunch. We went and rented bikes then went up to the Mountain Bike trail head. We biked for awhile and I was doing great until we went down a pretty easy hill, but my bike slipped and I ran into a tree. My whole right leg almost went numb and I have about 10 bruises from that fall. The rest of the biking went wonderful and I had so much fun!

We got back to the car at about 4:00pm, returned the bikes and came back to the house. All of us started getting busy packing right away and we are finally done. I did about one hour of math once we finished packing and then helped Dad make dinner. Much later we made one of the best smoothies I have ever tasted! Now we are hanging doing some last minute stuff and watching the Olympics.

Adios!
Larissa

August 19

Aaah the peacefulness and beauty of Eagles Nest Meadow is great!
Today has been just spectacular. It started out with a big and yummy breakfast at the Sunshine Café. Then we drove to the parking lot of Eagles Nest Wilderness. There we packed up and made the long ascent to where we would camp. The whole four mile hike (with huge backpacks) only took us about three hours, not to mention that ¾ of it was uphill. 

Once we had set up camp and gotten everything organized we set off again (this time without heavy backpacks) to explore (and get away from the mosquitoes). We did a big loop and it was gorgeous! We were out for about one and a half hours (Kels and I are refusing to keep track of time up here so I don’t know what time we got back) and it was just reaching dusk. 

Now we are having some quiet time before dinner. Oh did I mention that we are having dehydrated stroganoff for dinner? Yum! (No seriously it actually tastes pretty good, and considering we are backpacking and that everything always tastes better backpacking it’s actually a pretty good deal). After dinner and clean up we shall retire to tent to play some farkle. Then we will snuggle up and sleep the sweet sleep of backpacking.

Goodbye for now!
Larissa



August 20

Another most enjoyable day to look back on!
We got up early because it is hard to sleep late when there is sunshine flooding your tent at 7:00am. We had breakfast and got off to a very early start so we would have time to get in a nice long hike. 

The first pass we had to hike over is called Eccles Pass, that was a good long grunt and finally we got to the top. We took a short break there and then went down into the meadow on the other side. All of us got hungry pretty quickly, so we stopped at a tarn for our first lunch. After lunch we moseyed through the valley, and hiked up the second pass that is called Red Buffalo Pass. We sat down and had a snack, while we were sitting some marmots got curious and came over to watch us. One of the marmots got about a yard away from dad and looked like it was going to jump on him. After the marmots lost interest, we hiked up to a peak, from the peak we could see miles in all directions we could even see Vail. We cam down and saw the same marmots still hanging out where we were before. Dad told me to sit down and see if one of the marmots would come up to me. I sat down and the same marmot that went up to Dad came over to me, it got a foot away from me and was just about to jump on me, when I jumped up and said, “Eww, its ugly!” 

After the marmot incident, we walked back to our first lunch spot and had a second lunch. We had a good lunch but right after we finished it looked like it was going to rain and we wanted to get over Eccles Pass before it did. So, we walked fast and steadily (except for one stop to boot ski) and made it through the valley, up the pass, and all the way back to our camp site before it rained. Right now it is raining, we are hanging out in the tent playing hearts and resting. Later once it clears up we will go outside and have dinner, then probably sit and drink hot drinks and watch the sunset. Then we will go into the tent and play some farkle, hopefully I will actually win tonight.

That’s it for now!
Larissa