Who blew up the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man?

The ski area near our place in Colorado is known for good snow...but this was ridiculous! We're 3-4 miles down the road from Monarch Mountain, about 1000' down in elevation, and that little bit of difference means that in town we usually don't get the heaps of powder that they do.

But "usually" means that sometimes you do!

We were greeted by drifts so high when we arrived that we (mostly Henry) had to spend 20 minutes or so shoveling in order just to get into the front door. (Fortunately there was a shovel out on the porch and reachable! I will show before-and-after shots, plus action pix of Henry at work, next time).

Of course all this white stuff means good skiing (and I'll show some ski area scenes soon, too) and lots of fun for folks who don't have to drive in it. The renters in the Schoolhouse just before we arrived must have had fun digging the tunnel you see above from the parking area to their porch.

And some other residents of the area weren't stopped from nocturnal ramblings...on the left are some formidable tracks that led right up to the Schoolhouse back door!

While the back entrance to the Schoolhouse was almost clear and an animal shelter, from our second-floor window it looks almost completely buried!

Other pix to give you an idea of how much snow we were dealing with...

out storage shed and its new top hat; fortunately we didn't have to get into it

Henry providing scale for Schoolhouse parking area drifts

I took a walk down our very snowy main street when I was too pooped for two days of skiing in a row....here's the street, and our always-sketchy driveway...

We've never seen this street "canyonized" like this before! But street and drive were both navigable, and we were very glad to have an all-wheel drive rental vehicle (in spite of the extra expense, even Henry admitted it).

Anyway, walking was easier than driving, and at the end of the street I always love seeing our little creek. I've written about it before, and I'm glad I know where it is. Since it was almost completely hidden...

view from our deck

looking upstream from the bridge 

The lovely gurgling brook sound, which is always somewhat muffled in winter, was almost completely muted, too. But don't the puffy pillows of snow look pretty on the banks?

They looked pretty on our deck, too, although this much snow—which melts a bit in the sun, then freezes, over and over—is a matter for concern...

So Henry did have to do a lot shoveling, when he wasn't skiing. I'll celebrate his heroic work next time. A lot of it was done up on the rise from which I took this picture of our "compound." Somewhere underneath that blanket are our propane tanks!

Wordless Wednesday: winter light

Elegance in the Park

...again, in Estes Park, Colorado. Last time I showed you some exterior views of the super-elegant Stanley Hotel, where we stayed for a friend's wedding. Now I want to show you some of the wonderful interiors of this historic building.

Yes, it did serve as the inspiration for Stephen King's book The Shining (which is almost as scary as the movie) but we didn't find it spooky inside at all...just wonderfully elegant and maybe a few steps up from our usual cheap-motel lodgings. 

However, in the interests of full disclosure, we didn't have time to take their Ghost Tour, so perhaps we just weren't looking for supernatural phenomena in the right places  . And the resident psychic wasn't in to offer assistance.

They also offer history tours, which we were even sorrier to have missed.

It's obviously a place with lots of non-supernatural history. They do have displays and informational signs that let you in on some of this. For example, the Stanley Steamer (that's the Stanley the hotel is named for) in the lobby:

And there's this amusing, but also rather sad, note that's displayed outside the Music Room (where we had a delicious morning-after brunch with our friends—click on the image to enlarge if it's too small to read here):

But it was mostly just the sheer elegance of the place that charmed us the most. For instance, those fabulous staircases that are at the top of the post—the top one is the main stair, the second is one that just leads from the second to the fourth floor. Our room was on the third, so we took this one a lot.

Although, when we were lugging bags we were grateful for the old-timey (but fully functional) elevator. On the left is a picture of Henry inside its cozy confines. It didn't have an operator, but otherwise looked very much like the elevators I remember, mistily, from childhood—with double doors and lots of shiny brass.

The design highlight of the place, though, is the gorgeous bar...

I admit to being first drawn to it because of the incredibly creepy scenes in The Shining when Jack Nicholson visits with the hallucinated bartender. But upon entry we found it to be, more simply, just a fabulous space, with all kinds of interesting features...

gorgeous copper-topped tables

room divider with lovely liquor bottles diffusing the winter sunlight

All, in all, a great lodging experience that we wish could have been longer. But we were off to our place in Garfield the day after the wedding, where more adventures awaited us. I'll tell you about them next time.

the old room keys at the registration desk

Snow in the Park

....Estes Park, Colorado, that is. Plenty of snow, but, despite the reputation of the hotel where we stayed, no ghosts or other supernatural happenings. Just a gorgeous building in a fabulous setting.

Yes, that's the famous Stanley Hotel, the original inspiration for The Shining (after all these years probably still the scariest movie I've ever seen).

It wasn't the hotel that was filmed in the Kubrick movie, but we learned that a 1997 re-make was filmed there. Gotta find it on Netflix or at the library. I'm curious to see if it's as scary as the one I've seen, but mostly because it's so much fun to see a movie set in a location where you've been.

The photos above are of the front of the place, but in winter you have to enter through the back door...

...set in what is probably a lovely courtyard in summer. (It was pretty when we were there, with all that snow, but a little slippery!) Those tall ecru-colored poles are actually gigantic furled umbrellas that must cover the whole area when they're opened.

The hotel was named for the Stanley Steamer Stanley (I'll show you a picture of the car they have in the lobby next time, when I showcase the building's interior), who found relief from his consumption and renewed vigor by spending time in the mountains here. In this picture taken on the front porch, you can see the old boy's statue out in front of the hotel (in the red square):

That porch was really gorgeous, as I'm sure you'll agree. It was a little chilly to sit out there and enjoy the view when we were there, but you could tell it would be a wonderful place to relax in warmer weather...

There isn't a big maze, like in the 1980 movie, but there are a couple of touches on the grounds that made me think of that, and of the corresponding structure in the book (wasn't it a playground?)...

could you evade a homicidal maniac in these rows of trees?

mysterious "S" in the front "yard"...
mysterious because I didn't notice it until I looked at my photo!

I guess running into this guy in the right circumstances could be pretty scary, but here he was by the side of the drive to the parking area in the middle of the afternoon. Just impressive then, not frightening!

Of course, in the movie, the scariest stuff happens inside the hotel. Not that we had any supernatural experiences, but we were blown away by the building's interior and decor. I'll show you some of that next time.

---

And why were we here? We were honored to be invited to a Colorado wedding and made a little vacation of it. The wedding was outdoors and we had wondered about the wisdom of that, in mid-January, but it was lovely and we didn't even get too cold...

Congratulations, Laura and Sam!

Wordless Wednesday: winter sun

A horseshoe for luck

I forgot to eat my black-eyed peas for luck on New Year's day. (This is apparently a custom in the southeastern US, and since I grew up in Houston, which is in many ways more akin to the Old South than the rest of Texas, I have always observed this rite. Until this year, that is.)

We were at Canyon Lake for the weekend, eating too much non-pea food, hosting friends, and shooting off the kind of fireworks that are not legal inside the San Antonio city limits but that Henry is quite fond of. 

I also had a very nice walk around our CL neighborhood on New Year's Eve; here's one of the nice views I snapped while strolling:

Doesn't that look nice and peaceful?

However, since I usually don't think about the peas until NYE at the earliest, it never occurred to me to put a can in with the stuff we took to the lake on NYEE. (Plus, I don't even have any cans of peas on hand; I've been lately transitioning away, pretty successfully, from canned veggies and soups to the fresh and homemade variety.)

Anyway, this is all a round-about way of expressing my concerns about luck in the upcoming year, due to the lack of peas in our diet on the appropriate day.

However, we did go paddling on NYD (this has been a tradition among our paddling friends), and the lovely feature where we stopped for lunch is shown at the top of the post: Horseshoe Falls. Most of us, myself included, not at all surprisingly, portaged this rather tricky falls, but Henry went over it as smooth as silk:

So I'm holding out hope that this will suffice for our family's luck guarantee for 2017.

It was a beautiful day for a paddle, not nearly as cold as we had been fearing. And the scenery was terrific. We were on the lower Guadalupe, below Canyon Dam (we can't go here in the summer because the river's choked with toobers), and the banks here are much more developed. 

But there are some stretches where the topography ensures a more wilderness-like experience:

And the river itself is just as beautiful here as upstream:

Horseshoe Falls side channels

the Falls from almost rock-level

So, keep your fingers crossed for me in 2017!

Wordless Wednesday: a friendly zoo