Fish eating fish

It was my birthday today and I wanted to go fishing. I caught a nice 14 inch rainbow, and a little later Ashley caught one that was a tad bigger. It was her biggest fish ever and she was super excited. I'll put that story up on the private blog.

We kept both fish and I started fileting them when we got home. I was amazed at how big of a pig this rainbow was. I looked at what was in his stomach and there were 15 minnows in various stages of digestion. I have no idea of how he packed them all in!

Yeah, it might be a little bit gross, but it's super fascinating too!

Midway Hot Springs Turkey Soak

We've made it somewhat of a tradition to visit hot springs on holidays. There's nothing quite like a warm soak on a cool day. Thanksgiving morning we went over to the hot springs near Midway, Utah. The water today was really hot. Other times we've been, the water has stratified with the top 18 inches being hot, and the rest being warm. It was hot the whole way through on Thanksgiving. We retreated to the coolest part and enjoyed the warmth.

The best spot (normally) for a soak.

The source.

The pool.

Someone has done a lot of great work cleaning it up, placing gravel on the bottom of the pool, removing garbage, etc. If you read this, thank you!

Red Fossil Coral

We took a trip to Utah over Thansgiving. I'd heard of a site near Woodland that had red fossil coral, so when we had a free morning, we went to look.

It was about a mile and a half hike in, but getting out was pretty. There were great views once we got there.

And, best of all- we found some coral! The coral is up on top of a hill, but we had better success finding some further down the hill that had eroded and tumbled it's way to lower elevations.

Disneyland Fort Collins

Saturday we went and wandered around the old downtown Fort Collins. I'd heard that Disneyland was modeled after Fort Collins, so I did a bit of research and discoved that it is true!

The Emporium is modeled after this building- an old bank. Currently a rock & mineral shop is at the location.

The Disneyland Fire Station is modeled after the fire station here in Fort Collins.

Those are the two buildings that remain standing that are close models. A few other buildings have been demolished and aren't around anymore. Several other buildings have architectural elements that were used in the design of Disneyland's Main Street USA.

It was fun looking at the buildings.

If you're interested in further reading, Main Street Revisited by Richard V. Francaviglia is a good reference. You can also find a few other places online that tell more, the best is history.fcgov.com/archive/legends.disney.php

A short list for those who are looking.

Remaining

Fire Station

Jefferson Street

Walnut Street

Miller Block Building

Union Pacific Train Station

Poudre Valley Bank Building

Demolished

"CSU's Old Main" - burned down in the 1960's

Hottel House- - demolished in 1962

The old Larimer County Courthouse

Colorado & Southern Railroad Station

First National Bank Building- demolished in 1961

Hiking Greyrock

I've had my eye on Greyrock for a while. Everything I've heard sounded like it would be a great little hike- 6-7 miles round trip, great views, & bagging a prominent Larimer County peak. Sure enough, it was a great hike.

The trail was built by the CCC in the 1930's. You can still see rock walls and other features that were built then.

The trail starts gently at the Poudre River, heads west for about half a mile, then turns sharply north and begins to climb. The trail climbs for the next mile or so to the overlook. From the overlook, the trail resumes to being fairly level.

Shortly past the overlook,you can really see Greyrock as it rises above you. The trail goes along the east side and up the back. It's steepest from this point on. Once you make it around back, the trail kindof peters out so you have to look around to find it again.

Just below the summit is a small pond. The easiest climbing is to the left of the pond up the east face.

Once at the top, the views are incredible in every direction.

We left Fort Collins at 9 AM, and made it back about 3, so round trip time was about 6 hours. We did have a 5 week old baby with us, so most people can do it a lot quicker.

Summit Location: N 40* 42.942 W 105* 17.557
Trailhead location: N 40* 41. 729 W. 105* 17.095

Peak Elevation- 7613 feet

Trailhead elevation- abt 5800 feet

New Belgium Beer Tour

In Fort Collins, beer is a big thing. Not being a drinker, I don't understand why people get so giddy about it. They have numerous breweries, a beer festival, and a parade that's all about riding bikes and drinking beer. Doug and Bob McKenzie would love it here. Not being a drinker, you live in a world parallel to those who do. When work is done instead of going for a beer you go home for dinner; group projects are best done over a pizza instead of beer, and big events are marked with milkshakes instead of a round at the bar.

So in spite of all of this, the beer factory still was calling to me. Not for the beer, but for the buildings, machines, and processes. I had a friend who did an analysis of ways to improve the process and found that they only thing they could do better is ship it a day or two sooner. Other classes I've had have mentioned New Belgium for their buildings and innovative construction.

Last week we went for a tour. It was definitely cool to see. The bottle filling area was my favorite. I liked watching the bottles move around on the long conveyor belts.

Ashley liked the big wooden barrels in one of the back rooms. She also liked the quality control room- it looked like a laboratory!

They have some random decorations on the walls inside. The tour took an hour and a half. You could say we've officially seen everything in Fort Collins now.

Prickly Pears & Jelly

It's kindof amazing how adventures get a mind of their own and just sprout out of little ideas. A while back we picked up a new cookbook (Barbeque, Biscuits, & Beans) that's all about cowboy cooking. It's great, complete with tasty recipes and colorful pictures. Recipe books without pictures are like long weekends with nothing to do. Anyway, there's a recipe in there for prickly pear jelly that looked rather unusual. So I just tucked the idea in the back of my head. Fast forward to more recently when we found a patch of prickly pears with lots of ripe fruit. It was on the side of a cliff, and some other stuff, but that's not the point. The point was it had lots of fruit to accompany the usual "pricklys."

We came back with some tongs, a bag, and gloves to harvest the patch. The tongs worked great! We didn't get pricked at all! We ended up getting about half of a gallon of the little red pears. Now the pears weren't big, they were about the size of a thumb. And they had itty-bitty pricklys all over them.

So, we brought them home, soaked them in cold water, and peeled the skins off of them. They're full of little black seeds. We put them in a pot. It's a lot of work to peel them. Also, rubber gloves are recommended, but we didn't have any. It took a while to get the pricklys out of my fingers.

After they were all cut up, we boiled them for a while, then poured out the juice to use to make prickly pear jelly.

The jelly is unlike any jelly I've had before. It tastes more wild than other jelly, but kindof sweet. It turned out a beautiful reddish color. Yum!

Fall Fishing

Yesterday was absolutely beautiful. After finishing up with schoolwork and a few other things, I couldn't resist the call of the trout stream anymore. Sometimes you just know it's a killer day to be out. My instincts didn't neglect me.

I made it to the river about 4, one of my favorite times to be out. The first hole didn't produce, much to my surprise. I pulled this healthy cutt-bow out of the second. It was fat, wide, and colorful; a healthy fish. I was expecting a brown, but I'll take one like this anyday! It ended up being the largest of the day.

It was great being down on the water while I could hear traffic, horns, and sirens off in the distance. Ahh, sometimes it's not hard to know that you made a good decision! I'm sometimes amazed that I've only seen one other person fishing this stretch.

My next fish was super fun. I watched him follow the spinner in and hit it. He made a few runs and jumped a few times. What a great fish! I got him in, then tried to get out the camera. Getting the camera was a struggle, so I set the fish back in the water and he unhooked himself before I could get a picture. The third one was a decent brown.

I worked my way upstream and caught number 4. The fish today were extremely acrobatic. Most of them tried flips and headshakes when they were airborne. Where's a cameraman when you need one!

Several months ago, I took my canoe through here and it gave me a whole new perspective on this stretch of river. I discovered several fishy looking spots that aren't as apparent from the bank. I continued on and exploited a few of these areas, pulling several more brown trout out of them.

This one took a good look that was a little too close. I carefully unhooked and released it. Hopefully it doesn't go blind in the one eye.

I wasn't completely engrossed in the fishing, I took some time to enjoy the scenery as well. What a beautiful perfect day!

The last fish I caught was the smallest, but reminded me of a little football. I really liked the colors and spotted pattern of his sides. Oh yeah!

I was out of time, so I almost regretfully took down my pole and headed home. Some days you just can't do anything wrong. I walked in the door and there was a pan of fresh brownies and two beautiful girls waiting for me. Life is good.

The Bellvue Fish Hatchery

Today we went to the fish hatchery in Bellvue, a few minutes out of Fort Collins. It was fun watching the fish swim up and down their raceways. One of the best parts about it is a fish food dispenser where you can purchase a handful of fish food for a quarter. It made me want to bring a lot of quarters. We spent about 45 minutes walking around, looking at the fish, and looking for the big fish. We finally found one that was about 2 feet long in the water channel before it dropped into the raceways.

Can you spot the big fish?

Little swimmers

Food fight!

More rainbow trout

The Bellvue Fish Hatchery is open from 8-4 on most days.

Cub Lake in RMNP

Saturday was spent at Rocky Mountain National Park. The leaves were starting to change, the elk were bugling, and most importantly it was free admission because of National Public Lands day or something like that. We didn't want to do anything too ambitious, so we hiked up to Cub Lake. The trail was on the light side of moderate (my rating) because my overdue wife was able to do it. I was surprised that nobody passed us on the hike in. The lake had a lot of lillypads, too many for fishing, so we ate lunch, then continued down the trail to "The Pool". The Pool was more like a wide spot on the Big Thompson River. In my opinion it's not worthy of being a destination, but sure enough, the literature the park handed out indicated it was an option. From the pool, we wandered down the trail to the parking lot. The loop was a tad over 5 miles. It took us several hours, but we just wandered along.

Cub Lake