This weekend Dara and I went camping with Will and Franziska and their dog, Lucy, up on Guanella Pass. Well, not on the pass itself, this time they took us to one of their newly found favorite camping places. We were meeting another friend in Idaho Springs for lunch on the way up, so Will gave us directions to meet them up there.

As seems to be usual, Beaujo's took forever to get us our food. A little over an hour for a couple of pizzas, but they tasted much better than last time, so I won't complain too much.

After that we drove through Georgetown and up Guanella Pass. Guanella Pass was pretty rough. Definitely the worst condition I've seen it in in the years I've been going up there. From there I won't say much because it's supposed to be secret because it's great, and if lots of other people go in, they'll trash it like the other campsites up there, and it won't be great anymore. Also, the directions would likely just get somebody lost. There were something along the lines of park in the lot, walk perpendicular to the road to the lot to the left until you go over a steep hill and into a valley, then walk up the valley till you see us.

It was a fairly quick walk in with some thunder and a little bit of snow. Towards evening the clouds cleared and we had a pretty great sunset and the stars were able to come out. We cooked chicken sausages and red peppers for dinner and had a little wine and Dale's Pale Ale (beer in a can that doesn't suck). Will and I ran around in the willows at sunset grabbing some pictures. Dara and Franziska stayed in camp talking, probably relieved that they didn't have to put up with our craziness. Then we hung around the camp fire until bed time.

Sunday morning I woke to a sniffing sound outside the tent. In my addled waking state, my first thought was "bear!" because all of our food had been left just outside the tent underneath a poncho. Fortunately instead of having my fingers torn off when I lifted the rain fly, I just got a little lick from Lucy. Dara wasn't feeling well, so instead of heading up one of the nearby mountains as planned, we packed everything in and headed back to Boulder. Which was just as well because we were able to easily miss all of the usual Sunday afternoon traffic.

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