On to NY

So tomorrow I leave for my brother's graduation from West Point NY. My parents left a few days ago because WP makes a huge deal out of graduation and there's a week's worth of activities. How have I been taking advantage of their absence? Not all that well really. No raging parties etc. Although the other day I took my dog Chester for a beautiful hike. Only problem was that the trail was really snowy still. Like really snowy. Definitely should have had snow shoes since I was sinking up to my crotch with every step in places. Needless to say, that got tiring, so I decided to climb this snow free mountain of the side of trail. Turned out to be a much bigger mountain than it looked like from the bottom. It was really steep and treacherous, so coming down I decided to go down this avalanche chute right next to it. Usually it works pretty well to run down those, but this turned out to be way to steep for that. So I followed Chester's lead and sat on my ass and slid down the whole thing. It was rather exciting and terrifying at times. At one point the snow bank ended and I kept going down the grassy/rocky hillside --not so fun. The good old elbow arrest trick worked well and definitely kept me from killing myself. By the end of the day my poor dog was so tired I had to coax him down the trail. Anyway, so that was fun, it was great to get into the beautiful Colorado mountains.