White River National Forest, Colorado

A wedding called me away to Colorado, so I decided to go out a few days early with my youngest brother and make a mini-vacation of it.  We stayed in Breckenridge and hiked a few days in the White River National Forest.  What a beautiful place...

We did the Blue River Trail...which was neither blue nor within view of any river, but still lovely.  We bagged the scenic peak of Little Mountain--another Colorado misnomer: at 10,046 feet, it's hardly "little." However, it is shorter than all the peaks surrounding it. 

The White River National Forest is vast and mountainous.  The temps were cool, but the sunlight was gruelingly hot.  All the living world bore the calming scent of sunshine on evergreens.

The rare deciduous trees were mainly aspens.  There's not as much diversity in tree populations out there, for all the striking topography.

My brother doesn't get away very often, and he certainly never gets very far from his home--on a farm in Ohio.  When he was young, he and a gaggle of his stoner friends heard that the casinos in Las Vegas served free drinks, so they all four piled into his pickup truck and moved out there.  Between the four of them, they rented a cheap apartment where they all slept on the floor.  The bank started threatening to repossess the truck, so he parked it in the lots of local grocery stores and plazas to prevent them from finding it.  They did eventually locate and take the truck, so our parents flew him back to Ohio--where they were living--after just few drunken months out west.  Turns out, those casinos don't give free drinks to just anyone who shows up, so there wasn't much point in staying.

All of that is to say, he hasn't seen much of the world, so this Colorado trip was a big adventure for him.  Happily, my brother stopped drinking long ago, and now his life revolves entirely around his family of 6--for whom I am by far the favorite fun uncle.  That's nice, too.  He'd never been away from them for more than one night.  After we'd been in Colorado for 3 days, my 7-year old niece said to her mother (my brother's wife), "I don't even remember what it was like when daddy still lived here."  His 9-year old daughter told him, "I dreamed you died out there and we played rap at your funeral."