Still Waiting for Spring

I haven't posted for a while because I had nothing blogworthy to say.  And today's post barely falls into the blogworthy category, but I didn't want to give up entirely on this enterprise.

We've been waiting for spring to arrive, and we're still waiting.  The weather has been nice, but it still doesn't look like spring has officially come.  The flowering trees are flowering, but the rest of the trees are just starting to bud.  It is far from green.  Locals tell me not to put flowers in my outside pots until after Mother's Day - then, it's safe to assume that there won't be any surprise winter storms.

This past weekend, we decided to venture into the mountains.  Although we've already lived in Denver for 5 months, we're not winter people and we don't have winter-equipped cars, so we've waited until the non-snow season to get out of town. Everyone here tells us that the prettiest time of year in the mountains is the spring and summer, so we were ready.  Well, as I mentioned above, spring is really not quite present in the city and is even further removed in the mountains.  We could see all of the aspen trees and how beautiful they will be, but they're certainly not there yet.  I'm not sure if spring really exists in the mountains, or if there is just winter and summer.

Since we'd never been anywhere in the mountains, we passed through a few well-known spots, Vail and Aspen, and spent the night in Glenwood Springs.  There's still a little bit of skiing going on, but mostly it's off-season now - in between winter and summer, so it's quiet.  Aspen was almost like a ghost town.

The prettiest area, to me, that we saw was Glenwood Canyon - you pass it on I-70 (quite an engineering feat in itself, it took 20 years to build), and it looks like someone did a beautiful job of stacking stone, except that it's not stacked stone, just natural rock. 

We look forward to going back when all is blooming and to see the beautiful wildflowers and aspens but that may still be a while.  I promise to post new, prettier photos when we take this trip.  On our way home on Sunday, we went through some snow flurries in the mountains and, then, less than an hour away, we were back in the nice 70° of Denver.  On Monday, there was a foot of snow in Aspen and Vail, but again springlike weather in the city.  The weather fluctuations are continually interesting to me.