The Lazy H Climbing Club: Spring in Rifle

We spent much of the spring climbing in Rifle this year. We now have a second home at the EconoLodge in New Castle. We know the staff, we have our favorite room (113), and we have found the best bike paths, the best parks, the the best gas station pizza.

Rifle Mountain Park is a beautiful canyon where the kids can ride their bikes and dig in the sand and build forts in the woods. On the other hand the river is raging this time of year and cars zoom through the canyon, so I'm always afraid they're doing to drown or get hit by a car. But all in all, its a pretty nice place to spend the spring.

Ama & LoLo hiking up to Hanging Lake in Glenwood Canyon.

We made it! Its only 1.3 miles and it took us over 2 hours at Ama's pace. Nothing like kids to make 1 mile seem like 10. (To her credit, it was all uphill.)

Hanging Lake

Hanging out at Rifle


Most of Ama's time at Rifle is spent making dirt volcanoes and sand soup. Her specialties are vanilla and chocolate soup.

Their spot under Mark's route, with Kindles babysitting

More Rifle digging

Ninja moves

I get many dandelion bouquets

More ninja moves

Ama is a stick collector. Sticks and dandelions, everywhere we go.

A couple times we ran into our friend Rob Pizem who has two boys the same ages as our kids. Ama and Orson got along great and liked to go exploring in the woods.

The best part of climbing for Logan is the swings

Mark & LoLo at Grizzly Creek in Glenwood Canyon. The rivers are high right now so there are lots of pretty waterfalls.

Me & Mark

Me & LoLo

Glenwood Springs has great bike trails. We found one with a tunnel through a culvert.

The New Castle fire station put on an open house one day, complete with free lunch, tours of the fire trucks, and water hose games in the parking lot.

Ama with her new firehat

She loved all the buttons in the firetruck.

We do still have jobs and stuff so we're home 4 days of the week. We celebrated Mark's birthday and Derby, but mostly we just went to work and daycare.