All this waterfall hiking over the last few weeks had me working overtime on photo editing, finding GPS coordinates and lastly, redesigning our waterfall pages into a slicker CSS-styled look.

Eric’s work with the database has made my life a lot easier and I wanted to freshen up the look of the site. Additionally, we’ve created a Google map, so along with the directions on the individual pages, folks should be able to find any of the 209 waterfalls we’ve visited! :)

Rolling up at 10am, I panicked a little when I saw the guard setting up a barricade for the Lake Rose parking lot. Thankfully, he waved us past and we got one of the last parking spots before folks had to add over a mile to hike into the Ganoga Glen gorge. We coated ourselves with bug spray, packed some snacks and hit the trail with Riesling leading the way.

The weather started out perfect, so we took our time to let Eric photograph all the waterfalls. I love a hike that offers regular stopping points! The park boasts 22 named waterfalls, we got photos of 19 of them.

The trail was pretty difficult in spots, lots of stairs, but still very walkable for pup and despite her usual distaste of being wet, she even splashed around below Harrison Wright Falls.

We got caught in a total downpour about 2/3 of the way through the hike, but luckily found some shelter to wait out the storm. Riesling and I were absolutely coated in mud at the end of the 4.5 mile hike (carrying a writhing mud-covered animal will do that to a person), but I know we both had a great time despite what her tail says in the photo below.

Mama, why am I so filthy?

Before allowing her anywhere near the car, we found a wash basin near the campground and gave her a quick bath. :)

After this, we drove the remaining 9 hours home to North Carolina. The GPS put us at our hotel in Maryland around 5pm, so I made the decision to just keep on driving so we could sleep in our own beds for the first time in almost four weeks. Hallelujah!

Just a quick update from Utica, NY… we are heading up to the Adirondacks this weekend and may not have internet, so the Barcelona updates will resume on Sunday when we return to civilization. :)

And after that, we’ll have plenty to share from our time in upstate NY!

On our way south to Colorado Springs to meet up with my dad and Lynn, we took a short stroll around Lily Lake on the southern end of Rocky Mountain National Park. We saw more birds and small mammals here than on any other trail in the park… including this chipmunk who happily posed for us.

I was mostly bummed about all the snow because it meant it was too early for wildflowers. However! We did find some blue pasqueflowers on the southern side of Lily Lake just coming up. Imagine a fuzzy crocus. :)

We finished the southern end of the Peak-to-Peak highway which included a drive through Blackhawk, a town (seemingly) consisting entirely of casinos.

We took a short detour to Evergreen, CO to visit Creekside Cellars. The red wine was passable, but overpriced, and the white was, well, not really drinkable according to Eric.

Once in Colorado Springs we headed to North Cheyenne Cañon Park to see Helen Hunt Falls and Silver Cascade Falls.

Helen Hunt Falls is adjacent to the parking area, so the place was pretty crowded. It was next to impossible to get a shot of the falls without people posing on the bridge or even sitting in the creek above the falls. Silver Cascade Falls is not worth the uphill climb to see it, although you do pass this lovely cascade on the way. Our shot was taken from an overlook further up the road.

The drive out of the park with the sun behind us was beautiful; the light was really making the red rocks stand out.

After acquiring our rental car (Hertz takes forever, so I only use them when we get quadruple credit on Southwest), we headed west to Boulder and our first stop of the trip—Boulder Falls.

The sun was pretty strong, but Eric managed a darn good shot of this beautiful falls, regardless. It’s an easy hike to the falls, but most of it is on slippery rocks, so watch your step.

In Nederland, after a delicious BBQ lunch, we picked up the Peak to Peak scenic byway that took us north to Rocky Mountain National Park. We encountered both snow and sun on the way.

We also saw quite a few elk, both grazing on the side of the road and sprinkled throughout the meadow areas.

Many of the roads were closed still, which we knew could happen, so we had to discard some of the hikes we wanted to do. We were also at the mercy of daylight, but fortunately, the hike to Alberta Falls is only about 2 miles roundtrip.

In the snow.

Totally worth it.

The trail (what we could make of it anyway) paralleled a gorge, passing aspen groves and a creek. We even saw a beaver! The falls itself was very lovely, too.

We left the park after sunset, stopping at the alluvial fan for a quick shot of Horseshoe Falls before Eric had to retire his camera for the day. This shot was about 3 seconds - thank goodness for tripods!

Best of all, by the time we got to the park, all the stations were closed, so this visit was entirely free! Don’t worry though, they’ll get us on a future visit… we’ll definitely be back.

One of the first things that Eric researched after we bought our plane tickets was potential waterfall hikes. It hasn’t rained in San Francisco for several weeks, so we knew the waterflow was going to be low, but we were hoping it was still early enough in the season to get lucky.

Once we were on the ground we decided to concentrate on the Laurel Dell trail near Alpine Lake because the hike paralleled Cataract Creek and there were bound to be at least some water flowing over the falls.

Compared to other people’s photos after a good rain, the water flow was meager, but we enjoyed the fresh air and gratification that a new waterfall every couple hundred yards brings.

Eric photographed ten cascades along this uphill hike… all the shots are in our San Francisco Flickr set. We’ll also have all the photos and directions up shortly on our waterfall database.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new way to update our collection of waterfall photos. Previously, we would add new waterfalls by hand into the respective state and county indices. While this worked for a few waterfalls, now that we have well ~140 falls it had become hard to manage. Instead, I decided to build a small database that would hold the important info (state, directions, photo, etc.) and write some PHP code to build the pages for us. I’ve been wanting to learn a bit more PHP code and this seemed like a good excuse reason.

As you might have guessed, I’ve finished the first version and our redesigned waterfall site is now automatically generated. Anytime we have an update we only need to add the data to the database and let the scripts do the rest of the work. Sweet.