"These flowers are so beautiful!"

     Okay so this week was awesome. On Monday I drove up Trail Ridge Road to see the sunset for Elizabeth's birthday. Rachel joined us and we had a great time watching the sun set over the mountains. I don't think I'll ever get sick of seeing it.

     A group of us also went to see Inside Out on Tuesday. It was fantastic. I loved seeing all of the creative ways that the brain was interpreted. It had a great and important message about processing your feelings and I'm pretty sure that over half of the theater cried.
     My job was also a blast this week. The first two days of the week were spent brainstorming themes for the Y's Annual Campaign in the fall. Anything raised in the Annual Campaign goes to supporting the Y's mission. So any of the programs we've promoted in the past summer campaigns like GRACE (for families affected by childhood cancer) to Military Getaway are funded by money from the Annual Campaign. When there was a huge flood in Colorado my freshman year of college, the Y provided housing for everyone who was displaced by the flooding. Money from the Annual Campaign helped make that happen. Joanna, my co-worker/one of my supervisors, is in charge of launching the campaign to the Board and volunteers to making calls to raise funds for this. She uses a themes to make it fun. Last year she used The Wizard of Oz (bummer that I couldn't do that...you know, being from Kansas and all), so I've been finding ideas to help her "top it."
     It took some creative thinking and by the end of the day Tuesday I had it narrowed down to six ideas- Disney, Olympics, The Wheel of Fortune, LIFE, Superheroes and Broadway. I gave Joanna a short presentation and next week I'll present it to the department so we can make an official vote. After that I'll get to make all of the campaign materials reflect the theme, which will be super fun. I'm happy that they care about my learning and want me to get the most out of my experience here.
     Tuesday mornings are also fun because there's a small gathering by the museum for guests to come and hear about the philanthropy programs that the Y does. Our first one had a bit of rain but the one this past week had gorgeous weather. There are quite a few cabin donors that stop by so I'm getting to know them better and I really enjoy that! (There are also donuts so obviously it's a great time.) Our department also has meetings on Tuesdays so it's nice to start off interacting with people before having to go to a bunch of meetings.
     Thursday was, by far, one of the most fun days I've had with the internship. Almost all of the department traveled over to the other side of Trail Ridge Road to Snow Mountain Ranch. It's an area that's a little more secluded but just as beautiful as the Estes Park Center. We are in the process of filming an impact video so the main purpose of our visit was to get footage of different programs and activities happening throughout the day. We also talked to different guests and got their "Y story." Two activities to watch were the stick horse rodeo (aka kids running around obstacles on stick horses aka one of the most adorable things I have ever seen) and the tubing hill. I even got to take a turn down the tubing hill!

"We were told to throw you down as fast as possible."
"...Oh." 

    The day was full of filming and fun. I had never been out to Snow Mountain Ranch so I loved seeing it. There were a ton of gorgeous wildflowers all over the place. The outdoor chapel was called Columbine Point because there were clusters of Columbine flowers all over the place. It was so cool to see it all!

     Driving over Trail Ridge Road was gorgeous, too. The wildflowers are all starting to come into full bloom and they're beautiful. I didn't get any pictures of Trail Ridge but I got a ton on our hikes throughout the week. Unfortunately we weren't graced with the presence of a moose on the drive (they're really popular on the other side of the divide), but I saw one from far away at SMR and it was huge. 

     My favorite part of the day was talking to Camp Chief Ouray counselors and campers. CCO is the Y's residential camp out at Snow Mountain Ranch. A lot of the campers we interviewed said nice things, but I loved hearing the counselors' stories. Some of them had been going to CCO for over 10 years. One guy even said, "CCO has made me the person I am today." Wow. It's seriously so cool hearing everyone's stories. I still think it's the best part of my job. There was a lot of crazy thunderstorms so Courtney, my other supervisor, and I had to book it back to the Y. Even with leaving early it was still a 12 hour day so I crashed almost as soon as I got home.
     With the 12 hour day on Thursday, I got to take Friday afternoon off. It was great- I even got to spend some time talking to one of my roommates in Theta for two hours. Rose has been gone for so long with Field Training and such so it was fantastic being able to talk to her for such a long time. That night, I hiked to Cub Lake with a small group. The sun was shining so bright on all of the lily pads and we got to see some incredible flowers on the way back. Another cool thing was seeing a whole herd of elk on our path. It took us a while to get past them (there were lots of babies in the herd and the moms are super protective so we had to be careful) but we were off the trail just before dusk.

 
     Saturday was super long. One of my old co-workers asked Rachel and me to join her on a guided hike to Black and Blue Lake. We reported to Sweet Memorial at 6;15 that morning and started on the trail at 7:00. Normally I don't like guided hikes but we had a great group. It made the whole day very enjoyable. We made it to Mills Lake in no time and wow it was incredible that early in the morning.

     Black Lake was the next one we hit. It got a little tricky in the last half mile or so because there was a lot of snow but we made it there just fine. It's one of my favorite lakes in the park, and being able to see it again made me extremely happy.

     The stretch from Black Lake to Blue Lake was absolutely killer. It wasn't even one mile but it was all uphill. There also wasn't a specific trail so we spent a lot of time climbing up rocks and regretting our life choices. (This was Stage 5 of hiking, otherwise known as: "We should have gotten horses for this.") Luckily we made it to the top with no injuries and the view/lake was fantastic.

     We booked it back to the trailhead and made it back around 3:00 PM. I hadn't felt that tired or sore in a while but I still managed to drag myself downtown to go out to dinner with Rachel, Zoe (my past co-worker) and two other new friends who work in Sweet this year. It was a lot of fun hanging out with them and I spent the rest of the night recovering from the hike. I was juuuust about to call it a night and go to bed early (you know, like a responsible adult), but then Elizabeth texted a group of us to inform us that there was going to be a meteor shower. She wanted to know if we wanted to drive up Trail Ridge Road to watch it. My immediate response was "UM DUH," so we headed up around 11:30.
     As it turns out, the sky was super cloudy that night. We all noticed it driving up but for some reason we thought, "maybe it'll change by the time we get to the rest stop." I'm not sure how we came to that conclusion, but anyway we met Amanda up there and stayed until 1:15 AM. It was crazy. We didn't see any meteors but the sky was cleared almost in a circle right above us so we could still see a lot of stars. I even saw a beautiful shooting star! Despite being wrong about the meteor shower, I was still super happy that we made the trip up. I finally crawled into bed around 2 AM.
     Rachel and I were going to find another cool hike to do Sunday but since we had been awake for 21 hours we opted to sleep in and go into town in the afternoon. There was a Scandinavian festival happening so we wandering around with Kristina and Amanda for a while. We even stopped into a few shops as well. One shop we stopped in had a rabbit that we all got to stop and pet. We ended our trip in town with a stop in the bookstore (we all could have spent hours there) and then headed over to hang out at Amanda's house. She lives in town with her cousins, so we were able to actually cook dinner for ourselves. Well...we bought Kraft mac and cheese and then Kristina and I watched Rachel make it. Close enough. We hung out, watched a horrible movie called After the Ball (think A Cinderella Story meets She's the Man but about ten times worse) and made our "hiking bucket list." I'm starting to feel unusually urgent about hiking everything on the list. We have less than ten full days of hiking left in the summer so we won't hit everything but we're trying to find a way to hit as much as possible.
     It's so weird to think that this weekend is the Fourth of July. Summer is always nuts in Estes Park but July is absolutely insane. I don't think I'm mentally prepared for all of the traffic but it'll be fun to see what the crazy summer brings to the philanthropy department.