Left unattended: Fall in Telluride

On the last weekend in September, Brandon, Maria, and I went to Telluride, Colorado to do some hiking and practice our photography skills on the fall colors.

I’ll share some pictures and stories below, but for further viewing or reading pleasure, you may wish to check out:

All 492 of my pictures
Maria’s blog posts: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Food
Brandon’s pictures
Maria’s pictures

This trip had three main focus areas: food, hiking, and fall leaves.

Food

Our first meal was actually at a place I had never been to before, but had passed by many times: Brown Dog Pizza, on the recommendation of a Colorado native. We had the “Dog Biscuits” appetizer, which is their cheesy breadsticks. It was delicious. We went back to Brown Dog another night for pizza, and while it was good and likely the best Telluride has to offer, I liked the breadsticks the best.

For our first dinner, we hit up Smugglers, which was as usual fun and full of good food. We had their house-brewed root beer as our beverage of choice. I don’t like to drink root beer that often, but when I do, it’s a nice change and reminds me of my childhood sitting on our deck enjoying a root beer float.

Our final dinner was at Rustico, one of my favorite restaurants. But what I was really looking forward to on this trip, what I was craving, was a fried Oreo sundae from The Sweet Life.

It was just as good as I had remembered from last time, and I’m reminiscing about the taste right now. Because of this, it’s best that I never learn how to fry things myself.

Hiking

We went out for a few hikes on the trip, but our longest and favorite was the hike to Bear Creek Falls. The fall weather was just about perfect for hiking. It wasn’t cold yet, but it wasn’t too hot either. And of course we saw plenty of golden aspen leaves.

2.5 miles later, we reached the falls. I don’t think I meant to take the first picture with a tilt, but I like it.

Leaves

Geeking out

As I mentioned before, I really want to get a new DSLR with a GPS receiver. I’ve carried around a GPS logger before and then matched things up with software, but I don’t like that process. This time I just took a reference shot with my Nexus One so I could see where the DSLR shots were taken and geotag appropriately. One reason that I wanted to geotag all of my photos was so that I could get them added to the cool photos layer in Google Maps, which also appears in Street View. My photos haven’t been included as of this writing, but I’ll keep checking back to see if they make it onto the map.

Speaking of gadgets, while we were watching the sunset we noticed two bright lights in the sky before the starts started appearing. Using Google Sky Map, we were able to identify them as Venus and Jupiter.

Well, we were pretty sure that this first one is Venus. It’s right next to Mars, so it was hard to tell, but I think Venus is easier to spot.