Team Tully: The High Desert

The lovely Dolly Parton and her lyrics come to mind "I'm just travelin', travelin', travelin', I'm just travelin' thru." We have been TRAVELING!! Hooray! Team Tully has been able to hit the road, fly the friendly skies, and hike our hearts out! Hooray! It feels SO good. Gosh, how we have missed the wandering, the new places, the wide open spaces.

We have just returned from the high deserts of Utah and Colorado. L has spent the past 5 weeks teaching a field geology course out west, driving a box truck full of gear for 16 students and 5 faculty for five weeks of primitive and remote camping. Wild! The caravan crossed the country and marveled at the changes in flora, fauna, geology, and topography until reaching the high desert region of the American West where they would spend 5 weeks learning and mapping and hiking and completing countless maps and cross sections of new and unique geology all while being hours from any grocery stores or other conveniences! Wild! Luke and I joined this fantastic crew for a week in Colorado to see L and be a part of this unique experience and to give Luke a glimpse into the geology fieldwork world. It brought back so many memories of my own field camp experiences and it was so much fun to see the dynamics and social experiment of the students. It was a great group of kids (kids...because I am indeed old)!! Luke thought the students were absolutely hilarious and he got quite the earful of colorful language and delighted in all the college student shenanigans! So fun! Camp life was fun, the hikes awesome and challenging, and the scenery beyond beautiful! We were so grateful to be included and so thrilled to share at least a portion of this experience with L. Love Does!

Luke and I spent a day and a half on our own before meeting up with L. We rented the perfect little AirBnB outside of Colorado Springs and had Pike's Peak to gaze at each morning!

We went right from the airport to some red rock hiking!

One of Luke's travel quirks...he brings a Lego figure or other small trinket and photographs them. I asked him to share some with me. How's this for perspective?! I love it.

This formation is called Siamese Twins

My red rock climber!

Moments after being startled by an antlered mule deer (to clarify, I was startled, Luke was not) we ran into a nice gentleman who offered to take our picture. The answer is always "YES, thank you!"

The landscape, the sky, the beauty

L was given a day off on their arrival into CO so we picked him up at camp and headed to some Native American cliff dwellings and another hike with a decent amount of elevation change! It was so nice to have him all to ourselves and we enjoyed the Team Tully wandering, plus L got to use a real bathroom and was able to thoroughly wash his hands! The little things!

Looking from inside the dwelling out

Amazing ingenuity!

Another fellow hiker as the photographer! Colorado folks are so sweet!

How is that for a campsite?!

Gorgeous

The dreaded and plentiful cholla cactus! Yikes! Cacti EVERYWHERE! By far our biggest obstacle hiking. Cacti in our shoes, pants, butts (both Luke and I sat on one), just everywhere! But the cholla was the largest of all.

Late afternoon snooze under the creekside cottonwood trees. The field camp life!

Views for miles

Lower elevation meadow along a river, a welcome swimming hole on a hot day!

Dave, the lead professor, had his 8 year old son E with him while we were there. Luke and E had a great time together and were so very creative in their play....endless entertainment in the great outdoors. This was our makeshift bridge to get everyone to the mapping area. Worked like a charm