Wildflower Hike on Shrine Mountain Trail

Last week my "Women With Altitude" hiking group tackled the Shrine Mountain Trail. The trailhead is off of Shrine Mountain Road, about 2.3 miles past where it peels off the Vail Pass Rest Area parking lot in Colorado. We'd been told by friends that the wildflowers were particularly beautiful on this trail, and they were soooooo right! The photos below don't do them justice. The first photo is of most of the group (minus the photographers), and the next three are of wildflowers.

Then there are the views! Once you reach the top of the ridge, you can see Mt. Holy Cross off to the southwest, the Gore Range to the north and the Tenmile Range to the east. Also, there's the "shrine" itself, a bulwark of a red rock formation (as seen in the first photo below) across a small hanging valley from the ridge the trail goes on (in the second photo).

And there were beautiful but deadly mushrooms. All in all, a fine day for a hike with fine company!

The America Cup International Fly Fishing Tournament

Wicked Eddies, the second book in my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series starring whitewater river ranger Mandy Tanner, features a fly-fishing tournament. I modeled that tournament on a real fly fishing tournament called The America Cup, which is held in Vail, Colorado every fall. For the book, I replaced the loch (lake) days of the competition with downriver rafting days, held on class I-III whitewater sections of the Arkansas River near Salida, Colorado. Otherwise, the details of how the tournament was run, including wading fishing days, are the same as those in The America Cup.

I was able to include such realistic details because John Knight, the Tournament Director of The America Cup, invited me to shadow him on a competition day. Early in the morning, I observed the check-in of two-person fishing teams and volunteer controllers. These controllers measured and recorded fish catches using large PVC pipes cut in half and marked with inches and fractions of inches. John Knight was acting as a controller, too, so I tromped along muddy, brambly terrain alongside the Arkansas River with him while we shadowed a fly fishing team.

As a thank you to John for his help in researching Wicked Eddies, Midnight Ink and I gave him seven autographed copies of Wicked Eddies to use as prizes in this year's tournament. On The America Cup website, you can see photos of the award ceremony, and copies of Wicked Eddies appear in at least two of the photos. I hope those award-winning fly fishers enjoy reading Wicked Eddies, and I hope all of my blog readers do, too!