Shooting an Ma Deuce at Cherry Creek Shooting Range, Colorado

I tried trap-shooting at Cherry Creek finally, but the cold weather and my tempestuous moods did not make the experience a positive one. You should have seen the look on my father’s face when I told him I didn’t hit a one. I was disappointed in myself, too, but I was cheered by the cool machine guns being featured at the range.

An enthusiast called Larry is bringing around his Browning M1919 and Brown M2 machine guns on Fridays and Sundays to let the hoi polloi act out violent paramilitary fantasies on water jugs. The gun I’m crouched behind is a Browning M1919 and the brute to my left is a Browning M2. Larry says that the prices on these respective monsters are $2500 and $12,000 (!); the bullets for the M2 are about five bucks apiece. Larry was generously offering the opportunity to shoot the M2 for seven bucks a pop or twenty for three, and the M1919 for two bucks a shot, or thirty-five for twenty. They’re mounted on tripods and sighted already, so there’s not a lot to it, but still.

South Table Mountain, Colorado

Had some spontaneous Cameron time today, and we decided to do a hike. Cameron has had some extremely frightening and serious health issues recently, and he wanted to go somewhere that would not be too strenuous but still felt somewhat substantial. Enter the Table Mountains, mainstays in any amateur mountaineer’s arsenal. I’ve done the north one, so today we took the Lubahn Trail up South Table Mountain for a short hike and extended photo shoot. We found the perfect jutting piece of rock to play Batman on. Which we did, for like thirty minutes.

I also seized the opportunity to get another few geocaches under my belt. I had two set of coordinates plugged into my little Foretrex. The first turned out to be “hidden” about three feet from the trailhead, so I didn’t bother. The second, from the way the signal was jumping around in every direction, must have been attached to a caffeine-addled squirrel, so I walked away with no logs. Because I am a mature adult, I released my frustration by throwing things off the side of the mountain and watching them break when they hit the ground.

I eat lutefisk

As part of Glenn’s ongoing quest to ingest every seemingly inedible thing on the planet, we went to the annual Lutefisk and Meatballs dinner at the Sons of Norway. Lutefisk is a cod soaked in lye and then boiled until it reaches the consistency of gelatin… The meatballs were good.

The Great Colorado Loop

Glenn’s opus, an amalgam of the Colorado trail and a knot of lesser trails heading back north which he has deemed “The Great Colorado Loop,” has unofficially begun.

Waterton Canyon, the traditional starting point for the CT, will be closed for most of the rest of the year for some sort of construction, so Glenn wanted to get that segment out of the way while he still had a chance, and I tagged along because I wanted to see if I could hike 16 miles. Turns out I could, quite easily, and I wasn’t even sore the next day. Great success! Not so much for Glenn - he hurt his foot and had to crawl around on kneepads for a few days. (I offered to get him crutches, but he informed me that “the time for crutches has passed.” I guess the time for crawling around like an animal was still nigh.) The importance of having good shoes for hiking has been further ingrained in my brain.

The top is called Lenny’s Rest; it was the Eagle Scout project of an eighteen-year-old who was killed in a mountaineering accident before he got to finish it. The rest of his troop finished the project for him in his name. Quite a nice story.

Also deeply ingrained in my brain is the vast rift between being physically capable of walking sixteen miles and being mentally capable of the same. Before we’d finished the first eight miles, I had finished the candy bar I had brought for myself and the candy bar Glenn had brought for himself, and I was fading fast. Luckily Glenn had some crackers to feed me as I followed him huffily up the last mile. I don’t know if I’m cut out for thru-hiking.