Another Pleasant Valley Hodgepodge

Sorry. I have Monkees on the brain for some reason. That said, today’s ThrowBack Thursday post is indeed another hodgepodge of photos from various locations along the Colorado Front Range. Let’s start by pub crawling back through time to the end of March 2009, just outside of the city of Colorado Springs. (Note: if you don’t want to sound like a tourist, call it “Th’ Springs”). We find ourselves at Seven Falls, which is (as you hopefully suspect) a series of seven consecutive waterfalls. And these are not small waterfalls; each of them is quite respectable in its own right.

Now, there are two main ways to enjoy Seven Falls. The first is to view the falls from an observation dock a short distance downstream. The second is to get up close and personal with the falls by walking up a set of 224 stairs. Keep in mind, at the bottom of the stairs, you’re already more than 6,500 feet above sea level. On this day, I did not brave the stairs, so I didn’t take very many photographs, but here’s some of what I did get:

All seven and we’ll watch them fall. Sorry. I have Prince on the brain for some reason.

A short distance away (and on the same day), we find Cave of the Winds. (Note: if you don’t want to sound like a tourist, call it “Edna”). My cave photography is crap, so I won’t subject you to many pics from here, either. Just these few:

In the early days of cave tours, visitors were encouraged to break off a stalactite as a souvenir.

Now let’s skip ahead about six months, to the end of September 2009. I found myself with a few hours to spare one afternoon and decided to head up Boulder Canyon to photograph a few things that I had driven past countless times but had never stopped to check out. Like these…

By this point, I was pretty close to the old townsite of Sugarloaf, which I had never set foot in. So, let’s finish today’s trip with a visit to that most magical of loaves: Sugarloaf.