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Back in March I had a chance to catch up with my good friend Sam. He had recently returned to North Carolina after finishing his graduate program at the University of Colorado. With the blessings of our wives, Sam and I headed to Virginia for a couple days of snowboarding in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sam and I met during our first semester at Appalachian State and ended up rooming together for the next three years, until Kristen finally agreed to marry me and I moved off campus. At ASU — due to location, wonderful student discounts and a general lack of pressing (financial) obligations — the three of us had an opportunity to go snowboarding practically as often as we were up to it; usually three or four times each week. This was the first year I have been able to make it back to the slopes since we left Blowing Rock in 2008. Sam and I spent two days at Wintergreen Resort, near Charlottesville. The weather was perfect, the slopes were fairly well covered and the crowd was relatively sparse.

Knowing how much patience and planning it would take to get any decent snowboarding shots that weren’t cliche, and, more importantly, knowing that I only had two days to enjoy the mountains, I decided to try something different with the camera. As we moved around the mountain, we just pointed the lens in a general downhill direction and held the shutter, blasting off nearly 2,000 still frames of random snowboarding action. I dropped the pictures into iMovie, added a soundtrack and created my first stop-motion video. It’s pretty rough, but you have to start somewhere, right?

Here are a few still shots I pulled out of the reel, in case you missed them.

This morning we finished the hike we started three days ago. Kristen, Heather, Roxie and I reached the summit of the First Flatiron overlooking Boulder. To get an idea of the path we took, look a few posts down at “First Taste of Colorado.” It took us about an hour and a half to reach the end of the 1.2 mile trail, which put us 1,500 feet above the city we started in. We climbed a little beyond the trail’s end, but cresting the final 40′ of the mountain requires a rope and climbing shoes.

Still, the view of Boulder, the surrounding plains and the mountains in the distance was incredible.

We found the Rockies today. Heather was nice enough to lend her VolksWagon to me and Kristen for the day, so we took a road trip.

We drove north of Boulder, through the village of Estes Park and into the Rocky Mountain National Park. We spent four hours driving 29 miles along Trail Ridge Road – the main scenic highway through the park. We came out of the park alongside Grand Lake – a centuries old mining town and resort area, grabbed lunch at Maverick’s Grill and then hooked up with I-70 to head back to Boulder.

The mountains in the Front Range near Boulder are unlike any I’ve seen before, with their red-brown faces and prarie grass hills, but while we were in Colorado Kristen and I really wanted to get a glimpse of the craggy snow-capped peaks that our nation’s western states are famous for. The Rocky Mountain National Park didn’t dissappoint.

What has really stood out to me about the Rockies is the diversity of the terrain. In one drive we saw stony flat mesas; pale red cliffs of dried lava; 8,000-foot peaks covered in spruce and fir trees standing alongside barren, 13,000-foot mountains still cloaked in a remnant of the ice and snow that fell months earlier, all separated by endless plains of prarie grass and piles of clay boulders that loomed over our lime-green Beetle.

Seeing the Rockies for the first time, I instinctively want to compare them to the mountain ranges I’ve already experienced. At first glance, I want to say they are more impressive than the Appalachians and not quite as breathtaking as the Alps. Neither of those statements are really true. The more I travel and experience places, the more I realize just how unique every spot on Earth really is.

For a skier or rockclimber, the size of the Rockies will certainly add to their draw. For the casual observer, day hiker, photographer, vacationer or general mountain nut, I would have to say that the mountains of Colorado are no more or less attractive than their East Coast counterparts. They are just completely different, and definitely worth seeing for yourself.