Time (a flat circle) seems to be moving fast.


How's it goin, it feels like the days go by pretty quick with the short evenings off and the workflow has kept me pretty busy on my end.  Besides the usual cad work on redlines, I have been so lucky as to have been given a whole residential site to play with. I went to the initial site visit a couple weeks ago for this project and besides the facilitation overall, I have been pretty much on my own generating the planting plan and designs.  Our firm rarely does residential and for this reason, they have been willing to turn something like this over to me.  This has been a wake-up call to how dry it is in the west and how different you need to think about forms and massing with this sparse plant palette, but the firm has been good for letting me take time to learn these plants as I go.  Besides this project, we have an interns project across the offices that is shaping up to be a mini capstone by the end of June as well as 20 hours of AutoCAD training they will allow us to do at work. 

I summited my first 13er hiking from Loveland pass after I got the set of microspikes! This hike was nearly 4 miles but the conditions were in the teens and extremely gusty, as much as I envy the first people up these mountains I sure was thankful for the windbreaks on the ridge to give me a break from the wind that was taking my breath away.  The next weekend I drove through south park and slept in my car at the Quandry Peak trailhead, this is the most popular 14er in the state, with an easy 7-mile hike straight up the smooth ridge.  When I got out of my car around 7 there were already 3 cars of hikers already up the mountain so I never felt alone. It seems you're really prone to experience trail magic in these winter conditions, I've had my car pulled unstuck without having to ask for help, and hikers on the descent offered a protein bar and water if I needed it, which seems pretty typical of interactions at this point.  I've got a winter bag to break in now too, hopefully, I'll report back with more snowflake 14ers under my belt. 



The office building.

The res.

Frosty at <13k


Quandry at night (the peak on the right)

That same ridge the next morning.
















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