Thursday Adventure (and a revision update): Telluride, Colorado

I started July by taking a few days off work to concentrate on revising The Labyrinth of Flame, which was both wonderful and frustrating.  Why frustrating?  Because I saw just how productive I could be with entire day-long chunks of time.  I tell you, if I could take a month off work I'd have this revision finished, bam.  Alas, I must return to snatching scraps of time whenever I can, making progress in inches instead of bounds.  But I've passed 100K - always a big psychological milestone for me - and once I get the rest of the midsection of the book properly fixed up (darn those pesky logistical and inter-character details I skimmed over in the first draft!), the climax should require far less work. I hope.

After my 3-day book-writing vacation, we took a real vacation - our annual 4th of July trip to Telluride down in southwestern Colorado.  I could go on for hours about how much I love Telluride....but I figured since I haven't done a Thursday Adventure post in forever, I'll just show some of the pics from this year's trip, and let you see for yourself how gorgeous the San Juan Mountains are.

The town of Telluride, nestled in a box canyon deep in the San Juan Mountains.  The ski runs above town are some of the best and steepest mogul slopes in Colorado.

View from our condo.  The town's small enough you don't need a car - everyone bikes and walks everywhere.

My son indicates Telluride's airport, visible on the mesa in the distance.  We've never flown to Telluride (we just drive), but I hear it's a hell of a landing.  At 9,070 ft, it's North America's highest commercial airport.

My husband and I got married in Telluride, and we return at least once every year.  Visiting over the 4th of July is always great - the town has a fun little parade, followed by fireworks at night that are truly spectacular. (Nothing beats fireworks in a box canyon - the echoes roll on forever.)

My son and my husband, ready to watch the parade

The parade involves plenty of cowboys...

Yetis and climbers doing crazy things (yes, the guys dangling off the truck are in skydiving wing suits)...

And plenty of people being silly.

This year was extra fun because my son is finally old enough to do some actual hikes and bike rides instead of just toddling along beside the creek.  The weather was lovely, though in typical Colorado fashion, a thunderstorm rolled in every afternoon at 2pm.  You want to hike in Colorado, you've got to do it early.

Ready to hike!

The views are always amazing

I love me some spiky ridges

The San Juans are much wetter than the mountains near Denver, and as such, far greener and chock full of wildflowers

Lizard Head (the little rock formation poking up on the left) and the Wilson group of peaks, which includes several 14ers (El Diente and the less imaginatively named Wilson Peak and Mt. Wilson) 

The waterfalls are pretty awesome, too.

Checking out Cornet Creek Falls

Looking toward the head of the box canyon. 

The aspen are large and plentiful, which makes for beautiful fall color displays

The key to hiking with a 5 year old is to keep things silly

It was a great trip.  I read some excellent books during the 6+ hour drive back, including Mazarkis Williams's The Tower Broken, M.R. Carey's The Girl With All the Gifts, and Jim Butcher's Skin Game.  Just to cap it all off, when I got back to Boulder I discovered people saying very nice things about my books on Reddit's r/Fantasy  - talk about a good homecoming!

I'll do a post next week on July's new releases I'm excited about reading, but other than that, it's back to the revision cave for me.  Until next time...

Telluride fun, and my new Goodreads policy

Hope everyone had a terrific weekend!  My husband, son, and I had a wonderful 4th of July in our favorite town in Colorado: Telluride.  It's our favorite for good reason.  In winter, the skiing is incredible (assuming there's enough of a snow base to properly cover the steeps), and in summer, the valley remains utterly gorgeous - the town is deep in a box canyon surrounded by towering peaks whose slopes are covered in aspen and wildflowers.

Town of Telluride beneath the San Sophia ridge - you can't see it very well in this pic (our good camera died so this was taken with my cell phone!) but the ridgeline is gloriously jagged.  

Telluride is so small you don't need a car, the houses are cute brightly painted Victorian things (as opposed to Colorado's usual "squat, ugly box" mining-heritage architecture), the locals are both friendly and hugely outdoorsy, and scads of amazing hiking and scrambling awaits right outside your front door.  I have this wistful dream of one day renting one of those cute little Victorian houses and spending a year living in Telluride, exploring all the San Juan Mountains have to offer.  (Sadly, first I'd have to win the lottery.  Telluride's housing prices make Boulder's seem like a bargain.)  We didn't get to enjoy any fireworks this year - the San Juan Mountains are tinder-dry right now, so Telluride and all the other towns in the region had to cancel their planned displays.  But my son thoroughly enjoyed the parade and town barbeque, and I thoroughly enjoyed the chance for some hikes with spectacular views.

Waiting on main street for the parade to start.

Anyway, while I was off enjoying some quality family time in the mountains, The Whitefire Crossing was also having a good start to the month: the brand-new r/Fantasy Goodreads discussion group voted to make Whitefire their inaugural Book of the Month group read.  It's not the first time Whitefire's been nominated for "book of the month" in a Goodreads discussion group, but it's the first time it's ever won out in the decision poll, so I can't help but grin in delight.  My fingers are crossed that people have fun reading and discussing!  And hey, that's not all - Whitefire also picked up a nice new review from the Coffee, Cookies, and Chili Peppers blog.  Hooray!

Speaking of Goodreads, I'm trying out a new approach to using the site. I adore Goodreads as an author, but after an initial flurry of rating/reviewing books back when I first joined, I quickly found that I felt pretty uncomfortable as a reader about rating books on a 5-star scale.  Part of it was that I felt really awkward about rating fellow SFF authors' novels, period.  But most of it was that I found it so hard to rate books on such a compressed scale.  I mean, how do you rate a novel which you LOVED in spite of some hiccups of craft, compared to a book that you were deeply impressed with craft-wise but didn't actually enjoy?  I kept wishing there were multiple categories to rate, like theme/craft/character/plot, and agonizing over the rating decision.  For a long time I stopped rating/reviewing, or even adding books to my library on Goodreads at all.  But darn it, I really like the idea of having a detailed record of what I've read...so now I'm trying a new policy.  I'm still not going to rate books, but I'll mark what I'm currently reading, and when I finish, I'll leave a few sentences with my impressions of the book.  I've started already with the books I read over the holiday weekend; so far, I'm feeling good about my new approach, but we'll see how it goes.            

Thursday Adventure: Ten Years Ago in Telluride

Mountaineering and canyoneering and climbing are all very nice, but the best part of adventures in the mountains is sharing them with someone you love.  Tomorrow marks ten years of marriage to the best climbing partner I could ever ask for: my husband Robert.

Robert and I on the Eggersteig route in the Austrian Alps

We first met in graduate school, when his PhD advisor came over from Australia to do a year-long sabbatical working with my own advisor at the University of Colorado, and had Robert come over to the US to spend a few months working here.  As a climber & mountain biker, Robert was quite eager to explore Colorado mountains; when he asked, everyone pointed him my way ("You want to climb?  Go ask Courtney, she's all about the mountains.").  I met him on my birthday - best birthday present ever!  We climbed a bunch of peaks that summer, and discovered we not only shared a love of the mountains, but of science fiction/fantasy movies and novels, gothic/industrial and classical choral music, and all manner of other interests.  We fell in love...but then he had to go back to Australia to finish his PhD.

Robert and I in Orderville Canyon, in Zion National Park

  We weren't sure what the future would bring, but we didn't want to just give up on the connection we'd made - so for a year and a half, we did the long-distance relationship thing, emailing every day, calling twice a week (how I wish we'd had Skype back then!).  Far from waning with time, our relationship got stronger.  I left grad school after getting my M.S. to work in industry; when he finished his PhD, my former advisor offered him a post-doc position in Boulder, and at last we were able to be together again.

Robert and I backpacking near Snowmass Peak, in the Elk Range of  central Colorado

A few more years of hiking and climbing together, and he proposed to me: again on my birthday, on the summit of a local rock formation with a stunning view of Boulder.  We decided to have a small "destination" wedding in Telluride, one of our favorite places to hike and ski in Colorado.  We invited people to come down a few days early and hike with us; we had a wonderful time hanging out with our friends, and showing Robert's Australian relatives the beauty of Colorado.

Hiking together in Telluride the day before our wedding

The wedding itself was tons of fun - we had the ceremony in a beautiful little church in town, then walked with all our guests to the ski gondola and rode that over the mountain to a reception in the upper ski village.      

Dancing on Telluride's main street on our wedding day

With our wedding guests at the reception

Exiting the church

Ten years of wonderful adventures together, and I'm looking forward to many more!