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| Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs |
It's good to be back in Austin after an excellent trip to Colorado.
For the past three years, I've gone up to Colorado for vacation. In 2009, I hiked to the top of Mt. Elbert with my mountain climbing buddy. In 2010 and 2011, I went to Denver, Boulder, and Estes Park with friends. Both of these trips included a lot of fly fishing, hiking, and road tripping around the mountains.
This year, my trip to Colorado was more business oriented as it was center around the 2012 Association of Government Risk Pools ("AGRIP") Institute for Management and Leadership conference. The conference was held at the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs. I hadn't been to that part of Colorado in a long time, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Furthermore, the conference was full of very informative seminars. I have been a regular at AGRIP's Fall and Spring conferences since 2007, but this was the first summer Management & Leadership session I'd attended. I walked away with some very valuable information, as well as quite a few ideas for tweaking things at Prism Risk Management. I also left with ideas for the Texas Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative and Oklahoma Schools Property & Casualty Cooperative programs. I'll get into some of these concepts in detail on the Prism Risk Management blog over the next few weeks.
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| Mt. Elbet and Mt. Massive in Colorado |
Owing to the business nature of my Colorado trip, I had compressed time to travel around the mountains for fun. I did take a day to drive the following route:
- Glenwood Springs to Aspen
- Aspen to Twin Lakes (via Independence Pass)
- Twin Lakes to Leadville (in the shadow of Mt. Elbert and Mt. Massive)
- Leadville to Frisco
- Frisco to Grand Lakes
- Grand Lakes to Estes Park (via the Trial Ridge Road in Rocky Mtn. Nat'l Park)
- Estes Park to Ft. Collins
This route took me about 9 hours, but there were significant breaks in driving for photography. The Twin Lakes to Estes Park portion of the contained several portions of a by-way called "Top of the Rockies." If you have a short time frame and want to see some spectacular mountain scenery in the vicinity of Denver, I highly recommend the route listed in the bullet points above.
