Rocky Mountain Highs
November packed some unwelcome surprises, so this serves as a very belated October update.
We closed out the Pacific Northwest in the best way possible: by celebrating our dear friends Laura and Glenn’s wedding overlooking Mount Rainier. As we drove into the Cascades from the Olympic peninsula, we nervously refreshed the forecast as both smoke and rain threatened the weekend. They lucked out on both, and we enjoyed a weekend full of spectacular views, raucous celebration, and a drunken post-wedding midnight swim when the rain finally caught up to us. We left the PNW with full hearts, sad to say goodbye to our friends whom we had gotten so used to spending time with over the previous few months, but excited for a change of scenery and weather.
We drove southeast, through northeastern Oregon into southern Idaho. Due to impending cold, we moved quickly through Idaho, stopping for a couple days in the lower Sawtooths for some mountain biking before we moved on to Jackson, WY. We excitedly texted our friend, Valerie, who grew up in Cheyenne, as we crossed the border into her home state. Her reply? “Enjoy the scenic part of the state. The rest is a wasteland.” Needless to say, Valerie doesn’t hold the warmest feelings about where she grew up, but our impressions were fortunately more positive.
We spent close to a week camping outside Jackson, exploring local trails and venturing into the jagged Tetons for a spectacular valley hike just as the leaves were beginning to turn. While we were disappointed to rush through the area, we knew we wanted to have ample time in Colorado, and the quickly-changing seasons pushed us south. Colorado was a place we were simultaneously excited and nervous to visit. Excited for the obvious reasons: it has huge mountains, endless hiking, mountain biking, and skiing, a strong outdoors culture, great weather, and is beautiful. Nervous because this was our first time visiting our future home: we’ve known for a while that we wanted to leave the Bay Area, so when Apple opened up a campus in Boulder, we agreed that we’d move out for Lee to join the team. Thing is, we had never actually been to Boulder. Lee visited Colorado once when he was a teenager to ski, but that’s very different from scoping out a place to live, and I had never been at all. I was fairly confident that I’d like it; I’ve heard great things about Boulder, and it’s close to all of the activities that we love to do. But I don’t know anyone there, so I’ll be starting from scratch with my social and professional network, and a more existential threat looms: fires.
The only reason we moved away from the Santa Cruz mountains was because of the fire risk. The week before the CZU complex fire started in 2020, we had actually gone to look at a house and were talking to realtors; we weren’t close to making any real moves, but we had mentally committed to settling down in that area and were putting out feelers that we hoped would turn into roots. After the CZU fire burned half of the area we had been considering, after getting evacuated for a week while we watched the fire boundary creep ever closer to our home, and after hearing our neighbors were losing fire coverage from their homeowner’s insurance policies left and right, we decided that it was too mentally/emotionally stressful and too financially risky to buy property in an area that almost certainly will burn again in the near future. People living at the rural-urban interface (i.e. exactly where we want to settle) are a huge contributor to and liability for wildfires in California. This wasn’t a risk we were willing to take, so we started discussing our exit plan in earnest in late 2020, hoping that we’d be able to make moves in early-mid 2022.
So, when Apple announced it was opening a few new campuses, our ears piqued. The timing couldn’t have been better; Lee’s leave was approved starting in Spring 2022, and upon his return in Spring 2023, we’d relocate to the new Boulder campus. I was excited to commit to Colorado even without having ever visited, but as we made our way south from Wyoming, nervousness started to creep in. My biggest fear, beyond making new friends and getting settled in a brand new area, was fires. Colorado doesn’t get fires like California, but in the past few years they’ve increased. The Boulder/Denver area is famed for 300 days of sun per year, so it’s far from damp.
We arrived at one of the driest times of year, so I expected to be greeted by fields of golden yellow like in the Bay Area. Instead, I was delighted by how green everything was; open fields were filled with tall, green grass, and while I wouldn’t call the area lush, it was most definitely not parched. As we got up into the mountains, I was even more relieved to see that the soil held some dampness, and both rivers and lakes looked healthy and full. Who is to say whether Colorado will look the same in a decade - climate change is quickly reshaping weather patterns - but I was relieved to see that at least for now, Colorado’s natural lines of defense against wildfires are standing.
We spent three weeks exploring areas near Boulder, Breckenridge, Vail, Aspen, and Crested Butte, and absolutely fell in love with the state. As we made our way west through the Rockies, we enjoyed peak aspen foliage, with bright yellow groves of trees blanketing the mountainside and creating glowing golden tunnels around the trails. Fresh snow dusted the mountains, providing a sharp contrast against the blue of the sky and yellow/green of the trees. The options for hiking and biking felt endless, and we begrudgingly left only in the face of an incoming winter storm. We’ve stayed pretty active the entire trip, but Colorado took that to a new level; we crammed in as much as we could, and between the elevation and the volume of exercise, I felt like a damn superhero by the end of our time there. My mountain biking confidence and abilities, which for so long felt like I was taking three steps forward and two steps back, skyrocketed with abundant access to well-built trails and long but moderate climbs. For the first time, I viewed mountain biking not as something I was struggling through, but as something I truly enjoyed and anticipated. Our hikes rivaled those we did in Canada, leaving us breathless at both the scenery and the elevation. And the towns we visited in between offered a charming respite after days packed with adventure; people everywhere we went were friendly and warm, making us feel at home already.
We only got a small glimpse of our future home, but it was enough to get both of us very excited about our decision to move here sight unseen. We did a lot in our few weeks in Colorado, but barely scratched the surface of all the things we wanted to see and do, and that’s just after the most basic research. Colorado is a gold mine for outdoor activities, and we can’t wait to keep exploring our new home when we get settled.
