BOM's Away - 29 July 2012 - A Storage Find and Pike's Peak

Welcome to my Link-Up for BOMs Away Mondays!

(We'd love to see the BOM you're working on lately.)

On Friday evening we went to the storage unit to pull jackets out for a Saturday-morning train ride up to Pike's Peak. Let me journal a few of my favorite picks from that family outing, and then I'll get to the "real" stuff for you.  ;D

If you're ever in Colorado Springs, you really have to take the Cog Train
up to Pike's Peak. It is more than worth the ticket price!

The concept of wearing jeans and jackets in July is COMPLETELY FOREIGN
 to this transplanted Florida family! Back there, this is what we'd wear
for about 3 weeks in our deepest winter days.

On your way up, you see lots of neat forest trees and vistas like this overlooking reservoirs.
Only, the phone shots don't do it half justice for the sheer beauty in real life vision.

You climb fast in this train! The grade is a whopping 25 sometimes!! Normal-track trains would fail at something like a grade of 10. This train runs on the cog track, though. See it in the center? That's the track that the train pulls itself up on with cog gears under the cars. The outer tracks are only for balance. It's rather like some types of roller coasters.

After 70 minutes or so, you break over the timber line, where only arctic tundra grows. 

And you get glimpses of lots of these
funny little Yellow-Bellied Marmots.

The historian in me loves this shot - you can see another train car approaching that ridge in the distance (good for perspective!), but along the bottom portion, meandering up and over from the bottom left corner, you can glimpse the carriage tracks from the late 1800s still showing the ruts even though it hasn't been traveled for ages and ages. That's because tundra only grows 1-3 inches every CENTURY. Makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

After about an hour and a half, you arrive at the peak!

The Caulkins Family on Pike Peak, with Wyoming in the background distance.

Scott loves to scramble to solitary perches. Yeah, it makes me quite nervous at times!

If you're cold or want to shop souvenirs, they have a shop up there with food, drinks, gifts, etc.

Remember those carriage tracks? Well, in 1893 Katharine Lee Bates traveled on them to the peak, where she wrote "America the Beautiful" - inspired by Pike's views and her train trip across the Plains. It was set to music by Samuel Ward, and by the time Katharine died in 1929, it was already the wildly popular national song that remains one of our most beloved to this day. 

But pretty soon you want to ignore the memorial and the shop and get back to gawking at the amazing views. . .

. . . Before you get back on the train and head down that steep, steep track.
Next time, we'll take the train up and bicycle down!

So - on to quilting concerns!  

While we were at the storage unit getting jackets, not toooooo far back, the box for Dragonfly Party was peeking at me! This was the next BOM quilt top I'd wanted to assemble here in the apartment, but had found that only the focus blocks had made it here with me. The quilt is on the waiting list of a popular professional longarmer, and due to come up sometime soon - so I was fretting that I couldn't finish it and would lose my spot.

Haven't had much sewing time since the outing, but I did get all the pieces for the centers sorted out and organized - and nothing was missing! (This is one of two identical twins.)

And after a couple days off from any Dear Jane work, I did get these five blocks finished up this week out of the hand-work tote:

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What have you done lately on your BOMs or interval projects? We'd sure love it if you link up here to show it off! :D