Saturday in Aspen

We had a quiet morning, then watched the University of Michigan game before heading out to see the Grottos, a place we visit each year. The drive there had some beautiful scenery as you can see from these pictures.  It is so cool to see the aspen trees in full color mode!

Being a Saturday, it was quite busy, but we were able to get a parking spot in the lot.  There were a LOT of people crawling over the rocks, so I got a chance to use a new feature of my Pixel 6a phone called Magic Erasure!

Check the picture on the left vs the one on the right! Pretty cool!

Note: you can click on them to make them larger. 

The evening event was the Chris Collins and Boulder Canyon Band concert at the Wheeler Opera House.  This was a very good show, but seemed to lack the energy of last night's performance.  Chris did some funny things, like singing the opening phrase of Annie's Song in a number of famous singers' voices before singing the entire first verse in his Kermit voice.  He also had some very nice sentimental touches embedded in the show.  One of which was to give flowers to Mrs Melville, the original owner of the Mountain Chalet (a hotel where most people stay) and to thank her for 25 years of hosting the Aspen in October festivities. at her place. He had Jim Conner (composer of the song Grandma's Feather Bed) on stage and had him tell a (lengthy!) story about meeting John Denver, before leading the singing of the Feather Bed song. Jim accompanied the band on his banjo for the rest of the show, but I'm not sure his microphone was turned on very loud as I never heard it. 

As an encore, They played "Friends, I will Remember You" and showed pictures that people had sent in.  Two of Mary's submission made it - her with John Denver friend Gail in Aspen last yer, and one of daughter Katie.

Tomorrow we plan to hear Mack Bailey sing at Aspen Chapel, then on to the Cookhouse Event for lunch and another concert.