North Cheyenne Canyon Park

Since we've been getting so much rain, we thought it would be a good time to go see some waterfalls.  

We drove down to Colorado Springs and went to North Cheyenne Canyon Park.  There were several waterfalls in the park, but we only made it to two since the others were longer hikes.  

This first one is the Helen Hunt falls and was right off the road.

They also had a junior ranger program for Kyla so she had fun doing all the different activities.

This is the second one, Silver Cascade Falls.  We thought it was neat that the water was shooting up in an arc--that made the steep hike worth it.  We might have had a better view if we have hiked farther, but AJ was getting grumpy since it was lunch time.

This is a Western Tanager.

On the way home we ended up stuck in construction and an accident so it took much longer than we anticipated.  As we got closer we could see that Aurora was getting quite the storm.  We ended up getting only the end of it but arrived home to this-

No its not snow--but hail.  These were some of the bigger ones that Adam found in our yard.

After being home for a couple hours, we learned that not only did we miss the hail, but we missed the tornado.  It was on the ground for 30 minutes, started north of us and went south.  It  hit the mall that's 5 minutes from our house.  It blew out windows, turned a car over, and blew down a brick wall.  From what Kyla's friend from across the street said you could see it from here, and they spent some time in their basement.  It was 1 of 5 tornadoes that touched down in the Denver area.  I've never been so glad to be stuck in construction--otherwise we could very easily have been driving thru the storm--and may have made the decision to take the toll road to get home faster which would have put us right by the mall that was hit at about the time it was hit.  But I'm much happier to have not even have know about it while we were driving!