Colorado Part 3: Heritage Festival and the Stanley Hotel

One morning we checked out the Heritage Festival that was taking place at the fair grounds, which included a combination of old west exhibits and a horse show (and a few kid-geared activities like face painting and a petting zoo).  

Checking out the antlers and tepees.  

Petting the pelts.

Scarlett's arrowhead.

Face painting.

Watching the horse show and staying dry during a rain shower.

Building a log cabin (note the work gloves).

Max lends a hand.

Posing with the bear at Mountain Munchies after lunch.

One afternoon we headed over to the historic Stanley Hotel built in 1909.  The hotel served as the inspiration for Stephen King's novel The Shining, which was later turned into the horror flick starring Jack Nicholson.  The adults were interested in checking out the hotel, and we figured the kids would have fun at a monarch butterfly release that they do once a week in the summer.  (They raise the butterflies on site and you can see them at their various stages of development.)  Little did we know that the butterfly release would turn into a bit of a horror show itself ...

Front of the hotel with a storm brewing in the background.

Hanging out on the front porch.

Waiting for the butterflies and throwing rocks into the pond with BB.

Scarlett got to unzip one of several butterfly cages.

I was expecting hundreds of beautiful butterflies to flutter delicately up into the air and head off to begin their lives as glorious Rocky Mountain butterflies.  Instead, they were sort of dumped unceremoniously onto the sidewalk while hoards of kids stomped around trying to pick them up, pet them, and in a few unfortunate cases, smash them.  It was basically a butterfly massacre.  Stephen King may have arranged the whole thing, now that I think about it.

Max wanted no part of it, and put his finely-honed clinging skills to the test once again.  Perhaps he was imagining the butterfly with a tiny little axe and a maniacal grin running through a hedge-maze.  (That happened in The Shining, right?  Except obviously not with butterflies.  I think.)

Post-butterfly release, with (mostly) smiles all around.  Probably the happiest of the bunch were the handful of butterflies who actually managed to survive and escape from the Stanley Hotel.  Sort of like in The Shining.  But not really.

The End.  (Look out Stephen King, there's a new master storyteller in town.)