The REAL Colorado Boulder [Not Clickbait]

Pack it up and go home, guys; the competition is over. I’ve won.

 

 

I have found the Colorado Boulder. And you may be wondering, but Sadie! Do you mean
‘Boulder, Colorado’? Because you’ve been living there for the past week-ish I’d hope you’d have
found i-”

 

 

And to you I say “nuh uh uh!”. I have found the Colorado Boulder. To elaborate, the city is called
Boulder, so surely they must’ve found a boulder and named it after said boulder. And that is the
boulder I found (I’ve said the word ‘boulder’ so much it doesn’t sound like a word).
My June 20th started at 00:00, my latest work session yet, fighting T.A Alan. I am not a coding
expert, so Alan was grilling me while checking my PSet1 Python questions and pointing out why
my code that seemed the most intuitive to me was, in fact, NOT intuitive to the standard of the
rest of the Python world. He also found great issue with my plethora of Monty Python references
in my comments. Boo. Boring. Alan, leave me alone or I shall taunt you a second time!
(For the record, Alan, you are a great T.A and a lovely dinner conversationalist and you are not
boring!)

But alas! After asking poor Tejus about a million questions regarding partial derivatives, I
finished PSet1! And early too (only by 23.5 hours)! Yipee! The two of us headed back to
Crosman walking extremely fast to avoid any potential night lurkers while discussing our notable
high school alumni. Tejus pulled Snoop Dogg and a famous singer. Me? A famous murderer
also named Sadie! How fitting!

I was initially nervous about feeling tired the next day, but after a hearty 6 or so hours of sleep, I
rose again to a new day. We had a field trip in the afternoon up to Flatirons, so I made sure to
grab a bit of everything with my breakfast. Then, I headed off to the morning lecture with Dr.D! It
consisted of stuff I already knew (except for spherical trig, which wasn’t too terrible), leaving me

motivated and ready to conquer our hike! Additionally, Ethan Chen and I drew portraits of each
other upon finishing our integral graphs. I think I got the short end of the stick.

Oh, our hike.

 

 

I would go in depth explaining the events leading up to our hike, but my programming partner
David F. has told me not to raise the blog-length standards too high, so I will skip over lunch and
the details of our walk to the trails, but I will pick up where Tava, Ellie, Tejus, and I made the
good ol’ decision to take an abomination of a route that had us scaling rocks.

Ellie and Tava are pretty experienced hikers and overall mountaineers. Tejus and I? Not so
much. I had to keep asking to stop every few minutes in order to catch my breath, sip some
water, and munch on my DELICIOUS Blue Diamond Sriracha Almonds. The others can vouch: I
am not sponsored. But I wish I was, because a lifetime supply of these bad boys would never go
unappreciated in my book.

 

 

On our way up, we encountered comically large dandelions, a terrifying pile of loose rock that
Tava (and the rest of us) decided to walk straight across, and a pair of deer that tailed us (no
pun intended) for an even more terrifying three minutes of our journey.

 

 

But when we arrived at the scaleable rocks along the Spy Trail, everything made sense. The
boulders? Gigantic! The rocks? Climbable! At one point, we spotted some SSPers down below
and waved. The view made it all worth it: from our view up on the Flatiron, we could see the
pale blue sky blend with the gray clouds, the red swaths through the trees of our campus, and
the dots of cream coloured roofs that stretched for miles. And to make it all better, I chowed
down a healthy handful of my Sriracha Almonds. Good stuff, I’m telling you. Good stuff.

 

 

After we climbed back down (moreso scooting on our behinds), the four of us got ice cream and
giggled our way back to the dorms over the ridiculousness of our rock scramble.
After dinner (shoutout Alan again! Love that guy!), I handed in my problem set (hooray!) and
finished up some final things with Tejus in the computer lab. Then, Lauren and I gathered a
group to play frisbee in the dusk in celebration of our freedom from the PSet grind. We shortly
transitioned inside to play card games in the basement, and it was quite funny watching us fight
for our lives over tacos, cats, narwhals, and the occasional gorilla (as Luka demonstrates in the
image below).

 

 

Oh, and the Colorado Boulder! Alas, that was just a funny hook to get you to read this whole
jumbled mess. I lied: the Colorado Boulder is not a physical rock (although we saw many today).
But between you, me, Tava, Tejus, Ellie, Lauren, my frisbee gang, and the rest of the 36 SSPers
we all got here, the real Colorado Boulder was the friends we made along the way.
Cringey ending, right? A let down, for sure, but I wouldn’t have my Boulder be any other way.

Back to the blog’s home page