Red Rocks

Tuesday we had the pleasure to head up to Red Rocks and enjoy the John Mayer and Owl City Concert. Thanks the our great friend, Chelsea, I recieved this amazing and unexpected gift of two tickets to this concert for my birthday.

Never been to the Red Rocks, we decided to leave early so we could have a picnic and enjoy the beautiful scenery that everyone raves about. We hopped on google maps and followed the directions of 18 miles and 22 minutes. Not really thinking that it was rush hour, we followed the freeway route. A few miles into the drive we found ourselves in 6 lanes of stop-and-go traffic. I tried to embrace the experience as an adventure; my first time driving in real traffic in a big city, whoo hoo! A quick hour and fifteen minute drive later we drove up a winedy road following a pack of cars to the parking areas. We decided we had found ourselves a perfect spot when we observed about 20 cars of people picnicing by their vehicles under the rocks. This is the area in the pictures above. Once you drive through the rock tunnel, u arrive in a massive hearding of cars parked in lines up to the venue.

We spent about an hour enjoying our picnic, the amazing view of the city and each others company. Then we headed up the the concert. As we walked up the stairs I started to get winded. Matt explained we were about 6,200 feet, and I could fell it.
We found a decent spot to place our blankets in the open seating area amongst the sold out concert of 9,500 people in the ampitheater. We had an amazing view of the city in the background as the sun was setting. We ventured off to the visitors center and then explored the beautiful grounds. We learned that the Red Rocks opened 1906 and has hosted some of the biggest names in the business including the Beatles, Greatful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Rolling Stones, Rush, etc.

(The below pics are off of my phone since I couldn't bring in my Sony camera, but you get the idea, it was pretty neat.)