The Hills are Alive! Picnic on a Mountain Top

The Grill-Meister and I are at Little House in the Rockies for a getaway.

Like at home, we aren’t going anywhere or seeing anyone, but it’s nice to be in a different climate, especially since a friend in TX reported temps of 107° yesterday. Here, it has been a temperate 70-ish in the daytime, and down to the upper 40s at night. In other words, sheer heaven.

Today’s excursion was to a secluded spot in Pike National Forest that we found a few years ago. We’re like migrating birds, coming back to the same places every year.

Our First Picnic Here Included “The Kids”

The first time we took a picnic here was a couple of years ago, on our annual 4th of July family trip, which included one of our Musical Millennial’s college friends. Our picnic wasn’t fancy, but we had a wonderful time, playing bocce ball after lunch and taking a “selfie” with a camera timer.

The Hills are Alive

This spot feels like a front row seat at an amphitheatre – and the mountains are the show. It just makes you happy to be there. The landscape is so beautiful that makes you want to sing, or yodel, or dance a jig. In fact, that’s me below, rejoicing in the moment with my special version of “The Hills are Alive” from The Sound of Music. The Rogers and Hammerstein classic begins:

The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears

I’m so glad there wasn’t a video! I do a very, very bad rendition of that song, in a shaky falsetto, and it should never get out in public. (If it did, I would probably be looking for a new family, and the families of Rogers and Hammerstein might sue me.)

No Singing Today, but We Did Have Champagne

Today, since it was just the two of us, we cut out the team sports and musical performances and just focused on the nature. And while there wasn’t any crystal, china or silver, the meal had a celebratory feel to it. That was due, in part, to the pineapple juice mimosas we made with the sparkly-wonderful Blanc de Blanc from Aspen Peak Cellars.

Pineapple mimosas were a perfect complement to our simple picnic. I think this is the start of a new summer tradition: Mimosas on the Mountaintop. Wouldn’t that be a great name for a song?

Aspen Peak Cellars

A little more about where our sparkling wine came from…Aspen Peak Cellars is in Bailey, CO, and is a winery, a restaurant and a music venue. We went to a wine tasting dinner there last year during our Memorial Day trip, and the Blanc de Blancs was served with the first course, a delightful pairing of seared scallops and crab wontons atop a parmesan froth. It made me want to sing… 😉

Of course we bought several bottles, and I was delighted to see that there was one left in the wine cabinet when I was packing our humble picnic this morning.

You’ll hear more about Aspen Peak Cellars in the future; I’ve been meaning to do a story about this charming place. In the meantime, you should know that they ship their stellar wines, and that you can find them online here.

Pineapple Mimosa Recipe

Here’s the recipe for our delightful picnic cocktail:

• Sparkling wine
• Pineapple juice

Combine 2 parts sparkling wine with 1 part pineapple.

That’s it!

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