Snowmass

Last week I took a trip that seemed worth blogging about. Only time will tell whether this is really a blog-revival or if it will be shortlived.

For the first few days of our trip, we started near Aspen, Colorado with backpacking up Snowmass Creek to camp at Snowmass Lake with the goal of summitting Snowmass Mountain.

Snowmass Creek

Is this really the trail? Apparently it is.

Snowmass Lake - as seen from near our camp. The peak in the back is our goal for the next day.

Looking back down at Snowmass Lake from our summit hike.

This is not the summit, just a pretty meadow along the way. The summit was actually quite ugly (just rock and months-old snow). I have my doubts about Hubbers hobby (Colorado 14ers) - getting to these peaks is painful (that lack of oxygen problem always gives me a headache) and they aren't pretty hikes. If there were just a few of them then fine, but 54 ugly painful hikes? No thanks, I'll stay below the headache-inducing zone.

Plenty of people were camped at the lake but nobody hiked up the mountain the same day as us. There were others at the lake who brought along ice axes and crampons, presumably for some peak-bagging. Wish we had brought our ice-axes, it would have made me feel a lot better crossing massive snowfields... who would've thought that a mountain named Snowmass would have snow in August?

Next installment: canoeing the Yampa.

Laboring up a mountain

For Labor Day, we visited Hubber's grandma... but along the way we found this mountain that just needed to be hiked. It's Missouri Mountain standing at 14,067 feet tall in the vicinity of Leadville, CO. We started just after sunrise in the chilly 35-degree morning. The aspen were just barely starting to turn yellow. Bonus points if you can find the dog in the first photo.
This is really one of the nicest 14er hikes. It started in a forest, then proceeds up an alpine valley...
... and finishes with a good long ridge walk. You can't see them at this resolution, but there are people standing on the summit (the highest point in the photo below).
That's me just below the summit block. Those last few steps were pretty tough.
At the end, we're rewarded with a great view of mountains stretching into the distance. And gathering clouds, which can mean only one thing...
... hail on the way down. We were off the ridge before it hit, but still above tree-line. This was Vixen's first hike up a 14er and she still had plenty of squirrel-chasing energy at the end of the hike.

Colorado mountains

I just got back from a 6-day trip to Colorado, which included hiking mountains, visiting Grandma and attending a wedding. I'll post in chapters. The first chapter is Mountains.

Why climb mountains? It's for the view, of course! Okay, that's a quick answer, and obviously it's not always true. The top photo shows the best view we got during a lot of steep hiking up Mt Yale. We still went all the way to the top to get the great family portrait below... that could have been on any old rock pile. Despite the clouds, the weather was pretty good for being 14,000 feet up. This was last Thursday.

On Monday, we did a quick hike up Mt Evans where Wiley enjoyed the view below. We actually started lower down than this parking lot. We hiked about a mile to reach the summit, although most people simply drive the whole way. Clearly, we didn't hike this one for the wilderness experience.

Finally, on Tuesday we got a great view and a mountain to ourselves. Getting to the top of Mt Columbia was a tough 4000-foot elevation gain in 5 miles (one way). This certainly isn't the toughest 14-er in Colorado, but it kicked my butt. Actually, I've done 16 of these 14,000+ peaks and all but two of them have kicked my butt (those two weren't easier, I was just in incredibly good shape that year). Even that short one mile hike up Mt Evans, required many breaks to catch my breath and convince myself that there was some reason to keep going.

I still can't explain what reason I find for pushing myself up these mountains. It's the same reason I train to run 10k's, knit challenging projects, and go to school for another degree.

(There are a few more photos from the trip on Flickr).

Pesto

A few weeks back, I mentioned that basil is taking over my garden. Well, it still is, despite giving away several plants. I've made plenty of basil-based dishes over the past few weeks. Today I decided to pick as much basil as I could and make however much pesto that turned out to be. I managed to pick 4 cups of basil and 2 cups of parsley before giving up... there's at least 4 times as much basil still out there. With my little mini food processor, I can only turn one cup of basil (and all the other ingredients) into a batch of pesto at a time. Now I have a batch of regular basil pesto, spicy pest, sun-dried tomato pesto and garlic-artichoke pesto. The last one was experimental and it turned out rather creamy, more like a spread. Invite me over for a potluck, and you're likely to get a pesto dish!

I'll be heading up to Colorado later this week. The primary reason for the trip is a wedding on Saturday in Loveland. But then, we also have to visit Gramma in Denver and climb some mountains on the way. The plan is to drive to an as-yet-undetermined mountain in southern Colorado on Wednesday evening. Climb that mountain Thursday morning. Climb Mt Evans on Friday morning the continue on in to Denver. Attend wedding and related activities on Saturday and Sunday. Return to Denver and hang out there on Monday. Climb another mountain on Tuesday and head home. Somehow this long weekend turned into a week-long trip.

Neither the mountains nor Gramma's house are conducive to blogging... so it may be a while before the next post. Unless I find time to say something before I leave.

Labor Day

As a break from "work", we celebrated Labor Day weekend by climbing mountains in Colorado. Specifically, we tackled three 14ers near Lake City. We drove up to the trailhead for Sunshine and Red Cloud on Friday (it took about seven hours, so we had to deal with the rough dirt road at night). On Saturday, we started hiking around 6:30am to summit Red Cloud, then we traversed the ridge to Sunshine. Then we had to hike back over Red Cloud to get back down. So we actually climbed three 14ers in a day if you count Red Cloud twice. It was 11 miles round-trip, and such a beautiful day that we spent quite a bit of time on the summits. We didn't make it back to the camper until 4pm.

Troy and Wiley approaching Red Cloud.

Sitting atop Sunshine with the ridge to Red Cloud behind us.

On Sunday, we climbed Handies Peak from the American Basin trailhead. This was a relatively easy hike compared to the day before. Only 5 miles roundtrip, but the view was gorgeous!

Down from the mountain

After being computerless for a while, I have returned with some photos of Uncompahgre Peak. We were in Denver for a wedding, but what's a trip to Colorado without climbing a fourteener? So after the wedding weekend, we headed down to the Lake City area. The weather was nicely much cooler in the mountains than it had been in Denver. The hike started on a nice bright morning. Here's the rocky summit:

You can see that the clouds were starting to gather. They quickly turned dark and reminded us why we needed to get an earlier start to our hike. Get off the mountain by 1pm is the rule we'll stick to from now on. Wiley did not enjoy hiding out under a rock while waiting for the hail to stop on the way down the mountain. But he did make it to the top and back down again. Some people had their doubts that he could handle it.