After the previous day’s adventures on Mt. Evans, we made the 90-minute drive westward to Breckenridge, CO, where we planned to stay for a couple of nights before our next scheduled stop in Durango. After Chris caught up on work during the first half of the day, we decided to spend the balance of the afternoon exploring up Spruce Creek, the trailhead for which was located a few minutes up the road from our hotel. Ideally, had we more time,…
Since we’d first decided to make the detour through Colorado, we’d been looking for a way to hike a 14er, that being the enormously popular thing to do here. Somewhat surprisingly, all our hikes in CA have been below the 12,500′ level, and Jane’s personal elevation record (for hiking) was just under 11,000′. Over the time we spent in Loveland, we came up with a plan for the drive home following the Labor Day baseball game in Denver – we’d…
We had several options to choose from for our final day in the Rocky Mountain NP area – complicating matters was the timed entry permit requirement. We knew that the Longs Peak trailhead did not have a gatehouse where entry permits would be checked, but we’d also heard that the parking area fills up before dawn, and such an early start – especially since we didn’t expect to scale the peak – was not appealing. Chris suspected that the Wild…
Having driven through the town of Estes Park the day before, we today decided to return and explore the community itself – as one might imagine, timed entry tickets for Rocky Mountain NP were impossible to come by on Labor Day weekend, but there were numerous hiking options outside the park boundary we expected to attempt once we were done in town. Despite arriving midmorning on a Saturday, we were surprised to find easy parking, and we spent several hours…
How we came to find ourselves in Colorado bears an explanation. Chris had spoken at a conference in San Antonio the previous week, and we had made the drive from California to Texas in advance of that event. Hoping to garner some consulting work following the conference, we wound up embarking on a road trip that would take us first to Houston for two nights, Waco for one, Dallas for two, and finally to Amarillo for a night. The potential…
After a week-and-a-half in Redmond, WA, we were looking for something to stretch our legs and get outside. Chris’ sister, Anne, met us at Chris’ mom’s apartment in Redmond Ridge and offered to show us the walking trails in this neck of the literal woods, so the three of us headed out just after noon. Directly out the south end of the complex, we followed the trail west and south for about a mile downhill through a low drainage. Passing…
We had spent our second night of the drive to Seattle in Salem, OR, and the temps outside were below freezing as we left our hotel. The skies were sunny but there were many patches of low, dense fog in the area that reminded us of the tule fog back home. We had looked at several hiking options for the day, including securing a permit to visit Multnomah Falls east of Portland, but the weather forecast there was for freezing…
We awoke early on our first morning in Scottsdale, intent on getting to the trailhead at 5:30am for a sunrise hike up Camelback Mountain – the summit is accessible from two trailheads, and we had read that parking at both can be a nightmare, even on weekdays. As we sat with our morning coffee, we decided that such a popular hike was not what we were really after today, so we looked at several other options, settling on a hike…
No new snow fell on the South Rim overnight, although it was certainly cold enough to have done so – maybe some fell but the winds kept it from sticking. In any case, we awoke early and started packing up – between our camping duffel, day packs, and three small suitcases, we had a lot of gear to transport to the car. The small parking lot behind the Kachina had been perpetually full during our entire stay, so Chris temporarily…
Today’s agenda originally called for a 5-7 mile hike along the South Rim – we thought we’d take the shuttle bus to some indeterminate point east of us and walk back to the hotel. Ideally, we would have taken the shuttle a few miles west to Hermits Rest, then return via 7 miles of the Rim Trail with views to the western reaches of the canyon we’d yet to see, but the shuttles don’t run to Hermits Rest in the…