When Helene Freezes Over

The day, characteristically for a hiking day, started before sunrise. Out of convenience and partiality we journeyed again to Rocky Mountain National Park. Our goal this time was to reach a mountain lake called Helene Lake. Not often visited in the winter, Helene Lake’s lack of traffic is the result of the lake shore being […]

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Mills To Pay The Bills

We left for the mountains before sunrise. With a sparse 2020 now behind us, we were anxious to get outside and start making 2021 a brighter year. Looking at forecasts and trail conditions, we decided that brighter year would be best begun at Rocky Mountain National Park, specifically the hike to Mills Lake near the […]

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Brady Bop

This will be a quick blog for a quick hike. Brady Lake and Sopris Lake are neighboring entities isolated far out in the Holy Cross Wilderness of Colorado, closest by road to the small town of Minturn. The hike had been meant as a something to do midway through a camping trip near the larger […]

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Hot Take on Lonesome Lake

I needed an escape: a recess from the existential gloom that is living through this pandemic. Ty unfortunately could not join for this escapade, he has been hard at work helping to run time-sensitive COVID-19 diagnostic tests for CU Boulder through his lab research gig. Godspeed, Ty! Lurking just beneath the jagged precipices of the […]

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Climb To Safety

Two rules of thumb when going on day hikes in Colorado: always try to leave before sunrise, and never take east-bound I-70 on a Sunday afternoon. We managed one of these on a recent Sunday when we left for the Vail area to make the hike up to Deluge Lake. The sun hadn’t yet crested […]

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Warm Sandy Beaches

This summer has been an unusually stormy one for the state of Colorado, in turn making it more difficult to schedule hikes. With nothing but clouds in the weekend forecast, we decided to make an early morning foray to Rocky Mountain National Park. RMNP, generally best avoided during the summer months due to the insane […]

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East Peak Story

The air was starting to warm, and the snow-pack of the Rocky Mountains beginning its slow decline for the upcoming Summer. As you might imagine, the mountains in southern Colorado are some of the first to clear up every year, and this year was not an exception, even with the wild weather the state has […]

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Bluebird is the Word

Back in March, when snow still blanketed the ground in the mountains, I set out into the Wild Basin of Rocky Mountain National Park in an effort to find the sub-alpine Bluebird Lake. I trudged over five miles through the snowy landscape on a bleak, overcast day. After surpassing 10,000 feet in elevation, I began […]

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Conquistador-able

West Spanish Peak—the United States’s easternmost 4,000-meter peak—enjoys prominence in elevation and notoriety in history. Standing at an imposing 13,626 feet, the mountain’s apex may not rise as high as many of the other peaks in Colorado, but still takes the rank as the state’s twelfth-most topographically prominent summit. Rising nearly 7,000′ over its north […]

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