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Greyrock Mountain
We headed up the Poudre canyon to Greyrock trail with our friend Alan today. It’s a hike we’ve had our eye on, and we wanted to scope out the climbing potential too. After a couple of miles of good climbing, the peak comes into view. It looks like about 600 feet of granite dome. One…
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Lower Arthur’s Rock
It’s a bright, sunny day, but there’s a cold wind blowing. We follow Dave and Lisa to Lower Arthur’s Rock at Lory State Park. There’s the usual parking permit to deal with, and the trail up the arroyo is more like a bobsled track in places, but the rock is dry, out of the wind,…
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Ski Up Chief Mountain
Once again we head up Squaw Pass road to explore the ski trails near Evergreen. It’s a foggy, cold day, and we don’t expect much. We stop at small pullout by the road. Ann checks out the trail and gives it “snowshoes up”. After an hour and half of pretty, groomed trail, Ann turns around…
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Bouldering in Morrison
Morrison is a small but appealing spot proposed by our friends Dave and Lisa when the foothills look a little snowy for Eldorado Canyon. The south facing, overhanging sandstone faces catch the sun, turning a cold morning into a hot day. The spot is a little crowded, but the locals are so laid back and…
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Horsetooth Reservoir
With a clear sky and temperatures soaring into the 60s, we weren’t the only ones that headed up to Horsetooth for some bouldering. We met Lisa there with her 3-month-old Dyson on his first bouldering outing. It didn’t take long to shred the fingertips, but it sure felt good. Very nice also to finally get…
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Ruffwear Booties at Echo Lake
We head up to Echo Lake after an early breakfast for an exploratory cross-country ski. We also try a solution for Jezze’s icy foot problem, Ruffwear dog booties. She tolerates them once they’re on, if we yell at her when she bites them, but as soon as she rockets up the trail they’re left on…
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Golden Cliffs
For a morning that started by looking out the window, seeing big snowflakes falling, and turning over again, we got a few good climbs in. My Dad said on the phone later that the weather looked OK at his place, so we threw the climbing gear in the car with our skis just in case.…
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Lake Agnes Trail
Today we rally for our first trip into the mountains outside Ft. Collins. At home it’s warm and sunny out. The drive up the Poudre canyon to Cameron Pass is a long and twisty one, during which the sky slowy darkens and the light strains into a pale yellow before turning grey. It’s an hour…
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What Drives You To Summit?
Ransom Altman, the protagonist of my novel, WILD ANIMUS, is a mountain climber who’s not satisfied merely to summit peaks. He’s on a quest for a level of meaning and truth accessible only in the wildest corners of the globe, and ultimately, he ascends Alaska’s Mt. Wrangell with a single-minded purpose: to reunite himself with…
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Breckenridge
The lesson of our first day on the ski slopes this year is this: if you don’t know where sniff out the deals you will pay out the nose. I remembered that a local grocery chain sells lift tickets, and this saved us $28 on the ski-base price of $118 for two day passes. And…