colorado

This is a report of the trip my Son and I took from Elk Park to Needleton via Vestal, Balsam and Noname basins. It is an off trial route with lots of route finding and adventure. it is very remote and rarely visited. The only beta on this trip I was able to find called it the Bruce Traverse...

Hello everyone, This 38 mile mostly trailless loop route is located in the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness area. You can access it via the Mee or Knowles canyon trailheads, which are maybe a 30 minute drive west of Grand Junction. The area is covered in good detail in the Trails Illustrated...

Rawah Wilderness "Lollipop" Loop, Sept 7-12, 2023 Overview: Until recently I thought the highlight of my year was taking my eleven year old daughter to see Taylor Swift. Then I spent 6 days in the Rawah Wilderness in North-central Colorado. Peter, Chris and I began at the West Branch Trailhead...

One of the only trails on the east side of the divide that has alluded me has been this Buchanan Pass trail up the valley towards Red Deer Lake and Gibraltar Lakes underneath the St. Vrain valley. As a dayhike you're looking at 18+ miles, which is completely doable, but I hadn't made the effort...

Nine years ago, soon after moving out here, I went on my first CO backpacking trip. Over the last four days, I had the pleasure of returning to that area with my 15-year-old son Caleb and doing a longer variation of that loop: Day 1 We got nice views right from the trailhead: Despite it...

A Post member shared their trip with me a couple of seasons ago. Last weekend I got a group together and repeated it. We found a classic, high quality point-to-point route consisting of five off-trail passes divided by exquisite high basin traverses. The steep snow offered mild mountaineering...

Last year, one of my hiking buddies reached out to doing the High Sierra Trail this summer. It doesn't take much to convince me to head into the Sierra, so I immediately began making plans, looking at time windows, and figuring out how many days we'd need to complete the trip. Long story short...

Back in February I was out touring in the local hills, mostly to spend some alone time (with the dog, of course). The elevation was between 11-12k' in Colorado, and it was windy, cold and snowing some. Maybe 0°F outside at night, 8-10°F inside the tent. Pretty good times! When arriving at...

I've been lurking on this forum for a while, thought I'd finally post something to share with you all. Last summer, a couple of buddies and myself decided to book flights from the east coast out to Denver, hoping to do a 4-5 night backpacking trip around the beginning of October. We had a...

Another day trip to Rocky Mountain NP. I'll keep this one short, since about the first 50% overlaps with my Sky Pond report from last week and conditions were substantially similar. In the To Do in 2023 post I connected with @RyanP who has some similar winter goals this year and he invited me...

As part of my resolve to get out for more day hikes locally, I'm going to try to post a few more trip reports. We'll see if I can keep it up. (Plus, @scatman does it and I think he's basically who I want to be when I grow up.) Decided to take this past Saturday and do a little winter hiking in...

I am getting old. My car is old, my canoe is old. So I needed something new. I decided to act on 4 years of research and indecision and spend a lot of money and risk divorce to buy a new canoe. I have had our Wenonah 17'Adirondack for 13 years, a great big beautiful tandem boat that carries a...

After finishing work at noon on Saturday, I finished packing my pack and headed 20 minutes away to the Pollock Bench Trailhead in Fruita, Colorado. I headed out towards Rattlesnake Arches, and after 3 hours of moderate terrain I made it to the spot where I planned on dumping my pack while I...

Hello everyone, The Kannah Creek basin is located on the western slope of the Grand Mesa; the trailhead is maybe a 20-minute drive outside of Grand Junction, CO. It's covered in good detail on the Trails Illustrated #136 'Grand Mesa' map. I did this as a 3-day backpacking loop (over Memorial...

A couple of friends and I have been getting at it pretty regularly, ski touring around Colorado this winter. One of our group had never been winter camping, so we decided to do a camping overnight in one of the local wilderness areas on the front range with the secondary objective of skiing...

The day after Christmas I decided to hike through Mordor and toss the ring in to Mount Doom, forever ending the threat of Sauron and his minions. Well not quite, but hiking to Raleigh Peak along the Colorado Trail through the Hayman Fire burn scar makes for some pretty haunting views...

Spent about a week in August riding my bike in Colorado this year. Got in some good rides, but I'm just putting up a report for this one as it was the most interesting one by a good margin. This is a loop that starts and ends in St. Elmo, CO and it's more known as a mountain bike route...

Quandary Peak is a 14er a few miles south of Breckenridge. With a forecast for a spring storm heading in the night before, we planned to get up it and hit the bowls which would be loaded up with wind blown powder. I drove under bluebird skies to the trailhead. Bluebird skies. Everywhere west...

The stars finally aligned for me to go backpacking in the San Juan mountains in SW Colorado. I had enough vacation time to take a big solo trip ("big" for me means five days), the weather forecast was perfect, I was physically feeling fine (very little knee/foot pain), and the smoke from the...

Stuck home, thought I'd toss up something from the past. Hiking forums in the time of Covid. Couple years back these photos were stuck in an inaccessible computer hard drive. Finally ordered an enclosure to put it into to pull out these pics. Artemus had asked me to post this then when I...