colorado

Hello everyone, Below are photos from a beautiful loop hike I completed a few weeks ago in the Indian Peaks Wilderness. From the Mitchell Creek Trailhead, the route follows the Mt Audubon trail to its end at the summit of Mt. Audubon. From there, the route scrambles cross country along the...

My wife and daughters were at a girls' camp this past week, so I decided to take my son Caleb backpacking for a local 3-night trip while they were out of town. This was our first backpacking trip of the year. I came up with the exact itinerary just a few days beforehand, thanks to a...

I snuck up into the heart of the Sangre de Cristo Range in southern Colorado this weekend. My only true parameters were that I couldn't light out of Denver until around 1 PM on Friday and had to be back to town for a birthday party for my daughter's classmate by 4 PM MT on Sunday. Those, and...

Hello everyone, To honor my dad's memory, who recently passed away, I spent the day driving up to, then snowshoeing around Rocky Mountain NP-retracing part of a family vacation I took with him, his wife, and my brother many years ago. The vacation was a week long road trip throughout Colorado...

Canyons of the Ancients National Monument , SW Colorado- Wilderness Volunteers Trail Project - May 2024 Located west of Cortez, CO is Canyon of the Ancients National Monument. The monument is managed by the BLM. The visitor center and museum is located in Dolores, CO. The monument is considered...

3:45 am. It never fails; I’ve woken up 15 minutes ahead of my alarm going off. As a 63 year old carpenter who still works 5 days a week, you would think that I could really use my sleep, but I had rested over the weekend and planned an adventure for the Indigenous Peoples Day holiday on Monday...

I don't know that this one would normally merit such a belated trip report, but when looking through the year's hiking photos I realized I had already started preparing one back in June and just never got around to finishing it. Plus, it was a really fun day and - despite the Causeway being a...

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...