colorado

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...

I made it out for a solo trip this past Saturday up to Vail, CO to access the west side of the Gore Range. It seems like every time I venture out into these parts I end up with some epiphany that may be the most beautiful spot in our rectangular state. (Shhh, don't spread the word). The...

I decided to roll the dice on getting out for some peak bagging this holiday weekend, despite what I feared would be an off-the-charts amplification of the usual weekend trailhead madness that really spoils anything close to home on the front range for me. However I've recently switched jobs...

I headed out to the West side of the Indian Peaks Wilderness, looking to climb my last 2 peaks in the wilderness, Hopi and Cherokee peaks. For those that don't know, the Indian Peaks is a continuation of the peaks to the South of Rocky Mountain NP. There are 37 peaks in the wilderness, and...

A few weeks ago I backpacked Colorado's Dominguez Canyon Wilderness between Grand Junction and Delta. This was a 46 mile loop up Big Dominguez Canyon, then connecting to Little Dominguez via seldom used roads and trail on the Uncompahgre Plateau. 1/4 of the trip was off trail and...

Mt Zirkel Wilderness 2012 July 10-13 I will be starting my backpacking for the season in mid/late June and am getting excited. Spending much time looking over past hikes, which I always enjoy. This trip was my first of the year after the long (2400 miles in 3 days) drive from my base in the...

Gather at the River March 27, 2018 I'd say it was late winter when it started to become clear that the Dolores was going to run. The calendar on the wall sitting vacant May and June suddenly became something more. This was the event of the year in terms of trip planning and primacy was...

This trip had become something of a backpacking white whale for me. I'd been eager to try winter backpacking and Rocky Mountain NP seemed a safe-ish destination for a first-timer. Only a couple hours from home, plenty of people milling about within a few hours of pretty much any spot I'd want...

Hey, this is my trip report from the Continental Divide Loop in RMNP in September 2017. Things didn't go as well as planned but it was still a fun time. The original plan was to add a trip off trail up to Timber Lake on the third day but we lost the old trail and the terrain and weather proved...

***Part 2 of 2 of my 2017 trip to Chicago Basin in Colorado. My hiking partner, Dave, and I also overnighted near the rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison before also heading out to summit Utah's Mount Peale, the highpoint of the La Sal Range near Moab because we had a bit of extra time...

***Part 1 of 2 of my second multi-day backpacking trip to Colorado in summer 2017; check out Part 2 for the rest of the adventure.*** Originally this trip was supposed to be an epic "thru-style-hike" (starting and ending at very different places) in Idaho's Sawtooth Range. I had, over the...

Okay! Here's part two of Colorado Trip 2017 # 1. :) Where we left off in the last post we'd headed to Montrose for food at the restaurant called Pahgre's. Mitch drove Claron's car while I rode along, Dave drove himself. Jeff and Claron had come down from Yankee Boy Basin and the Ouray side...