After I fell down the glacier twice, I gave up.

It’s not a big glacier. It probably doesn’t even have a name, like the Arapaho Glacier that I hiked up to a week ago. But it’s covered with ice all year long. And no way around it was any less hazardous.

On Tuesday, August 5, I wanted to celebrate my 73rd birthday by doing something I love. Hiking. My resistance training classes that I take on Tuesdays and Thursdays were cancelled this week, making a multi-day hike possible. [Read more →]

Today I had more time to go through the hundreds of pictures that I took on the Golden Gate Canyon State Park trails on Thursday and Friday. Here are some more that I found:
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My backpacking trip to Golden Gate Canyon State Park was fantastic. Everything went perfectly — until I got home and tried to load the 200-plus photographs from my camera into my computer.

One little complication like that can take hours of troubleshooting. This one sure did.

Eventually, I realized that the program I was using on my Macs that is called iPhoto stopped working when it came to some pictures that I had saved in RAW (uncompressed) form after my previous hike. I keep trying to improve my photographic skills, and shooting in RAW form seemed to be the next step. That goes with using a more powerful computer program, which is what I had to do anyway to get at the pictures that I took yesterday and today.
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Columbines in full bloom along the trails delighted me today. This delicate tri-color bloom deserves its role as Colorado’s state flower.

Today I returned to Golden Gate Canyon State Park for the third time in less than three weeks. But this time I hiked to Frazer Meadow, which I hadn’t attempted since May 2006. It was difficult for me then, and I only hiked a couple of miles at that time.

Today I hiked about eight miles, and it was easy. Because the summer weather clouds over in the afternoons here, I made sure to get an early start, arriving at the trailhead just after 7.
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Last August I started preparing to backpack in the Rockies by buying a backpack, tent, sleeping bag, and pad. Karen and I had a short and successful trial run with my new equipment in March, but yesterday and today was my first backpacking trip to any mountains in a quarter of a century.

Finally, everything clicked for an overnight camping trip on Thursday and Friday. I didn’t have any appointments except to post an article at HealthCentral.com, and my producers did that for me after I sent her a draft of it on Wednesday. I’m feeling great, and the weather prediction was good too.

In fact, the weather was superb, especially yesterday and last night. It was as clear as I ever remember seeing it and totally without any wind for the duration of my trip.
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To start my current trip visiting Karen in Albuquerque she suggested that we take a backpacking trip. Since northern New Mexico still has a lot of snow, she suggested we go to southern New Mexico.

This was to be my first backpacking trip in 20 years. It was Karen’s first in 30 years. She already had a backpack and pad for her sleeping bag. But last week I picked up one for her in Boulder’s REI that zips together to mine.

I checked out my New Mexico hiking guides, and found one place that they all say is special — White Sands National Monument. It happens that I had stopped there in 1977, when I moved back to California from DC, but had never hiked there. Karen had never gone there at all.

I had come down from Boulder on Friday in a 9-hour drive on Saturday and rested on Sunday. Yesterday morning we made the 4-hour drive straight south to White Sands.
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