What a difference two months make! What a wonderful trail! What a wonderful morning!

Two months ago when I drove to the top of Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park on the day that they opened it for the season, it was miserable. It was freezing cold and blowing snow.

Again today, I drove to the Alpine Visitor Center at 11,796 feet. And this time hiked down from there to the Continental Divide. If hiking down to the Continental Divide sounds strange to you, it does to me too. But the divide is at Milner Pass, elevation only 10,759. [Read more →]

I have got to the point where I just can’t stay away from the mountains — except on weekends, where the hikes are too crowded. Since I do still have to do some work, I can’t go every day. But from now to Labor Day, when it is warm enough in the mountains and too warm down here in the plains, I am doing my best to get into a pattern of hiking on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. [Read more →]

My hike today more than made up for some little problems in getting there. It was a beautiful day in the mountains, clear skies and sunny until near the end, a little warmer than last week. But again I was hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park. This was a trail new to me on the east side of the park about 1 and one-half hours from her.

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Yesterday afternoon I returned four glorious days in the Rockies. I already wrote about my trip to Bear, Nymph, Dream, and Emerald Lakes on Monday. But in looking at my schedule I see that I didn’t have any appointments or articles due until Thursday evening, when one of my articles for HealthCentral.com was due. I actually sketched that article out on the Chapin Pass trail when the idea came to me.

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At 5 a.m. this morning I went straight from the hospital to four of the most beautiful lakes in the world. And then I went straight back to another hospital.

The lakes were dramatic, but my hospital experiences weren’t. Last night I went overnight to one location of Boulder Community Hospital for a sleep study to see if I really need to keep using a CPAP machine now that I have lost weight. This afternoon I went to a different location of that hospital to have one of my hearing aids repaired. [Read more →]

When I started to take Byetta last February, my doctor asked me what my weight goal was. At the time I weighed in at 312 pounds. That’s a body mass index of 40, which has the discouraging name “morbidly obese.”

I told him that my goal was to weigh what my Army discharge papers say that I weighed at the date of my discharge, October 26, 1957. I weighed then 195 pounds, which happens to be at the high end of a normal BMI of 25. By goal was to get down to that weight by October 26, 2007, which is exactly half a century later. He said I could lose a little weight, but that my goal was unrealistic. [Read more →]

All the time that I was in Florida I thought about the wonderful wild beauty of the Indian Peaks Wilderness in the (Theodore) Roosevelt National Forest just south of and adjacent to the Rocky Mountain National Park. Today I got back there.
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I said yesterday that I was going to hike to Lake Isabelle today, and I did it! In fact, I hiked about an hour past the lake.

Even though I am headed off to a convention in Florida tomorrow morning, I just had to squeeze in another trip back to the Indian Peaks Wilderness today. It wasn’t a short trip either — one hour from home, six hours on the trail, and one hour back. [Read more →]

Today it was so hot in Boulder — exactly 100 degrees — that I knew that I had to get away to the high country. But I didn’t go quite as far as my Saturday hike to Long Lake. I went 20 miles straight west to the newest Boulder County open space, Caribou Ranch. I did hike half of the trail a couple of years ago, and that tired me out. Today, I am in much better shape, and I hiked every foot of the 4.5 miles of the trail. [Read more →]