Yesterday’s hike in glorious weather was an easy six miles that I completed in five hours. That’s a little faster than my usual pace for a couple of reasons. The Beaver Meadows Circuit trail had only a moderate elevation gain of 1160 feet, from 8440 to 9600 feet, and I walked and jogged in spurts (as interval training) faster and longer than I have before.

Still, I took my time to enjoy the beauty all around me. I was in an area of Rocky Mountain National Park that until a couple of days ago I didn’t know existed. I discovered it when I looked for trail waypoints and tracks on a website that Karen had told me about. When I found this loop trail, I loaded the waypoints and track into my GPS receiver.

These pre-made waypoints and track coordinated perfectly with one of my trail guides, Hiking Circuits in Rocky Mountain National Park. Good thing, because the area was full of a confusing matrix of trails, and the paper map that I also carried was no help at all.
[Read more →]

It was the rain that did it. On Monday it rained all day. That’s unusual for this area.

After the rain cleared the air, Tuesday was as clear and shiny a day as I have ever seen. But the weather was too cool to go to the high country, so I went to the foothills instead. The temperature was in the 60s all day. and there was essentially no wind, also unusual for this part of the world.

I went to Eldorado. The original Eldorado, dating to the 1530s, was a mythical city of gold. The real Eldorado is a scenic canyon about five miles from my apartment. In the aspens that are beginning to turn I did find gold there.

As I was answering my email about 8 a.m. the clouds lifted and went somewhere else. After detouring a long way around an accident scene, I finally left behind what a lot of people think of as “the real world” and at 9 a.m. reached the trailhead for the Eldorado Canyon Trail in Eldorado State Park.
[Read more →]

With Karen’s inspiration and help, I just wrote an article about moderation in wealth and health (http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/13985/health-wealth). Maybe that’s why my hike today was a moderate one.

When I studied my trail guides yesterday, I saw that it wouldn’t be possible to climb higher anywhere around here than I did Wednesday without climbing a mountain. No hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park or Indian Peaks Wilderness or James Peak Wilderness go above 12,550 feet without going off the trail to climb a peak, and I’m not prepared for that.

But I knew that I wanted to go back to Rocky Mountain National Park, because I just got high resolution National Park maps and loaded them into my GPS receiver yesterday. I decided to go to a lake that I had never seen before in the Bear Lake area where I have often hiked.
[Read more →]

If I hadn’t made it to Chasm Lake on Sunday, I never would have considered the hike I took yesterday. My guide books rate Chasm Lake as a difficult hike – and that is even before the rock slide, and I more than reached my destination.

Somebody told me yesterday that the trail to the lake had been wiped out. So that explains why I got lost and went too far!

Yesterday’s hike, which the Forest Service rates as difficult, took me to Pawnee Pass in the Indian Peaks Wilderness of the Roosevelt and Arapaho National Forests. It is a pass over the Continental Divide at 12,550 feet.

That’s higher than a place that I ever climbed in Colorado before. But I wasn’t sure if it was higher than any place I had ever climbed, because about 40 years ago Doris and I had climbed up Mount Kenya, the second highest peak in Africa. We didn’t climb to the top because it is glaciated and requires mountaineering equipment, but we climbed a long way in two days and spent a miserable night in a leopard’s cave with water dripping constantly on our sleeping bags.
[Read more →]

When I woke up at 3:30 yesterday morning, it was the answer to my problem.

I wanted to get in one more good hike to the high country while I still could this season. To me the high country means above timberline and preferably above 12,000 feet. But, of course, the weather has already cooled here.

While I generally avoid hiking on weekends, the weather prediction was for one warm day Sunday sandwiched between cooler weather. I had a couple of hikes in mind, but neither of them grabbed me.

My ah-ha moment came at 3:30 a.m. For a long time I had wanted to hike to Chasm Lake in Rocky Mountains National Park, but two things had stopped me.
[Read more →]

Since I learned that it is OK to go home again, as reported in my previous message, I figured that I can go back to a trail I have hiked before. There are so many wonderful trails to explore that generally I like to go to some place new. But yesterday I went back to the Wild Basin area of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Actually, a bit less than half of the hike was a retracing of my steps of a previous hike. This time I made a circuit by connecting a longer trail along a ridge of the basin with one going back down along the banks of the creek.
[Read more →]

You can go home again, even if Thomas Wolfe says you can’t. I came home yesterday evening.

Unlike my trip down to New Mexico, I came back almost as quickly as I could. I needed to be back today because early this afternoon I have a consulting appointment. It’s with the Joslin Diabetes Clinic via conference call.
[Read more →]

Today’s schedule was social. The purpose of my trip to Santa Fe was to meet with Gretchen Becker, and it was a great success.

Gretchen and I both have type 2 diabetes and write about it. We have worked closely together for about a dozen years, corresponding by email and phone calls. She has helped me on many articles and I have reciprocated. Gretchen has now written three books about diabetes, one of which,  The First Year: Type 2 Diabetes: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed, is, as I have often written, undoubtedly the very best book for anyone who gets this disease.
[Read more →]

History is the theme of today’s trip. The destination today was Santa Fe, the first city settled by Europeans in the United States.

While our history books teach us that my ancestors (and a few others) who came over on the Mayflower in 1620 to settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts, were the first Europeans in this country, the history books are wrong. The first European settlement was in Santa Fe in 1609, when the Spanish governor chose this city as the capital of Spain’s Kingdom of New Mexico.
[Read more →]

In 1858 when they discovered gold in Colorado, the pioneers painted “Pike’s Peak or Bust” on the covered wagons. Today my wagon took me all the way to the top of Pike’s Peak, 14,110 feet high – higher than I have ever been in my life without flying.

[Read more →]