Training Log Archive: CleverSky

After spending Wednesday evening with relatives outside of Boulder, I met Clint and Hayden at the rental car place and piled into their vehicle for the trip up to South Dakota. On the way, they were up for my suggestion of visiting the highest point in Nebraska, Panorama Point.

Yeah, this is one of the less exciting ones. It brings my meager list to five, as I've also got NH, RI, MA, and CT.

C • meager list 5

Sometimes a long drive turns out to be as worthwhile as you hope it will be. After spending a wonderful evening at the Bonderosa (vacation house belonging to Lex Bundschuh's family), I got up early and headed up to beyond Steamboat Springs (I had never been to that part of Colorado) to visit an old friend.

Very old, in fact: Mil's 90th birthday is in about a week. That's her own little cottage in the picture, just a few steps from her daughter's house, deep in the woods. What a wonderful spot for her to be able to relax in. She's slowing down for sure, and has some balance problems, but we had a great time conversing and catching up for a couple of hours. One of the sweetest people I've ever known.

Despite having lived in Boulder for four years, I had never summted a 14er on foot -- the only time I'd been to that altitude was on my 1983 bike trip when we rode up Mt. Evans. The Gagarins and I stayed at Stan and Joan's place Monday night, and Peter was also up for a hike (Stan just had a knee replacement, so he's on crutches), and we agreed on hiking up to some peak from behind Alma. I had my eye on Mt. Lincoln, since I thought it was two feet taller than Evans (I misread the map, it's actually 22 feet higher), but we were prepared to maybe go for Bross depending on the private property closure situation, or Cameron, which, although it isn't considered a separate peak, is over 14000 feet.


Fine hiking companions

We started out with Gail, who let us go on ahead once it got steep. The hike up was at a stately pace, so so fast that I was hurting. In fact, I felt okay the whole time, in contrast to other times that I've been up high when I've always felt like crap. No other hikers on the trail we used (up from Windy Ridge) until we got up to the saddles, where we eventually saw probably between 30-50 people (and a few dogs). We had gotten an early start in case there were thunderstorms, but the weather was perfect.


Peter, with our destination in the background

Got to the top, and snapped a few pictures

then headed down, quite a bit more quickly. We jogged past the crowd that had started down a little before us, and after I went by the last guy, Peter says it looked like he wasn'f fond of being passed, because he sped up to stay ahead of Peter. I paused at the bottom of a saddle, and they went by and started walking up uphill, where Peter easily got ahead. I caught up, and as I was going by the guy (who looked to be about 30), we had a little conversation.
Him: Wow, do you guys do this a lot?
Me: Not really. This is actually my first 14er, except for the one I did on a bicycle 31 years ago.
Him: (puff puff puff)
Me: And we're from Massachusetts.
(And I thought about adding, "And that guy is 70".)

We made pretty good time coming down, although the flat part at the end, where Peter wanted to keep running half the time, was a killer. The GPS track is actually from Peter's watch, my battery ran out on the way up.

During the night, the wind abated and the temperature warmed up, so after packing up the campsite I drove down to the day use area and went for another hike, this one further south than the previous night, but topping out at the same spot. There were plenty of warnings about wearing shoes (not sandals) because the sand can get so hot, but I just started out barefoot, and it was early enough that my concern was that the sand was too cold. Overall it was warm on the sunny side and cool on the shady side or a couple of inches down. All this barefootness wasn't great for my skin, though, as my heels got pretty dried out and started cracking, and I spent the next few days treating them carefully so that they'd be recovered by the Rogaine.

A bunch of pictures, these were worth making clickable to biggerize:

US Champs, Round Mountain. Still not fast, but mostly clean, I lost 2-3 minutes when I got way off line on the way to #13 (going through the camping area with numerous Trail-O controls around). 3rd (last) in M35, silver medal (behind a Kiwi and Christoph), but somewhere in the middle of the field on Red (15/38 for the weekend).

A pre-dinner stroll in Great Sand Dunes. Wasn't sure what I was up for, so after pitching my tent I walked from the campground down to the creek, took off my sandals to walk across, strolled up into the sand, and just kept going for a while, eventually getting to the summit of High Dune. Strong wind out of the NE, I estimate 40 mph at the top, so coming back down was harder than going up because I was getting sandblasted. Watched people sledding and sandboarding. Should have taken my GPS watch, but I didn't realize how far I was going to go, so time/distance/climb are estimates.

If you zoom in on this, you might be able to get a sense of the streaming sand that was blasting me as I took the picture:

US Champs, Badger Gulch, M35. Pretty clean, a few pretty small errors, but not very fast. 20 minutes out of the lead in the category (3rd), and a few more minutes for the course.