Journeys: Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado - Snowshoeing

Monday, March 7, 2011

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado - Snowshoeing

Just because I have decided that I'm over Winter does not, of course, mean that winter will cooperate and yield to Spring. The Winter season tends to linger for a long time here in the Mountain West and it's not unusual to see snow fall in May and even into June.

The first attempted snowshoeing trip of the season was with Josh in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. It was Halloween weekend and the weather was so warm and dry that we ended up carrying our snowshoes on our backs the entire way.

Where's all the snow?

A few weeks later, Rob, Ryan, Lesa and I found lots of new snow on a trek up to White Pine Lake in Little Cottonwood Canyon. Between November and February I managed to get out snowshoeing quite a few times and even invested in a fancy new pair of MSR snowshoes. By the time February comes to an end, I'm ready to be done with the snow and cold. Four months is enough.

Lesa, Ryan, and Rob enjoying a lovely day in White Pine Canyon

Rob needed to head over to Denver and decided it would be fun to make a long weekend trip out of it. We spent two nights in Estes Park, CO in a great cabin before heading down to Denver on Sunday. My friends Kevin, Josh, and Justin joined us for one night in Estes Park and Rob and I spent two days snowshoeing within Rocky Mountain National Park.

Rob on the way to Flattop Mountain - Rocky Mountain NP

On the way to Flattop Mountain - Rocky Mountain NP

Windblown trees on the way to Flattop Mountain - Rocky Mountain NP

Windblown Rob - Flattop Mountain

On the way to Flattop Mountain - Rocky Mountain NP

Bierstadt Lake - Rocky Mountain NP

Rob giving me a ride on the ride - Bierstadt Lake

Winter started and ended for me in Rocky Mountain National Park. I'm sure there will be more snow over the next few months, but it's time to move onto biking and hiking.

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess