Tour de Lakes

As usual, I am posting this several weeks after the actual run in question. As much as I try to avoid working this way, it always seems to happen. This time, I have not actually had much time between that day and this in which to write a post. Between helping a friend move, getting shipped out to Chicago for a week for company training, and, naturally, running quite a bit, I have not found the time.

On October 2, I took advantage of a little spare time and a gorgeous day to head up to Rocky Mountain National Park for a run that I had taken with a friend some years earlier. I recalled it being a long, arduous run with a hard initial climb, and an additional several mile-long, 3000 foot climb in the middle. The loop was listed at about 11 miles, but given the time it took last time, we estimated it was closer to 13 or 14. Called the “Tour de Lakes,” it skirts a path around and past four separate lakes.

This was the peak aspen season, so I anticipated large crowds. I was not disappointed. There was a snarl of traffic through Estes Park, and a long line to get into the Park proper as well.  Since I had to wait in line in any case, I took the opportunity and renewed my National Parks pass for another year.

By the time I finally made it to the Bierstadt Lake parking lot, I was worried about finding a parking spot with all the traffic I had seen on the way in. Fortunately for me, though, this trailhead is far less well-known than Bear Lake, which is a few miles farther up the road, and I was able to pull into the last spot in the lot.

I remembered the initial climb up to the first ridgeline being tortuous the last time, so I was surprised when I found myself cruising up the switchbacks without much trouble. I stopped to snap a few pictures of the Longs Peak diamond rising behind me through the golden aspen, something quite a few other people were doing with much larger cameras, and cruised on over the ridge and around Bierstadt lake.

A classic autumn view of Longs Peak, from the first climb of the day.

This little guy was sitting in the middle of the trail. (S)he did not particularly like me getting this close, and curled up defensively.

After Bierstadt, the trail gets significantly less crowded as it heads for Cub Lake. The last time I ran this steep and rocky downhill section, my friend Mark had a GPS watch on, and clocked us in at a 4:30 mile for one stretch. I do not think I equaled that this time, but I’ve been wrong before.

After the descent, the trail crosses a small stream, and takes you out into a small meadow. I looked up, and saw the picture of a lifetime. I snapped a quick shot, knowing that I would probably not be able to capture the sheer stunning beauty of the scene, but the picture itself turned out pretty well.

 

I think this is one of the better pictures I have managed to capture. It's hard to beat the scene I had to work with, though.

As the picture shows, at this point the trail starts to head up again, for a long, long time.

A mile or two on from this picture, the trail crosses another, larger stream before heading up a long valley. At this crossing I met a couple other runners heading the opposite direction around the loop. They had just moved to Boulder from Texas and Tennessee, and three days after moving here went for this run. Hats off to them, that takes guts.

A little farther on, after  passing a group of CU students out for a weekend backpacking trip, the trail goes by Fern Falls.  I took the opportunity to grab a profile pic for my Facebook account, as well as a picture without me messing up the foreground. 

Fern Falls

My legs were starting to feel the climb a bit here. As I continued on, and the climb just kept coming and coming, I began to suffer a bit. There is no part of this climb that is particularly steep. It’s just relentless. It only lets up briefly to skirt the edge of the third (and fourth) lake of the day: Fern (and Odessa)

Looking over Fern Lake, at Flattop Mountain and the Little Matterhorn. 

At this point the trail is more accessible from the Bear Lake trailhead, and thus more crowded. Where I had gone miles without seeing people earlier in the day, now I saw groups every quarter mile or so. For the moment, this helped give me a little boost to get me up and over the last climb ridge of the day, from which point it is all downhill.

While I was definitely feeling the run by this point, I still was not as tired as I might have expected to be. I must have had some residual fitness from a summer of runner that decided to poke its head out during the end of the run.

That being the case, I started cruising the downhill, letting my legs go knowing that the hardest, longest portion of the run was over and it was, nearly, all downhill from this point.

Unfortunately, this also meant that I had to dodge the ubiquitous photographers on the way down. In general, they were courteous and stepped to the side of the trail, letting me burn by them, and often even cheering me on. However, as is always the case, there were exceptions to this rule. I started to get exasperated by the fifth time I came around a bend to find a tripod supporting a several thousand-dollar camera set up in the middle of the trail. I am all for getting a great shot, but it is still a trail, and people run.

This annoyance was not nearly enough to spoil my day however. I was out on a gorgeous day, running through groves of evergreens and golden aspen, with my legs still feeling good even after 12 or so miles.

I came back to Bierstadt Lake with enough left in my legs to give it a good push over the last, short uphill before cruising back down to the parking lot with, again, stunning views of Longs Peak to the south.

I ended up coming in at three hours on the dot, about 35 minutes faster than I took this loop the last time, even with all the photography breaks. All in all, a fantastic way to close out a serious summer of running.

The First Snow

It has been my tradition as long as I have been a runner, or even close to a runner, that I run during the first snow. Whenever it occurs (usually sometime in October out here in Colorado), whether it's in the middle of the day or the middle of the night, when those first flakes start falling, you can find me out on the roads, trails, or paths running my heart out.

And usually singing.

Today was the first snow in Boulder this year. My plan had been to head up to Indian Peaks today to get in a High Lonesome Loop before the snow closed that route down. Unfortunately I may have left that a bit late this year. The forecast for Nederland today was for 4 to 8 inches of snow to fall in 31 degree weather. While I don't really mind running in that much snow, and in fact regularly find it quite invigorating, I had zero desire to drive up the Canyon this morning with a cadre of other, less experienced snow drivers. The first snow of the year almost always causes a bit of a Charlie Fox up the Canyon, and I avoid it if I can.

Thus this morning found me heading up to Chautauqua to get in a run up Green Mountain. The parking lot was wet, but with rain, not snow. In a tiny bit of cosmic irony as I pulled into my parking spot, "Knee Deep" by the Zac Brown Band, with Jimmy Buffett, started playing on the radio. So I took off up the Amphitheater Trail with the words "only worry in the world 'is the tide going to reach my chair'" bouncing around in my head.

To my great surprise, the initial stair-climbing up Amphitheater felt rather easy today. Whatever shape I'm in, this section tends to hurt, but today I just felt smooth and easy, bounding up the rocks and stairs past the various groups of people coming down. And that sense of ease continued as I followed Saddle Rock trail up across the snow-line, where the soft susurrus of snow falling on the still-golden leaves provided a soothing background to a difficult climb. I had to pick my way across some of the rock-fields on the higher reaches of Greenman, when I got there, since I don't know the trail as well as some other runners. But much to my surprise I felt great even as I got to the summit. I have always remembered this last stretch being a bit of a haul, but today I was still cruising.

That's the magic of the first snow for me: I always feel invincible on my runs. My legs don't get as tired. My lungs don't gasp. On the way down, after stopping and talking to a ranger for a minute, the people I passed kept looking at me strangely. I wondered why, until I realized that, true to form, the words from "Knee Deep" that I thought were merely going through my head were in fact coming out my mouth. Thinking about it now, I must have made quite the picture, running down the mountain at a decent clip, signing "left a note said I'll be back in a minute, bought a boat and I sailed off in it. Don't think anybody's gonna miss me any way" while my feet came down in several inches of snow. The first snow: every year, it pushes me just to the other side of sanity. And I love it.

A few pics from a summer of running

The first set is from a run I did up in Indian Peaks on June 26 this year. This was to be my last long(ish) run before running the Leadville Marathon the next week. I felt good, despite coming back from a week in Baltimore just the day before. Unfortunately, before I managed to get much of a run in, the snow on the trail got too deep and I ended up turning back. I did, though, get a up high and get some good altitude time in.

Very much out of order, this is a picture of the only lake I'd managed to get to that day. I had meant to go to king, but the snow was too much.

This was the first stretch of snow on the trail. It only got deeper from here. Since I was in shorts, post-holing through the icy crust of this quickly cut up my shins, and I soon decided to turn around.

The water was still really high for June. Down in Boulder around this time, the Creek was in full flood, and closed to tubing.

Again, the water was high. But as ever, high water makes for great pictures.


Skipping a bit, the next are from a run, again in Indian Peaks, up the Arapahoe Pass trail. i didn't get pics of it, but I got caught out a bit by a thunderstorm this day, and ended up having to hightail it back down the trail a ways.

From the Arapahoe Glacier trail.

Looking back down the trail. At about this time the clouds were building a bit behind me, but I wasn't too concerned as it was still pretty early. Oops . . .

My turnaround point. My legs were just not feeling good this day, so I opted not to continue on either to Caribou Pass or further along the Arapahoe Pass trail. Also, shortly after I took this picture, the sky opened up an the lightning started, so I decided to head back down, somewhat recklessly it must be said.

More pics to come.

Pics from the run below

Again, it has been a while since I posted here. Not due to me not running, but more that I have not yet set up internet in my new(ish) apartment. Had I done so before now, I probably would have posted these earlier. However, since I didn't, here are a few.


A look at the trail ahead for the day. Belford is on the left, Missouri looms to the right of the picture. Missouri was intimidating to me that day, despite being a relatively easy mountain, as it is where a friend of mine's girlfriend had died in a mountaineering accident earlier in the year.

At the top of Belford.

I am no longer sure where this picture was taken from. I believe, though, that it is looking south from Oxford.

Summit of Oxford.

On the saddle between Belford and Missouri. It was about here that I decided not to go for the summit of Missouri as well, but leave it for another trip.

More pics from the summer and fall of running to come in the next several posts.