climbing higher

If you look carefully you can see the road I drove up on four different levels. In the mountains its very easy to drive 10 miles just to get to someplace that's 3 miles away.

Getting up into the mountains always makes me feel good, sometimes because it's cooler and sometimes the air just tastes better, but this time the air tasted kind of smokey, sort of like eating at a barbecue joint.

But despite that it was good to be getting up to altitude again. The brisk air and the beautiful scenery makes me want to get out there and commune with nature instead of communing from the seat of my truck like I usually do.

I took a couple of walks on some easy trails while I was still below 10,000 feet to get to some overlooks where there was a nice view and did just fine as long as the trail was fairly level and didn't go uphill for too far. But the trails that were steep or had a lot of obstacles that I had to go over tired me out rather quickly. But it gave me some insight about what walking around above timberline was going to be like.

I remember some years ago when I was in Tincup and I rode my old Yamaha 360 motorcycle up an old wagon road to the top of a mountain in the area that was about 12,000 feet tall. There was an abandoned 1800s gold mine on top and a lot of the mining equipment was still laying around the area, most of it being very big and very heavy.

As I looked off into the vast distances that I could see from the top of that peak, and all of that heavy equipment laying on the ground, I couldn't help but think of the men that spent many long hours doing hard backbreaking work at an altitude so high that I was dizzy just riding my motorcycle up there. I think as a whole, life has become so easy for most of us that it is almost beyond our comprehension to understand how difficult life used to be for the pioneers out West.

Well I sure strayed off into the bushes with that topic. I'm not sure how I got from me walking around above timberline, to how difficult the Pioneer life was out West, but I did do it rather smoothly.

 But anyway tomorrow or the next day I'll write about being above timberline in the RMNP and you'll be able see from the pictures what a featureless, boring area it really is. And if it wasn't for the views and the possibility of finding gold and silver there would be no reason on earth to ever go above timberline in less you've developed a taste for Marmot pot pie.

                                   theboondork

the Line across the side of the tree covered mountain across the way is the road I was just on.

it looks like while I was getting a little rain on me at 9000 feet the day before, the high country was getting a few snow showers.

Down by that little Lake looks like a nice place to camp, but you'd better bring some blankets, because even in the middle of August it will get below freezing up here at night.