Bear-Dream-Emerald

View Larger Map

So I guess I'm smack in the middle of one of my outdoorsing phases.

This past week the organizer of /r/coloradohikers on Reddit (link) proposed two meetups, one on Saturday and Sunday. The Saturday meetup was another hike outside Boulder, to the top of the mountain that is above the Flatirons. The Sunday one was to be a snowshoeing adventure in Rocky Mountain National Park.

I briefly considered committing to both of them, but decided it was folly. I decided to go with the snowsheoing expedition on Sunday, for various reasons. One is that the snowshoes that my sister bought me for my birthday have been languishing unused and even unwrapped in the trunk of my car since October, and I dearly wanted to use them at least once this winter.

It also seemed quite appropriate to go on the showshoing expedition, because we were to meet up in RMNP at Bear Lake, which would continue the "bear" theme of my life lately.

So I skipped the Saturday meetup. That evening I heard from the group organizer. Evidently it was to be just him and me for the showshoeing trip. That made it much harder to back out, which was a good thing.

So early Sunday morning before dawn I drove to Estes Park, earlier enough to grab a donut at the Donut Haus just outside of town, where I like to visit, but which is usually jam packed in the summer. I also discovered the fun fact that if you get to the park early enough, you can enter without paying the usual twenty dollars. Already the day was off to a good start.

I found the Bear Lake trailhead without problem. There was hardly any snow in the park at lower elevation, but there was plenty at higher elevation.

About half a dozen cars were already parked there---I felt like a true early bird. I fumbled using the scissors on my keychain to cut the plastic straps on my snowshoes. I felt like a real amateur. The truth is that this was the first time in my life I had ever been snowshoeing. When I was younger, it always seemed like something quaint and weird, like something the Hardy Boys would be doing.

The group organizer, Jonathan, found me in the parking lot and waited for me to get ready, in my obsessive compulsive way. We carried our snowshoes up to the benches at the trailhead and I found myself hoping that I knew what the hell I was doing, while pulling the bindings onto my feet.

But it wasn't too hard to figure it out, and in a few minutes we were off. He obviously knew I had been the slowpoke on our trip up Bear Mountain, so he didn't mind when I apologized in advance that I might be slowing him down.

We decided to make a hike up the trail from Bear Lake to Bierstadt Lake. I very much liked the idea, since that exact trail was the very first Colorado hike I ever made, with my family, in the summer of 1978, when we first moved out here. I hadn't been back to this trail since then.

We started up Bierstadt Moraine, but about halfway up, we ran into a woman in microspikes coming down who ironically asked me, "Have you been on this trail before?"

"Not this time of year," I replied, not mentioning that it had been over three decades.

She said that she hiked this trail a lot, and had been up to Bierstadt Lake two weeks ago, but today she had been unable to even find the trail, because of the snow that had blown over it. She cautioned us to be careful and not get lost, if we proceeded.

"Where are you from?" she asked us. "Fort Collins," I said. "Boulder," said Jonathan.

She seemed quaintly relieved at that, as if she could trust us not to kill ourselves on the trail. Turns out she was from Loveland.

So we climbed up to the top of the moraine. It wasn't too hard. I was barely winded and doing very well in the snowshoes. But the woman turned out to be right. The trail was completely unidentifiable, so we decided to turn around, but not before discovering a complete igloo that someone had constructed. I decided not to climb inside.

So we descended the Moraine back to Bear Lake, where we decided to take an alternative route, up from Bear lake towards Dream Lake, and then Emerald Lake, which was about two miles in, and right at the foot of the mountains on the Continental Divide.

It was a steep trail, and I did very well. Getting winded or fatigued wasn't my main problem this time. Rather it was the strain of the muscles right at the top of my thighs, at my hips, where the tendons were sore by the time I got to Emerald Lake.

I only embarrassed myself once, when I foolishly walked too close to a sunken tree and discovered the nightmare of being caught in the loose snow there (people actually die from being "drowned" in snow pits). It took a great amount of my remaining energy to get myself back on my feet. But I believe people should be forgiven when they fall down while snowshoeing (or cross-country skiing).

It was a great warm day, overall. We put in about 2000 feet of elevation gain, topping out around 10,500 feet. But I barely felt it. I must be getting back in shape.

By time we got back to Bear Lake, the parking lot was crammed full of people just starting out for the day.

There was something so oddly satisfying about the whole experience, beyond the physical exertion. I can't quite explain. Maybe there is part of me still trying to be a real Coloradoan after all these years, and somehow I fulfilled part of that.

One of the best fun moments of the day was when a woman on the trail who had been following us told me, when she caught up to me, that because of the tan color of my gaiters, she thought I was hiking in bare legs. "Hard core!" she said. It was almost as if she granted me the benefit of that, even after she found out it wasn't true. It made a better story, I suppose.

Only one minor screw-up: I forgot the Toblerone bar!

Here are some pictures that Jonathan posted of our trip. That's me in the red down jacket standing in front of the Igloo on Bierstadt Moraine, and on the frozen surface of Emerald Lake.