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June 25, 2005
Trailway to Heaven
Yesterday Torch and I, after over a week in Aspen, finally got our butts out of the room and onto the trails. We made up for our laziness on the hiking front by starting with the Ute...and continuing all the way up Aspen mountain, a vertical gain of over 3000 feet. In two and a half hours. If you're counting, on average, that's a gain of 20 vertical feet per minute. Needless to say, I'm riding my bike considerably slower today.
We started with the Ute, a short (25-40 minutes, depending on pace) but difficult trail I did many times last summer. The view from the top is quite stunning (click on the black links to change the picture at right, or visit here if that doesn't work for you), with the town of Aspen in one direction and upvalley towards Independence Pass in the other (yes, that's Torch, looking awesome). Continuing past the Ute, we ran into an abandoned silver mine, and up very steep skin runs towards the summit.
As we got higher, I found what I think is bear sign (droppings and print), although it'd be a pretty small bear -- I did find a larger print a dozen yards away. Maybe a female and cub? It wasn't long before we hit snow (maybe I should say, before snow hit me!). I was absurdly exhausted at the top, but the view is breathtaking....thankfully, we made it to the top in time to take the gondola down the mountain.
I would appreciate comments on this method of photoblogging. The pictures really don't do this place justice. When we had been hiking for nearly two hours and got high enough up that the wind hit us and the air cooled down, Torch and I both agreed that the old metaphor between height and perfection was considerably more than a metaphor in our case.
After the gondola descent, we rushed to the Chamber Symphony concert (first concert in the tent!), which deserves comment, but not now, since I'm hungry, and it took me quite a while to figure out how I wanted to do the photoblogging.
UPDATE (30 August 7:20 EDT): Changed the way the photos are displayed -- originally, I tried to have the images popup when you rolled over the links, but I think I prefer flipping images in a "viewpane" on click. I'll use this method in the future. Feedback welcome, as always. Also corrected elevation gain figure.
Posted by David Richmond at June 25, 2005 1:30 PM EDT
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Comments
i like the pictures but they hide under the menu bar.... hard to get the full pic depending on how the links lie on the page.
Posted by: Em at July 3, 2005 10:20 AM
why aren't you writing? why is your page blank?
i needie my fixie
Posted by: emmmmm at July 10, 2005 9:32 AM