Rocky Mountain Snowpack

What is it they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? Liz and i are learning this firsthand as we're attempting to make some outdoor weekends happen in the rockies this month and further North in the coming weeks, and discovering quite a bit of the white stuff. But, to back up to last Saturday...

Liz jumped ship a little early on her conference on Saturday morning, and we made haste out to Estes Park to find Mark & Kate. And find them we did, over at Ed's for some mexican food and some refreshing cerveza. They regaled us with the story of discovering that their rope was ten meters shorter than they realized... once they were on the route. funny for us, most likely terrifying for them.


We found our way over to the Mary's Lake campground, the only real convenient camping space left for the weekend since, apparently, it is the high season and all of the tourists are out. (this was another conundrum for the weekend, while we were indeed walking the streets of Estes Park Saturday night, and Mark did buy a pair of sunglasses... but do we qualify as tourists ourselves? I'm not sure...) The campground was pretty pricey, and while we didn't get a picnic table, we did get...uh... oh! annoying drunk people! I've never had the experience, that is, on private propery on which i had to pay to sleep on the ground, in which i had to walk up to a group of drunken morons at 1240 in the morning and tell them to stop playing Rossanna at full tilt out of their volvo. i felt old, i felt lame, but mostly i felt a burning rage to punch them all in the face. It's one thing to be annoyed on BLM land where we didn't pay anything to camp, but to drop nearly $40 on a campsite for two tents and then be subjected to horrible horrible music is beyond me.

The following morning, Mark completely ruined our ability to feel superiour and smug, though, as his un-staked tent took a roll in a wind gust from the campsite and then launched 50' in the air (no kidding!), tumbling and turning, Mark in a dead sprint after it for at least 1o or 15 seconds. said annoying drunk people couldn't help but chuckle, and we watched our elititst intentions fall apart with his unpoled tent skin.

oh, and we went hiking, too!


The original plan was to start at the Bear Lake Trailhead, and then hike up to Lake Helene, and then down to the Fern Lake Trailhead. Upon arriving at the starting point, we were soberly told that we wouldn't be able to really do that without some crampons, an ice axe, and some serious determination.

Lacking all three of those, we decided to hike up to the Loch and Mills Lake instead. Liz and I made it out to Mills lake last year over much more snowpack, but really enjoyed seeing it all melted out as well. The Loch was probably the prettier locale of the two, though, and is currently the prettiest place i've seen in the park thus far.


Kate has also been nice enough to allow us to borrow one of her old (but still incredible) big digital cameras, and was even nicer to show us how to use the darn thing. Some turned out pretty darn good ... most did not. BUT, we will hopefully beat the learning curve when we hit the road next week. The full suite of pics from the point and shoot can be found at flickr here.