V-Love’s Lonely Planet

Saturday was another amazing day in Fort Collins, Colorado and the Rocky Mountains.  I find it so cool to say I live right near Rocky Mountain National Park!  Didn’t the Griswold’s have a family vacation there?  Anyway, Saturday morning I joined the hiking club at 6:40am to hike Twin Sisters.  It’s a well known hike here in the Rockies as you get great views of the entire park, including Longs Peak, the coveted 14er.  A 7.4 mile round trip hike (surprisingly, this can take up to 6 hours depending on difficulty), hiking to 11,428 feet above sea level.  Nothing but switchbacks on this hike, and you are blessed with increasingly better views with such a rapid elevation gain.  Once you reach roughly 11,000 feet, you are above tree-line.  I don’t even think I was above tree-line when hiking the Inca Trail, and that was over 14,000 feet.  Being above tree-line was an awesome experience; you are surrounded by thousands of trees and then all of a sudden, nothing but rocks and boulders.  Talk about being exposed to the entire sky.  I wonder how all of those rocks and boulders get so high?  Once we reached both summits, we enjoyed sitting atop the boulders, eating lunch, taking photos, and talking to other hikers.  It gets very cold and windy up there; one wrong step and your off the cliff.

I’m not sure if the hiking is getting easier and I’m getting used to the elevation, but I found this hike to be much easier than Estes Cone, although Twin Sisters is supposed to be more strenuous.  My confidence level in hiking is going up because all of a sudden I am determined to hike a 14er.  And as much as I would love to complete a 14er before the snow starts (September), I just don’t think I will have time.  The hiking club will be hiking Longs Peak in mid-August.  Waking up at 3am to make it to summit by early morning so you can get down before the storms roll in sounds dreadful and thrilling at the same time.  I would just hate to lose my stamina over a winter of no hiking; that may put me back at square one.  So we shall see folks.  Vicki might be hiking one of the popular Colorado 14ers very soon.  I should really be more prepared for such a crazy thing.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 am and is filed under Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.