Category: Travel

Pikes Peak, Pike National Forest, CO

Pike(1)s Peak Highway is 19 miles with over 150 turns(2), and at the top, you get to turn around and ride back down. I’ve been wanting to ride up this mountain since buying my first motorcycle, and now with fuel injection and sticky street tires on the Monster we had to make it happen.

The long weekend started Thursday night with a Beatles cover band playing at Red Rocks. After a leisurely morning, Megan and I left midday Friday, towing the bike down HWY 67 to avoid some traffic already clogging the Front Range. While this was intended to be a bike trip, Ducati Monsters are not built for two over long distances, so we pulled the bike down to Rampart Range and planned to ride from there Saturday morning.

 

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Snowy Range, Medicine Bow, Wyoming

Happy Fourth of July! To celebrate our Nation’s independence Megan and I drove up to our Northern neighbor ( Wyoming ) for a two night backpacking trip in the Snowy Range portion of the Medicine Bow Range.

After a leisurely start to the day on Friday we drove up and were amazed to find very few other visitors at the trail head parking area. We started on the trail around 1PM and made camp a few short miles later at Sheep Lake, on the backside of Browns Peak. The scenery was incredible with rolling peaks and lush grass and flowers everywhere! Camp was a small patch of trees on the West side of the lake and we got right to fishing. If memory serves, this was the first lake in which Megan landed a trout on her second cast, a feat she repeated two more times when arriving at a new lake.

 

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Ouray, Jan 2015

Another trip to Ouray. Megan and I went in January with Dan and Ashley after having talked about an ice climbing trip for a while. Leaving on a Thursday morning we were able to get in a half day of skiing and riding at Copper Mountain before finishing the drive to Ouray that afternoon/evening. We stayed in the AlpenGlow condos where I have stayed in the past and an inattentive house keeper wound up providing us with an upgrade to a 3 bedroom unit since the two bedroom was trashed still from the previous guests!

Overall we had good weather and made it out to Buen Tiempo for dinner and margs one of the nights. Ashely had never tried ice climbing before this trip but did well despite the lack of experience. Most of our climbing this trip was done in the Grad School and New Funtier areas of the park since warm weather had caused much of what ice was there to have been severely picked out in the lower bridge areas (some of them were even closed, which was a first for me to see).

 

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Robber’s Roost, Hanksville, UT

Canyons!

After our inaugural canyoneering trip to Moab in November we decided we needed more. Detailed scouring of the Interwebs showed the desert surrounding Hanksville, Utah to have a plethora of great canyons, and, most importantly for us, readily available GPS coordinates to walk us straight to the first rap, ensuring our novice abilities weren’t tested in some inescapable drainage we thought was correct.

 

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New York City

10/31/2014 – 11/2/2014

I’ve wanted to go to NYC for a while now, and with the opportunity to go before a work trip I decided this would be a good time. The original plan to get Megan a ticket and totally surprise her while at work didn’t quite pan out, but she was still surprised when I told her the Sunday before leaving, and, this actually worked out pretty well since she was able to help plan out the trip and find things to do.

Jump to Friday afternoon.

 

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Moab

11/6/2014 – 11/9/2014

Our 4 day Moab trip was conceived only a few weeks before leaving. The four of us had gone to the climbing gym Sunday morning and then grabbed a cup of coffee and sat out by Clear Creek in Golden when I suggested it might be fun to squeeze in a weekend trip before winter really arrived. Thankfully the time off worked for all involved and we met up at Dan’s around 2:30pm for the 6 hr drive to Moab.

Dan’s Outback was stuffed full. We were car camping so packing light wasn’t really on my mind but on top of all the climbing and riding gear combining the cars at Dan’s was a challenge.

 

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