We had so much fun with Lauren and Anne last week and with the benefit of a surprise blizzard, their stay was unexpectedly extended which meant another day of fun for us. That also meant no hike for us last weekend…. It hit me this week that the summer is fast approaching and our hikes need to get tougher if we want to do our first 14er so I decided that we needed a really good workout. What I really wanted was a good butt killer and figured this weekend was a good one to revisit Green Mountain in Boulder, I had some problems in posting this one so there are 2 links to the original hike, first the specs and then the details of our assessment. The other reason I wanted to hit this one was that the weather was calling for rain on Saturday but it had been moved to the early afternoon from first thing in the morning and a tough workout as quickly as we could manage was in order .
We woke up extra early to make sure the hike would be mostly done before the rain which meant we were the first car in the parking lot. I have to be honest, I was little worried that the trail would be too much for us not to mention that we are starting to really get into spring, my Chicago brain was thinking so will this be the hike we see a bear?
Oh and the other big thing about this hike, it is exactly 1 year after we started on this journey. Which means I needed to show my inner eater/fat girl I knew how to keep it moving for a whole year and beat the hell out of it!
We got out on the trail and started climbing right away…on ice and after like 100 yards we thought “ok time for crampons” and I kid you not, we put them on and walked just around the corner to no ice… no ice at all for like ever. Off came the crampons, we moved onto heavy breathing and the butt workout we needed.
There was no ice until we reached the Ranger trail break, got passed by a jogger at the start of more ice and while we slid on ice we saw only ice in the distance. For the second time we put on crampons, walked a 100 yards and no more ice….. although this time there was actually more ice visible not far up ahead. I am so glad we didn’t take them off this time because the ice really never ended the rest of way up.
The interesting piece of climbing this part of the trail with all this ice and snow was that the it felt so much smaller than the first time we hiked it. I was actually looking at the edge thinking hmmm I don’t remember it being so steep and I am comfortable with heights. I didn’t even want to think about how Aaron was feeling who is actually uncomfortable with that part of hiking.
At the end of the day the hike was awesome again, because of the forecasted weather we had this hike almost to ourselves which was perfect mostly because I could breath heavy without fear of judgement by those insanely healthy people we saw the last time.
Here are our favorite pictures from the hike:
hiking to healthy 
So many beautiful trails, so little time. 🙂
Jealous Jealous !!!!! I so look forward to your posts………
Hey I hear ya, I couldn’t resist the call of them so I had to move here and experience it myself! Thanks for checking out my blog and the follow!
Way to go! It’s good that you brought along the crampons. They make a huge difference
They really do! We love how they make the ice walkable.
I do yoga everyday, but I have let hiking slip. I’m not much on cold weather, but in April I plan to get out there and maintain and hike our own 4 mile trail we have on our farm. I love a beautiful path.
That is the best part of Colorado, it is hardly every all that cold so getting out every weekend is easy. I look forward to it very much! I do get some yoga in occasionally but not as much I would like. I have been enjoying though! Hope you get back to hiking soon! Thanks for stopping by!
I think I might have given up after seeing all that ice and snow, but it must have been worth it for those views.
It was so worth it, the mountains looked so cool with the clouds rolling in!