My friend Jason Deugan and I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday to get in a bit of ice climbing. This was my first time climbing ice, and I wanted to try out my new ice tools and crampons. We hiked up to Loch Vale and found an easy toprope to climb, called Mo’ Flo’ Than Go. I climbed an easy ice/snow gully to the left of the climb to set up the toprope, then Jason and I took turns climbing the WI3 route. I had a great time, both on the hike in and climbing. We did learn several things yesterday that I’ll have to keep in mind in the future.

Both Jason and I had a great time. We hiked about 5 miles overall on a packed snow trail, postholed up 200′ to the climbs from the packed trail, and glissaded down around 100′ from the climb. On the way out we met some other climbers heading back to the trailhead who gave us some good beta on other ice areas and also showed us a shortcut back to the car. I think I’m hooked.

This past month we were able to take advantage of some nice weather here and get some climbing, hiking and skiing in.  Samuel’s skiing is improving every time we hit the slopes, and he now prefers the chairlift to the rope tow.  Monika’s been snowboarding with her sister again at Winter Park, and I was able to get up there once, too.  I went to A-Basin today, it was a bit windy but the snow was very nice.  I found a few areas that still had a foot or two of untracked powder, definately worth getting up at 6am.

We took the family up to Chautauqua Park in Boulder to get a good Christmas picture, and made them into cards at Wal-Mart.  There are always people there taking photos, I think the Flatirons there are the most photographed place on the Front Range.  The next photo below is a view of the Indian Peaks from Green Mountain, just behind the Flatirons.  The third is a view of Boulder from the summit of the First Flatiron, I climbed it with Jason and Jessica Deugan earlier this month.  Cold day, but nice to get out and get some climbing in.

So far this year, I’ve been able to ski at Copper Mountain, Monika has been able to snowboard at Winter Park, and today I took Samuel up to Eldora for his first time skiing. He did far better than I expected, I thought that we would only be there for a few hours and we ended up skiing for four. I tried to just make it fun for him and not expect him to learn anything, but he was able to move around on his skis pretty well by the end of the day. He even wanted to use the pony lift by himself! I let him decide when we were going to leave, and he kept wanting to do “one more time”. I would take him up the lift, then ski backwards in front of him and catch him when he was going too fast. He loved it. Here are some pictures from the day.

Luke and I had decided to climb Mount Washington a few months before my vacation to Maine (2001). He had attempted Washington two times in winter before, but was turned back each time because of weather. The weather on this trip turned out to be better than we expected. more…