Adventures on Earth
There's a lot to see, to hike, to photograph, to write about. These are attempts at taking all of it in.
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24 posts tagged snow
mountainsides
Rocky Mountain NP. That’s Longs Peak in the Background. View from the Flattop Mountain Trail.
Gosh it’s pretty
Looking southwestish on the descent into Anchorage. Taken and edited on my iPhone 4.
Roan Highlands
Monday was easily one of my favorite hikes.
With a day off from classes and nothing to do, it was the best chance I’ll get for a while to do a longer hike that’s over two hours away. Got up, got ready, and started driving towards Johnson City, then down through Elizabethton and Roan Mountain State Park (stopping at the visitor center to buy some great maps of the AT through TN & NC), and then parked on the state line up at snowy Carvers Gap (elev 5512 ft). The trail plan was twofold: first, hike west along the AT up to Roan High Knob (the highest peak on Roan Mountain) and return to Carvers Gap, from where I would then hike east out to Grassy Ridge and back. That’s a littles less than a 10 mile hike when you add it all up, but when I set out it looked like I might not even make it up to Roan High Knob.
The roads were clear of snow, but the ground and the forest were definitely not. A good foot covered the ground almost everywhere, two feet in many places. Luckily for snowshoeless me, it wasn’t fresh snow, so it had been packed down and frozen over, making it a little easier to walk on top of. But just a little. Looking back now, I don’t think I was on the AT for the first couple tenths of a mile, but it’s not like I could see the footpath in the first place. I just followed the tracks of hikers before me, and the guy I followed apparently trudged off into the woods cutting his own trail til he rediscovered the AT. His footprints were about my size, but he’d cut through fresh snow, so I had to mimic his footfalls by stepping directly into the foot deep holes he’d made. This was not very efficient hiking.
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Some skis would have made the descent from Roan High Knob a lot quicker on this road.
Frozen Head State Park
Yesterday afternoon, I hiked around 4 miles at Frozen Head State Park. About 2/3 of this was on-trail, and the rest was me trying to make the most of my time there since I’d wasted so much of it by driving to places that weren’t Frozen Head State Park.
I got off I-40 at Harriman and then took 328 up to SR-299, because on Google Maps there’s a protected area labeled “Frozen Head State Park” up there. While this land very well may fall under the umbrella of the state park system, it isn’t the Frozen Head State Park that I was going for. No signs, no trails, no nothing, and pretty small. That’s what I get for all of the sudden deciding to go hiking and then just eyeballing Google Maps, though. Should’ve actually, you know, searched for the park. Running out of gas, I stopped in Wartburg to fill up and get good directions. This time I found the real Frozen Head State Park, about an hour later than planned.
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Two minutes and thirty nine seconds of moving pictures to wrap up the posts from the Colorado trip. The shots of the heavy snow are all from just south of Breckenridge, on Quandary Peak and the Mohawk Lakes Trail. Most of the other shots are from the drive south down highway 24 along the Sawatch Range and the Collegiate Peaks. All shot on the D7000.
Music: “Colorado” by The Rentals
