i'll meet you at the car, dave.

this past weekend whitney and i made the trek up to winter park for a little break. and it was really the perfect weekend, what with temps in denver hitting the triple digits.

we didn't really make any solid plans other than to relax and have fun, but we both wanted to go for a hike and explore the area a bit. whitney had a map of the area with hiking paths and she chose one that looked mild (with my dumb altitude sickness, i have to be careful not to go on a trail that ascends too quickly). from the map, it looked to be about a mile and a half, so we expected to be doing about 3 miles total.

we got started on what we thought was creekside trail (nice pretty name) but after being on the trail a while, found out that it was chainsaw trail (not so comforting). realizing that we weren't on the right trail, we tried to check the map to find out the best way...either turn around or find out if we could connect with another trail that looped back to where we were parked. according to the map, if we hooked up at flume trail, it would be about 2.5 miles back to the car. we figured chainsaw to be about a mile and half(ish), so it looked like we'd be doing about a mile more than anticipated, but that really wasn't an issue.


but once we connected with flume and were making our way merrily along, whitney kept getting nervous. she has a pretty good sense of direction and just felt like we were moving further and further from where we needed to be. but, every time we stopped to try to make sense of the map we would get mauled by the mosquitos, so it was quite distracting. by the time we realized that the map just might be full of crap, we decided to wait until we passed another hiker to ask them if they knew what trail we were on and maybe gain some sense of where we were.


the trails up there are a big draw to the mountain biking crowd and we'd been dodging bikers all day without running into too many other hikers. we didn't want to stop a biker for direction because generally they were blazing by pretty quickly. we finally crossed paths with a guy and his ridiculously cute dogs (they weren't whitney's cup of tea, because they had short-hair, but i thought they were awesome). anyway, he confirmed the trail we were on and gave us an idea of which direction we were traveling and we felt better about where we were going. once we got to the trail head we turned right (as the kind hiker instructed us to) to get to the lot where the cars were. unfortunately, when we made the quarter mile hike to the parking area, we realized that that is NOT where we started.

back to our only idea of where to go, our crappy map, we realized we had gone pretty far off track and had a ways to go. all in all, our 3 mile, hour and a half hike turned into a 7.8 mile, 4 hour hike. oi. toward the end of the trail, we ran into dave, the biker, looking for his 2 buddies. he asked if we saw his friends, to tell them to meet him at the car. he ended up finding them shortly thereafter, but it was kinda funny. maybe you had to be there.

i did get a lot of picture taking in...except for the few miles that were all uphill. i was pretty much just concentrating on breathing. (c; i had taken some dimethylglycine (which helps your blood absorb more oxygen), so the altitude sickness didn't get me this time. yay!

the pine beetles have decimated a huge portion of the trees and the forest service has been working on cutting some down. i don't know what else they plan on doing, but it's really sad when 80% of the trees are dead or dying. this is one tree marked for destruction.


more proof of the beetles' destruction...



pretty mushrooms. good for looking. not for eating (c:


we stumbled across a painters bench...just a cool little place for painters to create some masterpieces. this was the view.




all in all, it was really nice to get away and despite the numerous mosquito bites and getting lost it was a fun trip. (c: if you want to see more pics from the weekend, i've got them posted at my flickr account.