Bent Forks and Broncos

View Larger Map Breaking my foot left me with few outlets for physical activity. Running was out. Climbing? Out. Hiking? Probably not a good idea. Ultimate? See running. Football? See running. But I figured out a loophole: biking. With a little bit of pushing, I got my little brother to package and send my bike over. A few trips to the bike shop later, I was good to go. And it was awesome. If you haven't biked recently, steal someone's bike and go. Its the most fun you can have on 2 (or more) wheels without getting a motorcycle license. It's like flying, without the falling. Like driving quickly, but without the metal skeleton. And then I got a crazy idea: I should bike to work. So I did. Well, in actuality, I biked from work one evening and biked to work the next day (I still haven't gotten Maryland plates so I can't park on the street at my current residence). Needless to say, I got lost. In both directions. It probably took me 2 hours to make it home (...

Misery loves company, but its not very photogenic.  So we have no photos from our wet, vehicular Capitol approach. It started with one of those classic Aspen rain storms: sunshine on one side of the street and a down-pour on the other. It's Colorado, we reasoned, the storm should be done in fifteen minutes. Our campsite will be dry by the time we get there. We mistook Snowmass with Snowmass Village, failed to find the turn off, and ended up in Basalt. This didn't get us any closer to the Capitol Creek Trailhead. Nor did it make our campsite any drier. Several hours later we pulled into the Hay Park TH, two miles short of the Capitol Creek TH. Our approach vehicles, a rental Chevy Malibu and an Audi, can't handle rough dirt roads, and we had returned the Jeep already. It's too bad: Hay Park, the closest non 4wd Capitol camping location, was TH for horse trails. The parking lot was inches deep with horse shit. We didn't bother getting out of the car t...

12000 ft. Three Friends. One rental Jeep. One road which you shouldn't drive if "you don't want want to devalue your vehicle." A 500+ ft drop on the right... And one, very, very large bump. I've got to hand it to Dave. Humvee training most definitely paid off.

On most 14ers, you should be off of the summit at noon. We woke at the crack of dawn. 8:30. Of course, we were at 12,800 ft. The summit is only ~1,300' above us.* We are not concerned: Dave and I are season 14er vets (I've done ~30ish and Dave's done 25ish). Shane? He's done zero. But he's used to the altitude: Dave and I are coming from sea level. Of course, Dave's sea level is a male-only Kosovo military base, but that's Dave's story, not mine. We are completely ready for this. We JetBoil ed some water for breakfast oatmeal, threw on some sun screen (gotta look good for the ladies!), and set out. It was 9:40. We quickly passed a couple groups of people who had caused us to stir when they passed our campsite  at ungodly early hours. We even fulfilled Dave's dream of meeting three gorgeous women at the summit (around 10:50ish). Unfortunately, they weren't heading in our direction: the 14er virgin in their crew was unwilling to continue th...