My First Official Trek!
Yesterday DH, Ashley and I went hiking at Horsetooth Mountain Park. It is just west and a little south of our house on the other side of Horsetooth reservoir. We headed out shortly after 8am and hit the trail at 8:30am. It was another scorcher yesterday so I’m glad we go an early start. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be those that were just starting as we came down!
Ashley had done a bit of homework and got a book on trails within 25 miles of Fort Collins. We chose the Horsetooth Falls trail as it was marked as easy to moderate in her guidebook and as easy in the brochure for the park. So, the three of us and my Trekking 009 headed up the trail.
The first leg is rather steep. There are nice shady bits along this trail, but none of us felt the trail was that easy. There were decently long stretches of rather steep climbing and areas that were very rocky which gave us unstable footing. This trail was also not well marked. We are pretty sure that we got off of the main trail at some point and back on again later. There were a few intersections of trails that were unmarked so we weren’t always sure which way to proceed.
There was much flora and fauna to photograph. I now am in need of a book of native plants for the front range as I could only identify a handful. Of those above I only knew the yucca and the cacti… There were also many great vistas to capture. My favorite was one I tried to do a panoramic stitching of - the ridges of the norther end of Devil’s Backbone, but it was a bit too bright to set the shots up real well. Though you can see the ridges going on and on and on towards the south.
Before we knew it we were nearly at the summit of our hike and met up with the easier Soderberg trail which is an old service road and thus wider and smoother and bit more gradual. We debated whether to turn around and go back down the Horsetooth Falls trail or to continue down Soderberg and we all decided the rockiness of the Horsetooth Falls trail would be more difficult going down so we opted to take Soderberg down to the parking lot. This loop took us almost exactly 2 hours. We were back at the car at 10:30am just as the sun was starting to really heat up.
I survived! There were a few points along the way that I thought I needed to turn around and start heading back down, but I kept on going anyway with the encouragement of DH and Ashley. I’m hurting today. Quite a bit actually. Mostly the arches of my feet, my calves and my butt… But it is that good sort of hurt that just reminds you that you got your butt up out of the chair and did something!
