Week in Review (August 20 - August 26)

Tuesday (12,642 steps) - Rower and dog walk before going into the office. More cross training at lunch, including a new PR on the StairMaster - this time I climbed the Eiffel Tower.

Walk with Olive when I got home. 4 Noses?

Wednesday (17,003 steps) - Peloton and dog walk before going into the office. More cross training at lunch, including a deceptively tough Yoga video. It's hard to believe I ever had any semblance of flexibility. 4 Noses?

Thursday (20,826 steps) - Decided to go to North Table for a run since it was cooler and with it being during the week I didn't expect for there to be a lot of bikes. 

Outside of the fire road (where I ran maybe the first .10 - FYI, it's 450ish feet of gain in a half mile), I ran almost the entire route! I even saw a few deer, which was fun.

Somewhere around two miles in I stepped off the trail into the bushes to pee and slid and fell into some cacti, which of course meant that I had some needles in my hand and blood. I tried to make sure I didn't get any blood on my clothes, but apparently failed...

Took Olive for a walk, and thankfully it was still a little overcast and cool out.

Saw two owls for the first time in AGES.

Did some driving and then convinced Ben to be the one to drive us to the airport to pick Lisa up. Her flight was only a few minutes late and even though she had a checked bag we were out of there pretty quick. Went to Torchy's for dinner and managed to shut the place down...

Friday (27,563 steps) - I took the day off from work so Lisa and I could go hiking! She wanted to do a 13er and I had never done James Peak, so we decided that one sounded nice. I had never been to Saint Mary's Glacier either (unless I went as a kid). We are cheap, so we parked in the "further" dirt lot for $10 vs the closer lot of $20. We headed up just after 8. Immediately it was a big, wide rocky road that we were hiking up. 

We got up to the lake and there was really no one there, which was nice to get a few pictures.

There was actually snow, so of course Olive had fun playing in that (I took a video, but am not going to post it).

A relatively big climb up the glacier, and then we had a fairly flat section for a bit. Lisa and I had the same reaction "oh good, flat, which means we are just going to have a big climb later. This point was also when we realized that it looked really storm ONLY on the peak we were hiking to.

There wasn't a ton of water access for Olive once we got above the glacier, but there were some small creeks. 

We got up to the summit a little under 3 hours after we started. We didn't want to stay up there too long because it definitely looked like a storm was rolling in.

We actually kept our jackets on when we started to descend and had a few raindrops fall on us, but nothing like what we feared might happen.

We let Olive play a bit more in the snowfields on the way down. It was 100 times more crowded when we got to the lake and we didn't stay long. Got back to the car and planned on going to Evergreen to get lunch/beer. Not too long after we got on I-70 it started POURING. The highway was flooding and it was really hard to see where I was going and we didn't think sitting on a patio in the rain sounded fun. I drove in extremely poor conditions to Over Yonder since it was the closest place I could think of that allowed dogs inside. I want to say within 5 minutes of arriving the rain stopped. We ordered food from next door.

Olive seemed resistant to resting, but finally fell asleep.

By the time we headed towards the house we had just enough time to shower and drive to pick Ariel up for a dinner in Golden. I am really glad that we were able to make this work. She has been busy with school and adapting to college life, but it was fun to have dinner with her. Maybe we went to 4 Noses after we dropped her back off?

Saturday (22,691 steps) - We had been discussing tons of options for an adventure day and finally we settled on driving back up to Summit County and hiking to Chihuahua Lake. We were going up the road by Peru Creek (and honestly, just found out that the turn off was where the aid station for "Chihuahua Gulch" was during Summit 200). Thankfully we knew where the "trailhead" was on Gaia, because nothing was marked on the road. We started climbing, but it was nothing crazy to start out. We came across our first water crossing, and I was really surprised that Olive actually used the log!

We had been out for a while when the trail started to level out and we had deja vu of James Peak where it just meant we would have bigger climbs coming up. I reapplied sunscreen on my arms since I had taken my jacket off, but neglected to reapply on my face and I would pay for that later. 

There was way more water access on this trail, and it was "fun" trying to navigate the best way across some of them.

We weren't sure where the lake was actually going to be or where the big climbs were going to show up, but we finally saw people hiking down. This definitely seemed like we were going to have some fairly technical climbing!

I did want to go down to the water, so we hiked down and had a snack and let Olive go in. (Side note: I'll have to work with her next summer to see if I can actually get her comfortable with swimming. She will not go in any deeper then where her feet touch the bottom). 

We tried to get Olive to join our selfie before heading down, but she was having none of it, so I did a separate one of just her.

With it looking like storms could be coming in, we didn't want to stay too long, plus we were all getting hungry with having started later in the day. The downhill part was just as "un fun" as we thought it would be. Steep, rocky and loose gravel. Ick.

Once we got on the more flat section, we moved a lot faster. "Olive, this is where we make up time!" I weirdly rolled my ankle quite a few times over the next few miles, which was pretty irritating. 

We spent a lot of the last mile trying to figure out where we were in relation to the "boops" and Webster Pass area from Summit, but couldn't really figure it out.

We got almost all the way back to the car when the drizzling started. Missing the rain on the trail 2 out of 2 times so far! We of course went to Outer Range and got food from Bird Craft. As much as Ben would like to stay up there longer, we didn't have a ton and went right to 4 Noses for a beer and to pick up beer for home. Opted to get Salsa's on the way home, which was delicious. 

Sunday (30,895 steps) - Last big day of the weekend! I can't believe I convinced Ben that we should go to Nederland. He has never been interested in going because he isn't super fond of the shuttle idea, but he agreed to it and I was pretty excited to go back up there. We didn't have to wait for a shuttle to get to the trailhead, although Olive did NOT want to get on the bus. 

Within the first mile we saw three moose! One baby and two smaller adult females. Pretty exciting!

I had mapped out a route that I imagined would be 9ishmiles. It became obvious fairly early on that it was going to be at least a mile longer than that because I don't think the route started until we arrived at the main bridge, which is at least a half mile from where we got dropped off. 

We had the map downloaded, which turned out to be helpful as we ended up doing a bit of bushwhacking on a section of very faded trail. It was a really nice morning and we did not see a ton of people, although we did see more runners than usual. 

Arrived at Jasper Lake, and it seemed like the perfect time to sit and have a snack. 

Only way I could get a picture with Olive in it this time was if I was holding her. 

Once again, we were all hungry, so we headed down pretty quickly. Olive did a great job of getting off the trail for people. The below picture was up a very steep 4' high wall - it seemed like an excessive place to jump up.

We moved pretty quickly because we looked behind us and noticed that it looked really stormy again and we did not want to break our streak of missing the rain. All in all it was just over 10 miles round trip, which makes it Olive's longest activity to date! We were unsure where we wanted to go in Nederland and just opted to have a quick beer at Knotted Root.

Lisa finally put her foot down about going home to to shower before getting food, so we did that before going to 4 Noses. Olive was zonked, so she got to stay home and we got to sit inside. Ninja Ramen was the food truck, and I got some rice and fried pork that was decent, but next time I think I would get something with more vegetables. We took Lisa to Target so she could get some Broncos gear and we picked up some cheese and crackers to snack on. We got MORE rain during the evening, so we weren't able to sit outside. Spent a bulk of the evening just drinking and talking. What a fun visit!

Monday (13,910 steps) - I told Lisa we could go for a run, even knowing that she is much faster than I am and I wouldn't enjoy it. I figured I would be able to gut out 4 faster miles. I was tired and even trying to hang back a bit it was definitely hard. Didn't help that it was really humid out! I made the decision to just go for a 5k because I couldn't keep up with her. The big excitement was getting close to home and having a loose dog chase us. He was very friendly (thankfully), but I ended up calling animal control because he didn't have any contact info on his collar.

Worked for a bit and then we took Olive for a walk. Lisa wanted to get brunch before going to the airport, so she treated me at Morning Story. The Green Chili Benedict was awesome!

Also got half off mimosa flights, but since I still had to drive I didn't finish all mine.

Worked the rest of the afternoon and drove for a bit until I met Ben at Parry's for dinner since he was at Big-O anyway.

Took Olive for another walk when we got home.

Stats:

• 145,530 steps
• 27.19 miles run
• 20.54 miles walked (includes hiking)
• 35 minutes of cardio
• 60 minutes of strength