--- Flatirons Crossing ---

2016

Flatirons Crossing is a shopping district in the town of Superior, Colorado. I have been there several times when I lived in nearby Broomfield and a House brother works in Superior so, planning for my endurance hike, and needing to get back in shape after the hot summer, which is my off season for hiking, I decided to take a long hike in the high plains between Superior and the Flatirons.

The Coalton Trail is a nice, broad, dirt trail. The most demanding part is the grade up Davidson Mesa. Once on top, it's pretty flat all the way to highway 128. The primary draw through most of the year is the view of the Flatirons, a steeply folded series of dark sedimentary rocks that loom over Boulder, Colorado. The flat, platelike shapes give them their name. In the spring, I'm told, this area is a great hike for looking at wildflowers. The Coalton Trail ends at the Boulder Alternative Energy Research station at Rocky Flats, the site of a controversial weapons grade fissionable materials factory in the last half of the 20th Century. I carried a dosimeter along but it didn't twitch. Evidently, they did a good job cleaning it up.

A short road walk brought me to the Flatirons Vista trailhead. It is similar to, but a little hillier than the Coalton Trail and it leads to a great overview of the southern end of the Flatirons and the Eldorado Canyon area.

On the way back, I decided to take an alternate path, instead of the road walk. That was a big mistake. The High Plains trail, in the first place, isn't a trail - it's a rut that winds crazily through cow pastures. It is very narrow, deep and has a curved bed that destroyed my hiking shoes. This same model of shoes lasted me for five years of regular walking and extreme hiking and a new pair is gone in less than half a year. The rocks in the rut were like gravel you might find in a terminal moraine of a glacier. About half way back to the Coalton trail, I gave up and took a farm road back to the less demanding, ankle pounding asphalt of highway 128.

A friendly biker evidently thought that I looked like I wouldn't make it back to Superior, so he gave me a lift back to the other end of the Coalton Trail. While I was recuperating, I had a conversation with a lady who was preparing for an Ironman Triathlon and I was gratified to note that she evaluated the High Plains Trail as "brutal". That made me feel much less like a whiner.

Anyway, I got my money's worth. The hike was great, except for the terminal moraine and I feel ready to stand up to a hike out to Waterton Canyon.

--- Field trips, hikes, and endurance hikes ---

2016

I made the decision to let go of my van back in 2014 and I haven't really regretted the decision. There are some down sides. If I leave the house, I do so on foot (unless it's a group activity, and those are fairly rare) and I'm limited to how far I can walk in a day or two or how many bus tickets I can afford, and the money has been rather scarce since I moved to south Denver.

But, on the whole, I prefer walking to driving for reasons I've mentioned. Most importantly, I miss too much when I'm driving.

There are three kinds of walking I regularly do.

Field trips have an end goal. I walk to get somewhere and do something at the farthest point of the walk. That might be a museum, a point of interest, or an activity, like a street festival or market. I guess my regular grocery runs could be called field trips.

For a hike, the walk is the goal. I regularly walk Bear Creek Trail, looking for particular things along the way. I rarely walk to Morrison to see something in Morrison. Morrison is only part of the reason for the walk.

Once or twice a year, I take endurance hikes - particularly long or grueling hikes. I joke that it's my annual stress test. I have a heart condition and I'm not sure how much it really effects me. The only thing I can say for sure is that working in a horizontal position or on an upside-down incline doesn't work too well for me. I figure that, if I can survive one of these endurance hikes, my heart must be in pretty good condition.

But, to be honest, I just like pushing myself occasionally. I've been doing this for some time. I met my long-time hiking friend, Paul Holm, in the early 70s in a biology class at Auburn University. Our first distance hike was a walk from the West Point exit of I85 at the Alabama-Georgia state line, across Pine Mountain, to Warm Springs, Georgia, a distance of over 27 miles. That was the longest day hike we took. The Dreaded Mid-Summer Death Hike became a tradition.

Our last long hike together, before I moved to Colorado was from the southern terminus of the Pinhoti Trail in Alabama about seven miles up and across Rebecca Mountain. It was a hot, dry day that improved when a line of thunderstorms moved in. When we were almost back to the cars, we found a patch of particularly juicy blackberries. That, by itself, made the pain worthwhile.

At the end of the hike, he went back home and I drove up to Mount Cheaha to camp over night. I ate at the restaurant on top of the mountain (one of my favorites), and the next morning, I checked out the Kymulga Covered Bridge, between Sylacauga and Talledega, and went to First Baptist Church in Sylacauga for Sunday School and the preaching service. After that, I drove back to Auburn and spent the rest of the day hiking and dining out with Paul.

Since moving to the Denver area, I've kept the tradition every year. In 2014, I walked from home in Broomfield to Flatirons Junction and then up the Coalton Trail, almost to the Flatirons before returning home. It was almost exactly a 12 hour walk with few short stops, so it was between 38.6 kilometers (24 miles) and 58 kilometers (36 miles). That hike was all high plains.

After moving to South Denver in 2015, I walked from home to Kipling Trail and from there up to Jewell Avenue; then I headed west to Green Mountain and across Dinosaur Ridge to Red Rocks park. A short road walk brought me to Morrison and Bear Creek Trail, which brought me back home.

After it snows a couple of times, I plan to walk to Waterton Canyon, which is south of the Denver area. One of my packmates works at River Point Shopping area, at the head of the trail system that leads to Waterton so I can start very early and cut off the Bear Creek portion of the hike. Still, it'll be well after dark before I get back home.

--- 2017 endurance hike ---

Socrates advised, "Know thyself."

That's what endurance hikes are about.

In the early days of computers, when they were huge assemblages of vacuum tubes, the U.S. security system ran two systems in parallel. If one went down the other came up. If one needed maintenance, the other was on line.

The way they kept them running was by doing scheduled stress tests. They would shoot a high voltage through one of the systems and any vacuum tube getting ready to fail would blow out and, then, the technicians would replace all the blown out tube.

That's sorta an endurance hike for old computers.

Not that I'm looking to metaphorically blow out any tubes, but the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual stresses that I expose myself to allow me to recognize any "weak spots". If my hip starts aching, I look for ways to change my gait so that it stops and I incorporate that into my regular hiking gait.

Much of my learning isn't conscious. Many think that we learn only with our brains. I suppose that, since most of our communication equipment is concentrated in our heads, there's a temptation to think that the "real us" resides in our heads. That's quite wrong. We live, think, and learn in our bodies. A lot of data processing goes on outside our brains - in our spinal cord, various nerve bundles called "plexuses" throughout our bodies, and even in individual nerve cells. When organisms invade our bodies, chemical changes happen that allow us to recognize the invaders and deal with them, After that, we "have their number" and we keep it - be become immune to the specific organism.

When I moved to Denver, my body had to adapt to the lower humidity and oxygen lean air. It has learned to conserve water and more efficiently take oxygen from the air around me.

When I began my job offshore as a welder helper, I went two weeks unable to grasp things. I had to hold a drinking glass with two hands. The heavy buffing and grinding tools I had to use really worked on my hands.

I did develop muscles in my arms, but mostly, my body, quite unconsciously, learned economies of motion that allowed me to handle my tools without overburdening myself.

So I decided to walk out to Waterton Canyon as my 2017 endurance hike. I'm glad I pulled the date back to January 26, because I noticed that Denver Water, who manages the canyon, was planning to close the lands during the week starting early February for some months.

I was still working out glitches in my use of duct tape to prevent plantar blisters and a hike a couple of days before had left me with blisters along the tops of my big and little toes. Those are not nearly as debilitating as the plantar blisters used to be, but I still needed to work on it. The tape would literally pull strips of skin off my foot at the edges.

So I planned to wake up at 4:00 the morning of January 26, get ready, and walk down to the local Steak and Shake for breakfast before hitting the trail. I also decided to take the train most of the way down to the canyon - to Mineral Station. I wanted to spend most of the day in the canyon and maybe take in some of the Colorado Trail at the top before walking the South Platte River Trail back. Forecasts looked great - cold and a little overcast.

(Mineral Station)

Mineral Station was quite a lot further from the Canyon that I expected. In fact, it was a 14.5 kilometer (9 mile) hike. Chatfield State Park is bigger than Bear Creek Lakes park and much more grueling. Once you get over Mount Carbon in Bear Creek Lake Park, the rest of the trail is easy, Chatfield is all up and down. And Chatfield Dam is a 147 foot rise that you have to address.

(Chatfield Reservoir dam)

I was pretty well worn down before I reached the canyon so I decided not to hike the whole thing and I only took about a third of the trail. It was till spectacular and well worth the pain. I walked about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) into the canyon, up to the Highline Canal diversion dam. Here are some pictures.

(pictures of Waterton Canyon)

Denver was built on the banks of the South Platte River and it is the major waterway. Also, the HIghline Canal zigzags all over the Denver region. A National Landmark Trail, the Highline was completed in 1883 as an irrigation canal. Today, the major use is the trail that parallels the waterway.

Both the river and the canal run out of the Rockies through Waterton Canyon. The canal is feed by the river at a diversion dam before running through a tunnel in the mountain to the other side, then there are feedpipes that catch other waters in the canyon and run them into the canal.

(pictures of the Highline)

I was already exhausted and in pain when I turned around and headed out of the canyon - another 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) and a train ride back home. And what did I get out of it?

Well, Waterton Canyon was spectacular and it was the first time I had seen bighorn sheep. Through it all, the bane of my hiking life was gone - no plantar blisters! I had figured out how to keep the duct tape that was wrapped aound the balls of my feet preventing the plantar blisters from literally ripping off strips of flesh from the sides of my feet. I had placed bandaids under the tape at the base of my big and little toes. The toe bandages on all my big and little toes kept them safe from how my boots broke over my toes somy busted left foot came through the ordeal very well. I managed my knee and hip joints and spine with precision. I had to focus on my pacing and breathing, especially during the trip back. On the 45 kilometer (28 mile) hike, I fine tuned my body and learned just about everything I needed to know about how to keep going after most of my reserves had expired. I think it was worth it all.

But, that said, this was probably my last endurance hike. I want to shift my focus to the rest of the world, the one outside myself, so I will be doing more technical hikes in he future, but many of those will be as grueling as the endurance hikes.