See Erich's photos from our hike HERE
Yes, Hike and Ski! Yes, again! Yes in August!
We got our turns in for August today at St. Mary's Glacier (we skied here in July as well: July Blog Post). 11 consecutive months of skiing now.
St. Mary's Glacier stays around all summer and is only about an hour drive from Denver. We found out that it's not really a Glacier, because Glaciers move. This is just an area of snow in a valley that happens to stick around all year. So it's a "Glacier", not a Glacier.
This time Erich (Melissa's brother), Eric (my roommate from Breck) and Steph (Eric's fiance) all joined us for our hike/ski. Once you get to the trail head, there is a short 3/4 mile hike up to the lake. On the far side of the lake, the bottom edge of the Glacier can be seen stretching up the hillside. We made our way around the lake and started up the snow towards the top.
The weather was beautiful with blue skies (again). It didn't take us all long to make it to the top of the Glacier where we threw off our packs and clicked on our skis and boards. There was a little less snow than in July, bit we started at almost the same spot. The glacier was just a little narrower up top. The snow was still very variable with mogul like conditions to negotiate. We all enjoyed our turns in the dirty snow that was soft in areas and crusty in others. We finished with about 600 vertical feet under our belts for the month of August.
As we headed down the trail back to the car, with our skis strapped to our packs, we got quite a few inquisitive looks and comments from tourists taking a short day hike to the lake with their kids and dogs. We finished up the morning with a great lunch and a few pints at Tommyknocker Brewery in Idaho Springs.
Not sure where September will bring us for some turns, we'll have to see what mother nature brings between now and then.
Colorado Rules!
See PHOTOS from our adventure HERE
See Erich's photos from our hike HERE
4 comments:
The more you ski on St Mary's, the quicker it is going to disappear. Think about that.
Great info! Thank you for the pictures! I'm with James, Moron...
Glaciers can be static. The word describes the substrate. Once snow gains enough weight it compacts itself into glacial ice,Thus becoming a glacier; generally when this occurs the glacier has sufficient weight to flow. This is a permenant snow field because it is granular snow not glacial ice. Skiing it may infact make it last longer by compacting the snow and lowering the surface area affected by sublimation and melting, so strap on and rock out. Wear white to increase the areas albedo!
I skied the glacier yesterday, 9/25/11.. What a huge difference from early July! It was neither easy, nor graceful, nor pretty to see but I did it - and crossed off "Ski down St. Mary's Glacier" from my bucket list!
And by the way, it is highly improbable that skiing the area does ANY enviornmental damage whatsoever. You do more harm to the air just driving up Fall River Road than 10,000 skiers could ever do to that snowpack.
And since when did they close off all street parking? People will do ANYHTING to make a buck (or five) these days.
Post a Comment