Another Year…

Every year since I was about 18 my dad and I have gone on some sort of adventure trip for our birthday’s. This year we decided to hang out in La Veta and climb Trinchera Peak, a 13er in the Sangre De Cristo Range. We got up early on Saturday drove the 20 minutes to the trail head, a major bonus to having a place so close to the mountains. Other than a few campers on the way up we had the trail and summit to ourselves. On the way up we saw a heard of mountain goats so we stopped to watch them for a while. It was pretty amazing to see, especially when two of the males started butting heads. I have only seen that on the Discovery Channel, not in real life.

After oohing and ahhing we continued up the trail. It got steeper towards the top, but I think that was more because my dad was making the trail up as we went along. We turned quite a bit of the final ascent into true rock climbing, and there was some major exposure in some areas. We didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the summit because it was really windy and cold. So we hiked down a little bit to a more sheltered area to have lunch and take in the views. The leaves from the surrounding aspens were intense with their changing color. I know that our foliage out here doesn’t compare to out east, but it is still spectacular to see, especially from high on a peak where you can see for miles.

After we ate some lunch we started heading down, again off the beaten path. We traversed across the face of the mountain, making it a nice class 3 in most areas. The rocks were pretty incredible and I found it was so interesting the difference of rocks at high altitudes from mountains created by volcanic movement versus mountains created by plate tectonics. That whole process of how the land developed down there is so fascinating to me and I feel so fortunate to get to experience it all first hand.

Carol ended up meeting up with us towards the bottom of the trail, so we all hiked down together then went back to the cabin to relax the rest of the weekend.