Boulder Mountain

For this trip, we had another leisurely fall start. Tegan showed up at Dad and Shelley's house at 10 and we drove to the trailhead together. Art and Carol would wait for Jim, who was running a bit late, and arrive about five minutes behind us.

After the normal fussing around with boots and gear, we were off. As we headed up through the woods between Boulder Reservoir and Boulder lake, it was still too dark to get a photo without a flash. Tegan's orange really stands out.

But when we go to the lake, the sun was out and it was beautiful. Dead calm, sunny, and quite a bit more snow than we expected.

The trail follows the shady, south side of the lake. So pretty much the entire way there was an inch or three of crusty snow. At the far end of the lake, Tegan turned around, intent on getting in her running workout- coach's orders.

We kept thinking we were going to get to walk in the bare patches, but the trail seemed to stick to the snowy areas. So it was nice that when we got to the Boulder saddle, at least we found a dry spot to sit and enjoy our lunch.

This was the long, relaxing type of lunch. So when we finally tried to get up to continue, there was lots of grunting and groaning.

But after we got our circulation back, everyone was making good progress, including Richard who was not really in shape for hiking in the hills. Nevertheless, he was having a grand time- and who wouldn't on such a lovely day?

We had told Shelley we would be back at 4, so at 2:30 we realized we needed to shortcut our intended route and beat feet for the car. We simply rolled off the south face and headed for Boulder Lake. At the lake, the water was way down, making it easy to walk around the side without the trail.

Then we picked up the trail and cruised back to the car in the afternoon sunshine. We got back about 1/2 hour late, but still beat our deadline.