Last Wednesday (07/02/2003), MB and our nephew Chad and I did a hike/climb up Mt Evans, which is one of Colorado's many 14,000+ foot peaks. I'd ridden to the Mt Evans summit on my bicycle before, but the hike was a totally new experience. Like most weekend (or in this case, mid-week) warriors, we were a bit underprepared, but it all turned out OK in the end. The problem is that we didn't quite understand the trail route we'd chosen, and weren't paying attention when we started. The climb we'd intended to do was a 2-mile round trip. When we were .85 miles into it, I used my GPS to determine that we were still over a mile from the summit.

Unfortunately, we had only enough food and water (comfortably, anyway) for the 2-mile trip. We knew we were on one of the trails, though, so it was a matter of deciding whether to push forward or to retrace our steps. We pushed forward for a while, and just as we were getting a bit worried about our progress we met some trailblazers. They put us on the right path to the summit, and the rest of the hike was mainly a rock scrambling traverse of the western face. The views were, to put it lightly, amazing.