January 2025
Books read:
- Sovietstan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland
- Patriot by Alexei Navalny
- Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
- Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age by Akshat Rathi
Trails walked:
- Dream and Emerald Lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park (Jan 15th)
- Lost Lake in the Indian Peaks Wilderness near Eldora (Jan 16th)
- Valley Loop and DR Trail in Bobcat Ridge Natural Area by Masonville (Jan 24th)
- Howard and Westridge Loop Trail in Lory State Park near Ft. Collins (Jan 28th)
Song of the month: Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields
January Summary:
You don’t have to read books to find great stories, although books still provide the richest examples, both fiction and non-fiction. I recently read about two incredible women on different newsletters I subscribe to. The women, born over 100 years apart, have very different stories, but both proved to be special beyond any of their peers. They did what came natural to them; they acted in the face of injustice. History and the present are filled with stories of people (most of them women from what I’ve noticed) who have bucked the norm of indifference to make a difference. The first is Victoria Woodhull, whom some of you may know as the first woman to run for president (in 1872, many years before women were granted the right to vote). But her story is even more incredible than that distinction. Born to a mother who couldn’t read and an alcoholic father who beat them and eventually bankrupt them, Woodhull managed to survive this past. But she survived so much more than that. She left the brutality of her father only to marry, in her teens, an equally brutal physician. Still a teen, she bore two children, one with developmental disabilities, the other in a birth so harrowing that mother and child nearly bled to death. Read about how she overcame all of this, then traveled the country to view the poverty and injustice of the times, wrote a manifesto on freedom, and then ran for president, here in Maria Popova’s wonderful The Marginalian newsletter.
The other woman I read about is Diane Wilson, a fisherwoman from Seadrift, Texas, a coastal fishing community between Houston and Corpus Christi. She sued a $250B Taiwanese plastics company in 2017 under the Clean Water Act. Against all odds, and many lawyers, she unexpectedly won a $50B settlement in 2019. But that’s not the whole story. She didn’t take a penny of it. Instead, she gave it all to the coastal communities to help revive their fishing industry and their towns. She grew up in this area and wanted to see it thrive; it was more important to her than money. Read her powerful story here, in a newsletter from Inside Climate News.
My reading this month consisted of all non-fiction, which is rare. I normally need a break from reality. One was about the Central Asian countries we only know about because of Borat, another was a posthumous memoir of a Russian hero who fought, and was killed by, Vladimir Putin. I also read Yuval Noah Hurari’s latest book on the history and future of information, plus a climate book focused on capitalism that changed some of my views on the possibilities. My rambling took me into the snowy mountains for walks in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Indian Peaks Wilderness, and to the foothills west of Loveland and Fort Collins. Enjoy.
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Things My Grandkids Say: For the uninitiated, the grandkids’ nana is known in some circles as The Ultimate Consumer. My oldest grandson knows this because the other day he said, “Nana is the best shopper. She shops very well for me.” Of course she does grandson, of course she does….
As you know from previous posts, I love the NPR Tiny Desk concert series. Artists perform 3, 4, or 5 songs from their repertoire at an office desk at NPR headquarters in Washington DC. I especially love watching my favorite artists perform at this venue, but I’ve also watched shows from artists I’d never heard of. For some reason, I’d never heard of The Magnetic Fields, even though their album 69 Love Songs seems to be a favorite of many critics. There really are 69 songs on that album, many of them very short with some funny and insightful lyrics. The band went on tour in 2024 as part of the 25th anniversary of that album and the tiny desk concert I watched was part of that tour. It was a weird concert. Stephin Merritt, the founder, songwriter and singer of the band held a stuffed kitten throughout the show, didn’t really say anything about the songs, other than to say, “This next song is called…” The band members didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves and overall had a kind of cultish appearance. Strange. But then they played Book of Love, and I was blown away. I then listened to it a couple of more times from their album…still great. It’s a very short and simple song, and it’s kind of an earworm that I couldn’t get out of my head for days. Anyway, it’s a beautiful song about love that we all need more of. I included this quote last month from Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics: “Between 1970 and 2010, the mention of “love” in popular music dropped by 50 percent, while the use of “hate” tripled.” We’re desperately in need of more great love songs. Enjoy:
The author is a cultural anthropologist and travel writer with degrees in language and history. In addition to Norwegian, she also speaks English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian and is currently learning Portuguese and Arabic. For this book, it was her Russian that was invaluable. She spent part of a spring and part of an autumn (winter and summer in this region can be harsh) in the five countries and wrote about her experience. It’s fascinating. Traveling in these countries is not easy. Four of the five countries are basically dictatorships (Kyrgyzstan is the only theoretically democratic country in Central Asia, but there are still plenty of problems there) and there is little tourist infrastructure. Plus, some of these countries dislike each other greatly, which makes border crossings difficult. Her descriptions of some of her flights, train rides, and car/bus rides are a combination of harrowing and mesmerizing. She encountered a wide range of people in her travels, most of them friendly and hospitable, but also some that were rude and in at least one case tried to assault her. Her descriptions of the vast deserts, high mountains, and of the environmental disaster of the Aral Sea are stunning. She spends a lot of time comparing the countries today with their experience as part of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1991. This book is a great way to feel like you’re traveling to these exotic places without having to put in the grueling work to actually do it. Here are some lines:
Through the ages, many different peoples – the Persians, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Arabs and the Turks – have conquered Central Asia.
I feel the soured camel milk taking effect and have to run over to the improvised toilet shack. I get there only just in time.
A Turkmen who criticizes the regime is putting his or her life at risk; simply having contact with a foreigner gives rise to suspicion.
The no-man’s land between Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan…apart from the two border stations, there were no buildings here, no people, only wolves, and mile upon mile of poorly maintained Soviet roads.
According to Transparency International’s annual overview, Kazakhstan is the least corrupt of the post-Soviet states in Central Asia, but that says more about its neighbors than about Kazakhstan itself. It is still towards the bottom of the list, 140th out of 177.
My only reason for going to Aral was that I wanted to see with my own eyes the consequences of one of the greatest man-made catastrophes. How could the authorities just sit back and watch the world’s fourth largest lake all but disappear? For them, cotton was more profitable than fish.
Why do we travel? Why do we put ourselves through all the discomfort that moving across great distances and staying in faraway, foreign lands usually entail? My theory is that nature has equipped us with deceitful, flawed memories. That is why we forever set off on new adventures. Once we are home again, the discomfort transforms into amusing anecdotes or is forgotten.
Kazakhstan is the most northerly country in the world with a Muslim majority.
Kokpar or buzkashi, as it is also called, is a national sport in Central Asia. The teams each have ten players, and instead of a ball, they play with a decapitated goat.
Archeologists believe that it was here, on the steppes of Kazakhstan, that people first tamed a horse.
Conspiracy theories tend to flourish under regimes that lie so much to the people that they get used to it.
..famous for its big Monday market, Dushanbe means Monday in Tajik.
When a person moves into the presidential palace of a Central Asian republic, it is very hard to get them to move out again of their own free will.
High up in the Pamir plateau, surrounded by an otherworldly landscape of bare rocky outcrops and rounded peaks, and lakes with the bluest water you can imagine, lies the village of Bulunkul, Tajikistan: Forty-six families scrape together a living in this lunar landscape, at the end of the road, with no mobile or Internet coverage, miles from the nearest village.
Kyrgyzstan is the only post-Soviet country in Central Asia where a sitting president has stepped down of his own volition…It is not so much the freedom that is noticeable, rather the absence of fear.
At the border: “Uzbekistan isn’t a dangerous country is it?” I said. “No, you’re safe here, but…” He nodded pointedly towards Kyrgyzstan. “It’s dangerous over there. Very dangerous.”
Despite their many conflicts and differences, the former communist leaders of Central Asia are united on one front: They want to prevent Islamist fundamentalism from gaining a foothold.
One of the most important cities on the Silk Road lies only a short train journey from Bukhara. The name in itself conjures up adventure: Samarkand. It carries a romantic association with spices from distant lands, handwoven silk carpets, camel caravans, dusty marketplaces and azure cupolas.
There were still several people out today enjoying the winter wonderland, but I had the trail to myself for much of the time, and there were only 3 other people at Emerald Lake when I arrived. I’ve shared it with dozens of people on summer days. One couple was cooking lunch on their backpack stoves, and I told them how lucky they were that the wind wasn’t blowing. They said it was their first time there and didn’t realize wind was usually an issue. The views from both Dream Lake and Emerald Lake are spectacular, and the hike is fairly easy even if it’s uphill the whole way (about 1.6 miles and 700 feet gain). These are the two reasons why it’s so popular: ease of access, gorgeous scenery and a relatively short walk. I slowly made my way back down and ran into several groups of Eastern Europeans – must be some sort of holiday season out there. They looked right at home in the snow.
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| Bear Lake with Hallett Peak in the background |
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| Expansive view with Longs Peak on the right |
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| Sun hovering low in the horizon |
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| A happy me on Dream Lake after no hikes in several days |
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| Emerald Lake (Emerald Frozen Flat Area in winter) |
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| Emerald Lake beauty |
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| Frozen Dream Lake with a view |
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| Dream Lake |
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| Dream Lake |
The book starts with Navalny’s description of his poisoning by the Russian FSB (KGB) from the nerve agent Novichuk which they’ve used to assassinate several dissidents over the years. He fell ill on a flight and thanks to the fast reaction of the crew and an emergency landing in Omsk, Siberia, he arrived at a hospital there and was eventually flown to Berlin for treatment. He was in a coma much of the time, but the doctors there saved him. He stayed in the hospital for a month before finally returning to Russia. Many people have asked him why in the world would he return to Russia and risk another poisoning or certainly prison. His answer: “I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. İf your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary."
The next sections of the book describe his life growing up in Russia, with the food shortages and poverty and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His mother was Russian, and his father was Ukrainian. He trained as a lawyer and eventually became active in politics as he saw his beloved country being taken over by corrupt thieves. He was an early user of social media and produced several posts and video investigations into the Putin regime. He was jailed many times for these posts and for protest rallies he organized. Many of these social media posts would show the modest annual salary made by many of Putin’s cabinet, followed by video of their huge mansions in Montenegro, the UK or other areas of Russia. This quote by Navalny in his book explained why he set out to do all of this: “If you were to ask me whether I hate Vladimir Putin, my answer would be, yes, I hate him, but not because he tried to kill me or put my brother in prison. I hate Putin because he has stolen the last twenty years from Russia. These could have been incredible years, the sort of period that we’ve never had in our history. We had no enemies. We had peace on all our borders. The price of oil, gas, and our other natural resources was incredibly high. We earned huge amounts from our exports. Putin could have used these years to turn Russia into a prosperous country. All of us could have lived better. Instead, twenty million people live below the poverty line. Part of the money Putin and his cronies simply stole; part of it was squandered. They did nothing good for our country, and that is their worst crime”
The last, and longest section of the book are his notes from prison from January 2021 through early 2024. He died in prison on February 16, 2024. I’m not entirely sure how some of his notes made it out of the various prisons he was in. Early on he did have some rights, like visits from his lawyers where he could have passed them on. But later on, in solitary confinement, with few rights I don’t know how he managed to get his notes and eventually Instagram posts made. He has a huge network of supporters, so I suppose they were part of it. Eventually all his lawyers were put in jail. Some have compared his prison notes to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. They are fascinating and depressing at the same time. A bit repetitive, but to me it’s incredible that he maintained a positive outlook and an undying love of his country and a desire to make it a better place for its people. Here are some other lines:
When corruption is the very foundation of a regime, those who battle it are extremists.
We must do what they fear--tell the truth, spread the truth. This is the most powerful weapon against this regime of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. Everyone has this weapon. So make use of it.
The hero of one of my favorite books, Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, says, "Yes, the only suitable place for an honest man in Russia at the present time is prison.”
I love the Russian language. I love the melancholic landscapes, when you look out of the window and want to cry; it’s just wonderful. I feel great, because all of this is close to me. I love our sad songs. I love our literature and cinema. It’s always about anguish, contemplation, suffering, melancholy, and self-reflection.
Having spent my first year in prison, I want to tell everyone exactly the same thing I shouted to those who gathered outside the court when the guards were taking me off to the police truck. Don’t be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have. The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites. That we will surrender without a fight, voluntarily, our own future and the future of our children. Huge thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel it. I’d just like to add: This year has gone by incredibly quickly. It seems only yesterday I was boarding the plane to Moscow, and now I’ve already completed a year in prison. It’s true what they say in science books: time on earth and in space passes at different speeds. I love you all. Hugs to everyone.
But I will not give up either my ideas or my homeland. My convictions are not exotic, sectarian, or radical. On the contrary, everything I believe in is based on science and historical experience. Those in power should change. The best way to elect leaders is through honest and free elections. Everyone needs a fair legal system. Corruption destroys the state. There should be no censorship. The future lies in these principles.
A serious political leader cannot simply decide to turn his back on a huge number of his fellow citizens because he personally dislikes their views. That is why we must create a situation where everybody is able to participate on an equal footing in fair and free elections, competing with each other.
Because of Putin, hundreds now, and in the future tens of thousands, of Ukrainians and Russian citizens will die. Yes, he will stop Ukraine from developing, he will drag it into the swamp, but Russia too will pay a high price.
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| Open meadow near the trailhead - heading to the other side of that hill |
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| Old Hessie Townsite sign |
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| Not many people using the bridge in winter |
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| I'm taller than the signs in winter! |
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| A walk in the snowy woods |
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| Lost Lake |
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| Lost Lake |
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| Lost Lake |
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| Last one of Lost Lake |
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| Snow art |
In the the book, Harari talks about how Facebook’s algorithms likely led to the violence in Myanmar and to the election of little-known Bolsonaro Jair as president of Brazil. The algorithms at the time were built to gain as much user engagement as possible and they discovered that hate speech online kept people engaged on their phones longer than compassionate speech. So posts from racist Buddhists (I hadn’t before realized there was such a thing) went viral in Myanmar and led to the execution, imprisonment, and deportation of Rohingya Muslims from the country. And similarly, hate-filled and lie-filled Facebook posts in Brazil from previously little known people around the country led to Bolsonaro's election as president. Harari goes on to point out the many positive aspects of social media, but his main emphasis is that all previous information networks have been used for both the common good and for evil. The difference now, however, is that AI is far more powerful than any previous information network and theoretically could go so far as to creating religious text for a new religion, creating a new “country” with its own AI-generated ideology, and starting wars between countries by creating financial and military havoc with all of their network interconnections that few people even now understand. His solution? Self-correcting mechanisms and open discussions between all countries as AI technology is developed and disseminated. Will this be possible? Only the future knows. Here are some other lines:
The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.
AI isn’t a tool—it’s an agent. Gramophones played our music, and microscopes revealed the secrets of our cells, but gramophones couldn’t compose new symphonies, and microscopes couldn’t synthesize new drugs.
The populists claim that the articles you read in The New York Times or in Science are just an elitist ploy to gain power, but what you read in the Bible, the Quran, or the Vedas is absolute truth.
… while the Bible has done a poor job in representing the reality of human origins, migrations, and epidemics, it has nevertheless been very effective in connecting billions of people and creating the Jewish and Christian religions.
…information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic.
When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys...advantages over the truth...fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated
An uncompromising adherence to the truth is essential for scientific progress, and it is also an admirable spiritual practice, but it is not a winning political strategy.
It takes a minute to tweet allegations of bias, fraud, or corruption, and many weeks of arduous work to prove or disprove them.
At the heart of every religion lies the fantasy of connecting to a superhuman and infallible intelligence. This is why… studying the history of religion is highly relevant to present-day debates about AI.
The history of information networks has always involved maintaining a balance between truth and order.
As Erdoğan once put it, “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”
Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.
In 2019, I went on a tour of Chernobyl. The Ukrainian guide who explained what led to the nuclear accident said something that stuck in my mind. “Americans grow up with the idea that questions lead to answers,” he said. “But Soviet citizens grew up with the idea that questions lead to trouble.”
Prior to the 2020s, there was nothing on earth, other than a human mind, that could produce sophisticated texts. Today things are different. In theory, the text you’ve just read might have been generated by the alien intelligence of some computer.
In 2022 top tech companies spent close to $70 million on lobbying in the United States, and another €113 million on lobbying EU bodies, outstripping the lobbying expenses of oil and gas companies and pharmaceuticals.
Through trial-and-error experiments on millions of people, the YouTube algorithms discovered the same pattern that Facebook algorithms also learned: outrage drives engagement up, while moderation tends not to. Accordingly, the YouTube algorithms began recommending outrageous conspiracy theories to millions of viewers while ignoring more moderate content.
What happens to democracy when AIs create even more complex financial devices and when the number of humans who understand the financial system drops to zero?
In the 1960s, the United States was riven by deep ideological conflicts about the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. These tensions caused a surge in political violence and assassinations, but Republicans and Democrats were still able to agree on the results of elections, they maintained a common belief in democratic institutions like the courts, and they were able to work together in Congress at least on some issues. Is the ideological gap in the 2020s that much bigger than it was in the 1960s? And if it isn’t ideology, what is driving people apart? Many point the finger at social media algorithms.
…to create wiser networks, we must abandon both the naive and the populist views of information, put aside our fantasies of infallibility, and commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms. That is perhaps the most important takeaway this book has to offer.
From the brochure on this area: “David Rice (D.R.) Pulliam and his wife, Virginia (Ginny), were the previous owners of the Bobcat Ridge property. D.R. and Ginny visited the area often, enjoying the peaceful beauty of this land. One year, as a birthday surprise for D.R., Ginny had a narrow dirt road built to Mahoney Park—one of the couple’s favorite spots. D.R. was so pleased with the new route, he immediately named it after his wife. Today, the Ginny and D.R. trails provide access to this beautiful area.”
The lower elevations were mostly dirt and drifting snow, but there were 4 inches of snow on the trails at the higher elevations (too little for snowshoes). The first couple of miles along the Valley Loop trail was a moderate uphill with ever expanding views of the valley. Once I hit the Powerline Trail though, it was a thousand feet of elevation gain in about a mile and a half. At the end of the Powerline Trail I reached the beautiful Mahoney Park, one of the prettiest meadows along the front range. I saw tons of deer and one very fast coyote running up a ridge in addition to the many elk I saw on the drive up in Carter Valley. I only saw one other hiker and one fat tire biker all day today. This seems like it would be a fun mountain bike ride in the summer.
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| Sun trying to poke through winter |
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| Winter sun |
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| Bobcat Ridge |
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| Appropriate since the brewery that makes Fat Tire Beer is near here |
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| Mahoney Park |
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| Snow art |
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| I started down there somewhere |
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| Cool rock formations up high |
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| Result of my footsteps |
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| Giant prairie dogs? |
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| Mahoney Park |
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| Wintry scene |
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| So many deer |
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| Bobcat etching with Bobcat Ridge in the background |
There’s the story of Wan Gang of China who’s done far more than Elon Musk for the electric vehicle. He is one of the key reasons that China now dominates manufacturing of batteries and EVs. But he just had the idea to make China a world power in sustainable energy; he needed the backing of the government and investors (like Warren Buffett) to turn it into a reality.
Fatih Birol, a Turkish economist was able to change the International Energy Agency from an oil and gas supporter and economic forecaster into the agency it currently is, looking at ALL forms of energy and their economic forecasts. The IEA has been instrumental in getting richer countries to participate in climate talks around the world, including the 2015 COP where the Paris Agreement was signed, in no small part to Birol’s work.
Then there’s the story of the Danish energy giant Danish Oil and Natural Gas which became the first oil and gas company ever to change its product to sustainable energy. It is now called Ørsted, the largest developer of offshore wind power in the world. The Arab oil crisis of 1973 and eventually the government’s placement of a tax on carbon led to this change.
Paul Polman was CEO of Unilever from 2009 to 2019. During that time, he completely changed the culture of the company from a quarterly reporting shareholder company to a yearly reporting company with a priority on its employees, customers, and the planet. He has shown that a more sustainable form of capitalism is possible. “The company’s market capitalism grew threefold during his tenure; revenues rose 30%, and direct emissions more than halved.” As the author also states about Unilever: “The world’s most sustainable company makes toilet cleaners, deodorants and mayonnaise.”
Maybe one of the most shocking chapters for me was the one on Vicki Hollub, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum in Midland, Texas. She is the first woman to run a major US oil company (the company Armand Hammer built) and she has set a goal for the company to become carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative after that. Hollub worked in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, in Venezuela during the guerilla wars in Colombia, and in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Two years after becoming CEO, the company published its first climate report. She understands that the history of oil is coming to an end and is finding ways to keep the company going during this transition. That has included partnering with Canadian start-up Carbon Engineering to work on direct air capture of carbon, with plans to remove one million metric tons of CO2 in its oilfields near Midland.
Sarah Breeden, executive director at the Bank of England gave a speech to world financiers in April 2019 that began like this, “My message today is simple, climate change poses significant risks to the economy and to the financial system, and while these risks may seem abstract and far away, they are in fact very real, fast-approaching and in need of action today…Climate change is an unprecedented challenge. I am sorry to say there are no existing charts for us to follow…. The risks of climate change are far-reaching in breadth and scope. They will affect all agents in the economy, in all sectors and across all geographies. The risks are eminently foreseeable. I cannot tell you now exactly what will happen and when, but uncertainty about what will happen cannot lead to inaction and inertia…The size of those future risks will be determined by the actions we take today. Climate change represents the tragedy of the horizon: by the time it is clear that climate change is creating risks that we want to reduce, it may already be too late to act.” Thanks in part to people like Sarah Breeden, the UK is one country whose political leaders from liberal to conservative all understand the threat of climate change, which is also why the country has one of the boldest emissions goals in the world.
There are many other stories in the book just as compelling, along with a good bit of history about energy and its impact on world economics. He concluded the book with this: ”Given the disruption that’s coming, the race to zero emissions is unlikely to be smooth. If history is a guide, it will probably be a series of missteps. Still, all the main forces needed to tackle this problem – politics, technology, finance – are headed in the right direction, with more and more people diverting their focus to the solutions. Time is running out and we need to pick up the pace.”
Certainly, there are still nefarious companies and governments doing all they can to delay action on climate change (I can think of one recent example close to home), I know this all too well. But these stories gave me hope and give those nefarious companies and governments a playbook on how they can still make money while transitioning to a clean energy economy.
It was the first sunny day after a long weekend of snow and cold temperatures. I ran into lots of snow up high on the Westridge trail and also, surprisingly on the lower section of the Arthur's Rock trail. Until I hit the Arthur's Rock Trail, I had the day to myself. I guess the Arthur's Rock trail is a popular local exercise hike as it's only 1.7 miles but with 1,200 feet of elevation gain leading to great views. I plowed through 6 inches of snow during most of the Westridge section that lasted 2 miles. It was rough walking (too little snow for snowshoes, too much snow for hiking), but it's also where I got spectacular views of the big mountains to the west. As I turned south on the Timber trail I got a pleasant surprise; a sno-cat had plowed the trail almost, but not quite, all the way to the Arthur's Rock trail. This made the walking much easier and probably lessened the amount of soreness I definitely experienced afterwards. I discovered that the sno-cat was part of a prescribed burn they were doing while the snow kept the danger low. I saw the first human when I reached Arthur's Rock. The climb to the top was an ice chute so I had to put on my microspikes. There were college students going up in tennis shoes while slipping and sliding all over the place. I'm sure they made it out safely because they're college kids, but I would have killed myself without the spikes. The views from on top of the rock are stupendous. I hung out up here for a while before heading back down the trail to my car. No animal sightings today, just great weather and beautiful scenery. I'll take it.
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| Starting out, I'll end my 7+ mile loop on top of that rock |
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| Snow got deep up high |
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| But great views |
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| Longs Peak in the distance |
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| Mountains forever |
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| I was so happy this sno-cat trampled the deep snow for me |
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| See that person on the rock upper left? I would be there soon |
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| Shadow selfie on the rock |
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| Horsetooth Reservoir from Arthur's Rock |
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| Lots of these icefalls/icicles |
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| Horsetooth Lake and Fort Collins in the distance |
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| Sun headed down as am I |
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| Sun shining on the tips of the trees and Arthur's Rock |
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| So much snow here but not over there |
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| Red ridge framing |