The first few years that I lived in Colorado, I didn’t see what all the hubbub was about, bub. In fact, I wasn’t impressed at all, really, until I broke up with my boyfriend and started to explore these alpine trails.
Some notes:
- When I write “we” I mean me and my dog.
- When I say I got lost, it’s not necessarily the fault of the trail. I often get lost while hiking. Good thing there are technological devices to help.
- Despite the fact that Colorado is touted as being “dog friendly,” I find that there are a lot of leash regulations here and a lot of places dogs are prohibited. If there are pictures on this website that show my dog off-leash in an on-leash area, it means I’ve photo-shopped the leash off.
Tip for finding trailheads:
You can always find the GPS coordinates beforehand, and then put them into Google Maps on your smartphone for navigation. In the app, in the field where you would normally enter an address, insert the GPS coordinates using the North/South number, a comma, a space, and then the East/West number. North is positive and East is positive, so if the coordinates are in the NW quadrant, such as N39 57.100 W105 35.696, you would enter this:
39 57.100, -105 35.696
Note that the second coordinate is negative because that’s a western latitude. In case you want to know, in case it’s ever a pub trivia question, the first part of the coordinate is the degree of longitude or latitude, after a space, the second part is a decimal made up of minutes and seconds. In the above example, the western coordinate is 105 degrees, 35 minutes, and 696 seconds west.