Woodland Lake and Skyscraper Reservoir, Continued...

As promised, here's the rest of the story on our hike.  It was about 11.2 miles round trip, with a total elevation gain of 3,140 feet-- the hike started at 9,000 ft and we climbed up to about 11,300 ft.  It took us about seven hours, but that includes stopping for lunch, photos, wandering off the trail in search of waterfalls, etc.

We left the house at about 6:30am, grabbing Jack in the Box on the way to the trailhead.  Sometimes fast food breakfast just hits the spot.  Especially Jack in the Box (sorry you don't have them, Illinois...).  It was earlier than I wanted to be up on a Saturday, but the trailhead was about an hour away, and it's best to be on the trail nice and early in the morning (you want to avoid afternoon storms in the mountains, which can cause the temperature to drop severely and possibly strand you overnight.  And nights at 11,000 ft are COLD).

But I digress...  We were excited for a nice long hike, and also for testing out our new hiking poles!

I know, they look super dorky.  But it actually helps a lot, and they feel very natural. Hiking poles, in a nutshell (source):

Most obviously, poles reduce the impact of hiking on knee joints and leg muscles. Arm and shoulder muscles support and relieve the leg muscles. With the basic "hands above the heart" position necessitated by the poles, circulation is improved and heart rate is reduced. The "rhythm" created by walking with poles leads to relaxed, more regular breathing and increased stamina.

Here's another view of them, next to my awesome hiking shoes!  Geez I'm a hiking nerd...  Of course, it's pretty much the main reason I moved out here, so I'd better enjoy it.  One of the neat things about them is that they have shock absorption built in, so your hands don't get sore from the impact with the trail.

But anyway... about the hike itself.  Here's a shot from about a third of the way up.  The two peaks in the background are Woodland Mountain (11,893 ft, on the left) and Skyscraper Peak (12,383, on the right).  We didn't climb the peaks themselves, but climbed up to a lake in the cirque just below the two peaks (a cirque is a bowl-shaped depression formed at the base of a glacier).

Since we weren't in a huge rush to get up to the lakes, we made a few detours on the way up.  One of them was to follow the sounds of a waterfall, and we were well rewarded for tracking it down.  I was surprised to see this much water this time of year (summer is our dry season, and almost all the snow has melted off the mountains already).

The previous picture is thanks to this awesome gadget-- called a "gorilla-pod".  Basically a tripod with flexible jointed legs, which you can wrap around practically anything to hold a camera.  Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Here's Woodland Lake, where we stopped to eat lunch.  A couple groups were already up there camping for the three day weekend.  We'll do that some day, but we're not quite in good enough shape to haul all our camping gear five miles up steep terrain!  Maybe next summer, though.

Lunch was fun-- crackers, cheese spread, summer sausage, and smoked salmon.  I had noticed before we left the house that we needed to bring a can opener for the salmon, but of course I forgot, so Stefano got to play MacGyver and open it with basically a leatherman.  He also managed to slice his hand open, but thankfully I hadn't forgotten the first aid kit, so I was able to put him back together with band-aids.

After lunch, we climbed up a bit further to Skyscraper Reservoir.  That's Woodland Lake in this photo, and Skyscraper is right behind me.  It probably doesn't come through in this photo, but you could see out of the mountains to the eastern plains from all the way up here.

Skyscraper Reservoir (as you might have guessed from the name) is held back by a dam.  I believe a smaller lake was here before, but in the 1940s, a seed producer in Boulder (which is located where the water from this stream exits the mountains) built the dam to hold back enough water for him to irrigate his crops.  It's no longer used or maintained, but the dam is still holding together fairly well.

Stefano, of course, being a dam engineer, had to take tons of pictures.  And it was crazy windy up here so he almost lost his hat.  Good thing he had the chin strap on when we got up there.

View of the dam from below.  After taking a few more pictures, and following the creek's steep path from Skyscraper to Woodland, we followed our original trail back to the car.  We didn't park as close as we could have to the trailhead, but we decided not to drive down the flooded access road, though a bunch of other people did.

I certainly wouldn't have done it, since it was already a very rough road, and the water was about 8 inches deep...  I think it has something to do with too much testosterone and not enough common sense!

If you want more pictures (of this hike or anything else I've put up), you can go to my Picasa photo page here.

Also, in case anyone is curious, many of our hikes, including this one, are out of the Colorado Mountain Club's "Colorado Lake Hikes" guidebook.

Here's roughly the path we took.  The GPS tracking on my phone was acting up, so it only ended up capturing less than a mile of the hike.  Next big hiking purchase will be a standalone GPS unit, so we won't have to rely on our phones.


View Woodland Lake and Skyscraper Reservoir in a larger map