Mountains!

I got into the mountains a bunch this week.

The day after we got back from our trip (Sunday 3/4/12) was gorgeous -- beautiful T-shirt weather day, blue skies and sunny. I only planned to run up Flagstaff, but once up there I decided to see what Green looked like. There was a ton of snow on the upper part of the mountain and it was quite difficult to run without any traction, but I continued on anyway. Took me about 2.5 hours for the 10-mile round trip with about 3000' vertical. Biked there and back.

The weather continued to be great during the week. On Thursday I did a 3.3 mile hike around Sanitas. Only took about 30 minutes to summit, but the East Ridge trail on the way down had some horrendous ice! Round trip 80 minutes, around 1300' gain.

Still awesome weather on the weekend, so on Saturday I did another big mountain run. This time I biked to NCAR to head up Bear Peak via Bear Canyon. This time I had my microspikes! The trails were decent but it still took a bit longer than expected to summit -- that last half mile is SOOOO steep. I continued over to South Boulder Peak. There were lots of people on Bear but I had SBP to myself. For the return trip I ran down Shadow Canyon. It wasn't as snowy as I expected, but in hindsight it's a south-facing canyon so that makes sense. 10.5 miles, 3h20m, 3400' vertical.