Steps in the Right Direction: Loch Lake, Timberline Falls, Lake of Glass, Sky Pond

The Loch, Timberline Falls, Glass Lake and Sky Pond

Today we started our day at 5:30. We need to get hiking earlier today as it is now monsoon season and storms are forecasted around 2 ish. It really is interesting that every time we come to Colorado so does the monsoon season. Colorado does need the rain, but seriously how does this happen.

We parked at Bear Lake and took the shuttle down to Glacier Gorge trailhead. We made really great time today because we beat all of the crowds. We quickly zipped up and past Alberta Falls. The overlook to this falls is a real people jam. I think the falls is about as far as the vast majority of hikers care to venture up the trail. It is a 200 foot elevation gain and 1.7 mile round trip. ( It is fine with me that the majority of hikers stop here.) This morning there were only two other people tucked into special spots with their cameras all tripoded up and waiting for the “ just right” sunlight moment. We proceed up to Loch lake. The mosquitoes on this hike were really bad. Had to stop and apply lots of bug juice. The bug juice that we are carrying is great stuff, but the spray bottle leaves much to be desired. Not sure why the spray bottle design was chosen? The spray applicator head does a better job of leaking than that of retaining the product to be able to spray it on. Perhaps the company put all of their dollars into developing a quality spray and did not worry about the applicator. We have the leaky bottle quadruple bagged to catch any leakage and to protect our gear and lunch from being contaminated. We end up pouring the leaked bug juice back into the bottle from three of the four zip locks. That is a BAD sprayer head!

When we were last up to Loch Lake the RMNP trail crew was working on renovating the trail to Timberline Falls. We are sort of interested in how it looks. We find the renovated trail all laid out with timbers, gravel, and large stepping stone rocks, a huge boulder staircases all laid in just the right spots. It made for a really nice pathway up to Timberline Falls. Once you get to the falls that's where all the really nice laid out pathway ends. The Park does not want to make it too convenient! A little risk should be involved when hiking!

We got up to the falls took some really great pictures. Kathi pulled out her GoPro and captured me growing up through the falls followed behind by her “in person view “ of her climb. From the base of the waterfall the trail continues up a chute to the right of the falls. This is a fair scramble that climbs roughly 100 feet, and requires hand holds, inseams longer than 30 “ and the use of all four limbs while ascending and descending. The first 30 feet or so are the most difficult, but beyond that it is a relatively easy scramble. Just to complicate things a little bit more, portions of the climb may have water flowing down the route. :) This fact may increase the possibility for boot siip’age...This is a scramble, so I watched several people coming down and a couple people going up to best gage what path looked best. Really it's a matter of trying to decide what is the best place to put your foot and what is the best place to put your hand without taking a plunge Into the falls. As usual the scrambling here is meant for somebody who is taller than 5’ 6”. I'm sure my video is worth a laugh or two as I had to scramble up there and crawl up in my knees a couple times because the step was just too big, oh well I got to the top.

When you get up to the top of the falls you walk straight ahead and right in front of you is a beautiful lake called Lake of Glass. We took some pictures looking out over the lake as well as some pictures looking back over the much lower vista of Loch Lake. From here we moved on around the lake. After a bit more of climbing we arrive at another lake called Sky Pond. All tucked back into a beautiful deep grey cirque. Up here we shot some more pictures and did some scrambling across some big rocks and shot some more video. We sat down and had a snack. Our goal was to get the back to town early so that we could do some shopping and then go to the grocery store. You might laugh at this goal, but since town is soooo very busy it will take some nifty traffic dodging to limit our time caught in the Estes Park traffic jam. Also the Safeway (grocery store) in town is the busiest Safeway in all of Colorado. The store is teaming with vacationing people who are trying to buy groceries as well as a staff who are busy trying to keep the shelves stocked. CRAZY PLACE!!! Plan on no less than an hour and a half for the grocery experience even if all you need is a pizza crust and some ice cream!

Today on our trip back to the trailhead we ran into another volunteer Ranger. No, no, no, it wasn't our happy volunteer Ranger who knew a lot about ground squirrels, it was a ranger who was local and was able to provide us a lot of information about some questions that we had. He informed us about why all the trees were lying all over the trail on our way to Black Lake yesterday. He told us it was because many of the downed trees had been damaged by the pine beetle and during a very high straight-line windstorm the trees easily blew over. Estes Park has some very very strong winds during fall and winter, often reaching 50 to 80 miles an hour. He thought it took about 4 months of work to chainsaw a path through all of the downed trees to open the trail back up to Black Lake.

We also talked about how much damage we saw with the pine beetle since our last trip to the park five year ago. At that time most of the beetle kill was on the west side of the park. Now, it is pretty much everywhere. He told us about why we saw all these huge wood teepees in parts of the park. (I use the term wood teepees as it is a lot of wood all standing together in a teepee formation.) Lots and Lots of wood teepees! In high use areas the Park is going in and cutting down the trees that are damaged by the pine beetle so the trees don’t fall on someone. Then the Park is stacking them into large teepees so that on a very cold winter day when there's lots of snow, and no wind the teepees will be torched. There is so much excess wood that the park just needs to get rid of the downed fuel sources.

Our Ranger also talked about the floods of 2013 and some of the damage from that event. Stay tuned for further information on that!!!

9.9 miles today

6 hours 36 mins.