We hiked to Chasm Lake (that’s the training hike for Longs Peak).
It’s 8.4 miles round trip. Doesn’t sound like that much – but it’s a pretty intense 8 miles. 2400 feet elevation gain. Took us 7 hours.
The weather was unbelievably perfect. This may have been the best hiking day of the year (for this route).
Very awesome pictures. Looks like a challenging hike as well.
I’ll admit I saw the pictures and started to imaging being out there with a nice wide-angle lens to get a big shot of the lake… or ya’ll could go back out there and take lots of shots and make a panorama out of it. (or send them to me, I’ve got some software around here somewhere to do that sort of thing)
I have Photoshop CS4, which does an AWESOME job with stitching together panoramics. I’ve made a few for the CO USGS pages, and was thoroughly impressed by the capability.
But the thought never crossed my mind to take pictures and set one up for my own personal use 🙂
Absolutely beautiful. The path was beautiful, the lake…. Wow. Was it hard to leave once you got there? Will you go again?
This was our second trip there.
The first trip was 11 years ago, and we were on horses. I think I preferred riding to hiking 🙂
Hopefully we will be going most of the way back soon. 0.7 miles from Chasm Lake, the trail branches off, and the other branch takes you to the top of Longs Peak. It’s another 4 miles to the top of Longs Peak (more than doubles the length of the hike), so I doubt we’ll want to take that little jaunt over to Chasm Lake itself.
But we are hoping to do Longs Peak. That would be very awesome.
But I would pack a knee brace. Fully half of the Chasm Lake trail (and all of the rest of the trail to Longs Peak) is loose uneven medium sized gravel, the kind of stuff that moves underneath you at ever step. On the way down, my knees started doing the deep ache thing.
Well, I haven’t been doing my strengthening exercises. But that was what this hike was for; to learn what we were getting into. And I learned:
Do my knee exercises
Pack a knee brace
Oh, but yes; it was beautiful. I don’t think any of the pictures really captures the incredible blueness of the sky that day.
Well, we didn’t stop too often for pictures. You simply could not believe the mosquitoes. They were worse than any other hike we’ve done in RMNP.
Believe me, we suffered for those flower pictures.