First bike ride of 2025

I took a chance on this warmer Monday, with a high of 69°, to try my first bike ride in 2025. I felt pretty dumb, after I realized I’d left my bottles of water and Gatorade behind on the kitchen counter. I found myself riding through several ice cold puddles, and some slush and ice on the trails. When the wind came up, the chill factor felt pretty low, and hypothermia seemed like a possibility, so I put on the one extra layer I always carry, and that got me home safe. There were some unusual sights — a hardy soul standing out on Chatfield Lake, drilling holes for ice-fishing, a trail closure due to a helicopter clearing some trees in the middle of the lake, and a small herd of deer by the trail.

Update: Apparently the temperature here dropped 25° while I was out on my ride. No wonder I felt like an ice cube. 

Chatfield Lake mostly iced over. 

Ice fisherman drilling holes all by himself out there. Brave soul, as the ice doesn’t look very thick to me. He’d moved to the other side of the lake, by the time I’d pedaled around. 

Helicopter carrying a tree to a collection area across the lake. I was curious about why they’d closed an extensive section of the bike trail around the lake, when I saw this. I was glad to have an alternative route around the lake, on the park’s perimeter road. 

Helicopter cutting down trees in the lake. I’m not sure I’ve seen a chopper carrying a saw and clamp like this. 

Small herd of deer by the trail. They barely looked up, when I stopped to snap a photo. 

The trails were mostly clear, although I encountered several icy puddles, some slush and ice, some sections still snowy, and lots of barely-passable sections of mud.

Wednesday walk

Chilly but sunny Wednesday walk. We left from the Carson Nature Center, and walked down to Highway C-470 and the South Platte Reservoir. 

 

The snow on the deck still looks nice. 

Just a few other people using the trail on this brisk day. Mostly empty. 

Most of Redtail Lake is frozen over. 

Shoveler ducks in a big circle

Shiny ice on a log chair by the trail

Slippery ice on the bridges

Pretty coating of snow on the rocks by the river

Little Kestrel Hawk on a wire

“That’s no moon…”

Snow on the grass by Eaglewatch Lake. Our fun-to-view half-submerged log has no Cormorants on it today. 

Lots of different waterfowl on the lakes today. 

Fun view of snow on the trail, and some interesting structures out there

Storm and Outage

There was a lot of storm activity here Friday afternoon.  I used iLightning to catch this pic of a lightning strike in the nearby foothills. 

Oops, and there went our power… and it came back on 90 minutes later, for 5 seconds… then went off again… here we are sitting on the couch playing word games to candlelight, and that was kind of fun…

The power came on and went back off twice more during the night. This morning, I was dealing with an angry beeping carbon monoxide detector in the basement, even after the power had been on for awhile. I replaced the battery and it was still beeping every 30 seconds. Turns out that several basement circuits were dead. I discovered, after tromping outside in the cold rain, and manhandling the dumb breaker panel doors, that multiple GFCI breakers in the newer power panel had tripped, probably when the power surged during one of the outages, or maybe when lightning struck nearby. Fixed! Then later this morning, we realized the house WiFi wasn’t working, as its backup battery had run down overnight. I hit the power button on the UPS, and we had internet! For about 5 minutes… then the UPS started beeping every few seconds, and shut down again. After downloading the user manual, I realized it was beeping because the outlet it was plugged into was dead. That lead me to yet another GFCI that had tripped, on the wall in another room, hiding behind my skis. After resetting that, everything seems pretty normal here… other than all that snow coming down out there.

We’re having fun watching the birds frequenting our feeders over the deck. I was going to say “Birds love snow,” since we tend to see more of them when it’s snowing, but of course the real takeaway is “Birds love to eat,” especially on snowy days…

Snowy PI(e) Day!

Happy snowy 30-36° Thursday morning! 

It's PI Day - 3.14! That's a pretty rough approximation of PI, which being irrational, has an infinite non-repeating number of digits in the mantissa. Many years ago, I memorized the first 10 of them: 3.1415926535, but the reality is, going through engineering school, 3.14 was about all we could read on the slide rule anyway. 

 

So… we DID get our snow accumulation after all! The weather app on my phone has been refusing to admit there may be a snowflake in the future… until today, faced with inches of snow on the ground, and still falling, they finally begrudgingly added a few snowflakes to today’s forecast.

 

We were awake at 4:19 a.m. this morning, because the power went out for about a minute. The only clue when we’re sleeping, and the power goes out, is that the smoke alarms chirp for a second, so I woke up long enough to realize what had happened and note the time, then started to back asleep... when the power came back, the alarms went off again, this time for much longer, a definite wake up call… but we still managed to fall back asleep for a little while. Then later, while we were up and getting ready for the day, the power went out again, this time for an extended period. We forewent our usual hot meal, with my traditional delicious homemade latte, and settled on cereal and milk for breakfast. We were going to bake a pie for PI Day, but with the power still out here, maybe a trip to the local bakery makes more sense… Oops… they’re closed too, with employees and customers being advised to stay off the roads…

Kitties marveling at the snow. 

 

Update 12:10 - Power’s back on 3 hours later! After seeing my friend posting about his 19 inches of snow in Highlands Ranch, I went outside to measure our snow depth - I found 19.5 inches in a nice undisturbed flat spot out front. 

With the power back on, we ran down to the grocery store, and picked up a pie to bake. I’m trying something new - a Dutch Apple pie from Willamette Valley. It was twice the price of Marie Callendar’s, but I have a special place in my heart for the Oregon coast, especially the Portland area, so… I’m hoping this means I’m spoiling myself. And… it’s in the oven!

St Mary's Glacier

We enjoyed a beautiful 55° Sunday hike up to St Mary’s Lake… and Glacier, what’s left of it…

Driving trip to Yuma

We enjoyed sharing our behind-the-wheel duties, during a fairly long driving trip in Jennefer's newish CR-V hybrid, to visit her sister in Somerton, Arizona, just a little southwest of Yuma. Our route took us west and south to Kayenta, AZ, where we stayed the first night, then to Somerton for several days, then up through Las Vegas to Zion National Park for two nights, over to Moab for a night, and then home. 

I checked the weather a few times before we left, and while it looked like it would be snowing in the mountains before we left, it was supposed to be beautiful weather while we were driving, and that worked out exactly as forecast. I don't think our tires ever touched snow or ice, but we saw it all around us, in many places. Here's our beautiful view of the snow-frosted rock walls in Glenwood Canyon, while crossing over the Colorado River.

We passed near Monument Valley, and were fascinated by the strikingly beautiful geographic features that we could see from the road, in that part of the country. 

We continued the drive to Yuma on the second day, passing through snow-covered Flagstaff and "the 303 loop" around Phoenix. We stopped for lunch at Jacky's, a little food service truck with delicious Mexican food, in Buckeye. 

We spent several days visiting with Janine and Jerry, while staying at the Cocopah Resort in Somerton, which was far nicer than the Howard Johnson's where we stayed, the last time we visited. Jerry was kind enough to drive us around, so that Jennefer and Janine could make progress on their Pokemon GO tasks while we were there. We saw some cool looking Ringneck ducks at the Wetlands park, while we ate our picnic lunch.

He even took us down to the city of San Luis on the southern border, so we could look for a special Pokemon that was only spawning in Mexico. Jennefer did see one, when we got very close to the border, but it disappeared before she could catch it, and Jerry didn't want to appear to be loitering in that area, as that's apparently the kind of behavior that can get you adverse attention from the border patrol. 

We helped Janine harvest cabbage and cauliflower one morning, with her gardening group at the Yuma Agricultural Center. I learned a new skill of using the special stalk cutting knife, and got quite a bit of exercise bending down to cut away the heads, and carrying the full baskets to the large boxes. It looks like they will have donated around 25 thousand pounds of produce, when they finish the last few rows this week. 

We enjoyed hanging out with them at their house, with their two dogs and the one cat, all of whom were very shy the last time we visited, but came out of their shells this time. Jennefer was very happy that they seemed to recognize us, and had decided we were okay people after all. The cat, who was the most shy last time, even jumped up and spent some time purring in Jennefer's lap.

We drove through some pretty desolate country heading north from Yuma. It was quite a change, when we ran into some major stop-and-go traffic through Las Vegas.

We found our way through St George, and down along the Virgin River, to the lodge in the canyon at Zion National Park. 

It was raining and snowing at Zion most of the time we were there, so we didn't get to do much hiking. But we did enjoy walking around a little. I was struck by how almost everything in this view of the lodge went so well together, as we were walking back one evening. 

We enjoyed some gorgeous views of Mount Zion and Jacob Peak from our room. They were especially pretty, with their snow frosting.

The Red Rock Grill at the Lodge served us some delicious meals, and we also enjoyed the views of the peaks around us, while sitting there. 

We liked the way that the dining room had some beautiful photos arranged around the small view windows, and then when we focused on the windows, that view was even prettier than the photos, with the snow falling gently outside.

We stopped on our way out of Zion, and hiked out to the end of the Overlook trail. There were quite a few people on the trail, but the view at the top was amazing. 

Our last overnight stop was in Moab, where we went for a walk from one end of town to the other, then enjoyed a delicious barbecue dinner at the Blue Pig near our hotel. We were hoping to get some up-close views of the local area. Unfortunately, we didn't realize we needed to book a reservation to enter Arches Park, even during what we thought of as the off season, so the closest we got, was the long wait at the gate, only to be turned away. We shrugged our shoulders, and headed home a little early. 

We stopped for lunch in Glenwood Springs, at a tasty taco restaurant named Slope & Hatch, and due to limited parking, enjoyed a fun walk through town as well. We passed by the Glenwood Springs train station as we were walking back to the car. 

 

Here's one last look at the Colorado River, with a few kayakers enjoying their day on the water, before we got stuck in a long line of traffic trying to get over the Rockies, on the last leg of our way home.