Training Log Archive: pfc

One Man relay at the Lights of Cheyenne map (first 3 loops) and then the area on the other side of 712 (just mapped last week.) I made a lot of mistakes and fell well behind of the leader. I went to the wrong control twice on the course. Grrr. Still a fun way to cap off Laramie Daze.

Distance is an estimate, and I forgot to take a lot of splits.

Drove up to the Snowy Range W of Laramie in the afternoon. Hiked a fairly easy trail from Lewis Lake up to the gap between Medicine Bow and Browns Peaks. Saw a number of fat noisy marmots.

====================================================

After a luxurious night at the Hampton Inn, I headed up for the last Laramie Daze race - a "one man relay" at the Lights of Cheyenne. It's called one man relay because you run all the relay loops yourself (in this case, four of them.) As reported in my log entry, I didn't do that well. Maybe I was anxious to get up to the Snowy Range - certainly my concentration wasn't 100%. I even went to the wrong control on one of the loops. Right after finishing, I said goodbye to everyone and got on the road west from Laramie.

Laramie is on the eastern side of a wide valley between two spurs of the Medicine Bow Mountains, so I had a half hour drive across the valley floor to get to the foothills. The valley is quite flat, except for one rise called Table Mountain (with a flat top, of course) and a outlying ridge called Sheep Mountain about 6 miles east of the main part of the range. From Laramie, all of these protuberances look like little hills, but as you gradually approach them you can see they're actually quite big, and it takes a long time to get to them. It all has to do with the tremendous lines of sights in these nearly treeless Western valleys - it's common to look ahead to the top of the next hill and not realize it's three or four miles away. It's easy to see herds of cattle at distances up to two miles, where they just look like little black specks against the grasslands.

Finally I arrived at the town of Centennial, right at the base of the mountains. The road starts to climb steeply up and you leave the grassy valleys for dense pine forests. I was feeling the mid-afternoon slump, and decided to stop at a pretty picnic area and take a nap. It spit a few drops of rain while I was sleeping, but the hatchback kept me dry and it soon cleared up. I then continued up above 10,000 feet, where the trees start to thin out and make room for alpine meadows filled with flowers. I didn't know most of the species, but one of the most common was the easily identifiable mountain aster. Also at this altitude, there start to be little lakes in the depressions and hollows. I took a scenic but bumpy road that runs along the valley below Browns Peak and eventually rejoins the main highway shortly before the Sugarloaf Recreation area - which is the main starting point for all the trails in the highest part of the range.

By this time it was getting late, and the weather was a little unsettled still, so I took a leisurely walk up the Gap Lakes trail. This goes north into the "gap" between Browns Peak and Medicine Bow Peak. Both mountains rise up about a thousand feet on each side of the gap, and there are two lakes right at the saddle, appropriately called North Gap and South Gap Lake. The trail is pretty easy, and I saw a number of people with fly rods either heading up to fish, fishing, or coming back from fishing along the trail. I learned from a couple of them that there are as many as eight species of trout in these alpine lakes, and it's a very popular destination for that reason. I sat and rested a while at the actual saddle, and I was quiet enough that a marmot leaped down onto some rocks only about twenty feet away, stood up, and started to cheep-cheep away. Marmots are a lot louder than pikas! I was able to get a pretty good picture of him, even though he was nearly silhouetted against a bright sky.

After heading back down from the gap, I figured I had to find a campsite for the night. The campground near the trailheads was mostly RVs, and it was full anyway. I looked at a couple of others before settling on the North Fork campground, back towards Laramie and about 2 miles down a bumpy dirt road. I had to walk around with my axe foraging for firewood, but collected enough dry stuff to have a nice fire come sunset. After claiming the campsite, I headed back up to the restaurant at Snowy Mountain Lodge that I'd noticed on the way down, and got a very reasonably priced steak dinner, including orange sherbet for dessert.

During the time I was inside having dinner, low clouds had started to descend from the higher altitudes and had just reached the lodge. These were truly low clouds, not fog, since they held together and the moderate wind was blowing them upslope. Before returning to my campsite, I drove up a little higher, took some photos and enjoyed the view.