Hoosier Pass, Colorado, and Hiking with a Toddler

   Above Breckenridge Colorado, where you have left the world of juice bars (avocado is a fat, not a protein, people) you may find a random seeming trailhead under the bare green mounds of the mountainside, against the dominating, stony gray of the rocky peaks behind.  Though it did not occur to me at the time, something of the green round of the hills could put one in mind of Barrow Downs, only more vertical.

    We stopped here in great need of a hike after the tedium of driving, and the frustrations of spending much less time on our feet than hoped.  Mountain weather being quick to change, and the cold a concern, we first had to think of bundling the baby.  She had a warm hooded jacket, but her legs were down to one layer, and here is where we discovered a technique that should be more widely known among parents.  Once the child is in the carrier, take a sleepsack, and put it on backwards, tucking the feet in so that the baby's arms are holding it up, instead of falling off all the time like a blanket does when you try the same idea.  Warmly thus enthroned against the her father's chest, the child set forth upon the side of the mountain.

Smug as a baby alligator on its mother's head

    The first small stretch of our road took us over a gravelly ground of evergreen trees, and we took the road which wound about the side of the slope, rather than the path some took to the right.  After a short distance, the road curved about a ridge and the trees broke for a moment, and the valley opened beneath us.

    The road winds about the side of the ridge, trees about it as it rises, views of a green hillside between them.  In the valley below, a reservoir lay steely in color under the shifting clouds and the depth of the sky.  

We walked along the rim of the valley, still below the green hill which our road climbed.

On the edge of this valley, which looked like a dream to me, we halted and I sat to survey what spread before us

        There a world like a book lay all about us, and tiny flowers, growing from mossy roots in the gravelly earth, with a kind of special beauty that I cannot explain or describe.  If it lies in part from the encouraging effects of a walk in the sun, and the knowledge that you may only see these that grow here because you have taken your own two feet and left the world of rushing vehicles behind, it may be, but perhaps the elevation itself puts something into them which could be quantified by technical jargon.

But the path still lay ahead

A snowfield beside the road wept into the valley to drip into the reservoir below

The hill above

We followed the road about the curve of the hill, and discovered that our road passed the debris of a mine at the valley's head, and wound higher, turning toward a fork.  The hill we had been walking beneath was lower and lay to the right, and another hillside, which had been in our view since we rounded the ridge lay still higher, and between these lay the fork in the road.

We took the left, but were stopped from climbing higher by notices of private property.  Before we went back to reach the top of the first hill, we came around the side to find another abandoned mine.  The door was collapsed, and the tunnel extension was in part tumbled, but a small stream of water ran through the rocks from the hidden caves beneath the hill, and trickled away over the rim of the valley.

Red slag visible on the mountain behind the mine exit implies there were multiple shafts on this hillside, and that our path was in part a mining road

On the far side of the ridge, a blue and green valley runs into the distance under the feet of desolate peaks

At last we turned to climb the final hill.

Here more flowers grew with stolid roots and misleadingly delicate faces, thriving in the summer sun, that bear the harshest winds and fiercest snows, to rise again with a smile from what could be mistaken for lifeless ground.

And there was rested, enjoyed our provisions ("because that sounds better than "those funny sandwich cracker things" and Gatorade, and the baby and I nursed above the valley. 

 Having checked "nurse baby on mountain top" off my bucket list, I enjoyed taking another stunning picture of my ankles.  Behold, ye who bear witness of my shins.

After a satisfying nurse, toddler enjoys playing with a gatorade bottle, and crushing some crackers significantly more than the view

A mound of blossoms on a mossy seat.  Many of the flowers had some sort of moss-like base, spreading above a thick root which dug for strength, while the foliage above spread to catch sun or rain. 

When the time came to climb to the lot at the base of the hills, we followed the top of the ridge, and took the trail which ran down it, into the tree line again, down the road's beginning, and back to the car where we had set out unknowing how unlike anything else mountain flowers can be.

The toddler wakes, and I must go.