Hallet Peak

For this weekend's adventure, Ali and I headed up to Estes Park to hike Hallett Peak. Little did we know, it actually starts out at one of our favorite trail heads, Bear Lake. This trailhead is great for people of all fitness levels since the trails split off in a lot of different ways and you can do as little or as much as you want. For Hallet however, we went to the right side of Bear Lake Which doesn't have as many shorter trails.

According to AllTrails, this is about a 9.6 mile hike and a 3,280 foot elevation gain. While you start to feel the elevation a little at the top of the peak, it's not bad at all and there are no real steep sections other than the end. It's just a gradual uphill grind. So enough of that, let's get to the pictures!

As soon as you leave Beaver Lake, you are on an uphill stretch with quite a few trees on both sides of you. There isn't much of a few for a while but then as you get up higher, there are a few overlooks of various lakes below you. I really like the picture below since you can see all of the mountains and one lake up close and one in the distance.

After you get above 11,000 or so, your views change quite a bit from tress to more of an open mountain feeling. It got a little windy up here but it wasn't too bad. Here is another picture of the lake as you look down the mountain range. It also got my little marmot friend in the picture doing some sun bathing.

The next two pictures show the top of Hallet Peak. The trail itself is called Flattop Mtn. Trail and the section to the right is a fairly long flat section before you start your final uphill climb.

Then we got a few pics at the top which was around 12,713 feet.

Overall I really enjoyed the hike. It had some good views of both lakes and the mountains. It'd be a good hike to get you used to higher elevation without having very steep uphill climbs.

Arapaho Pass Trail (Caribou & Dorothy Lake)

For this weekend's hike we headed back to the Fourth of July Trailhead. This is a pretty popular trailhead outside of Nederland. Getting there only takes about 1.5 hours from Denver but the last 4 miles is pretty rocky and bumpy so be prepared. Luckily there are no specific parking rules here so you don't have to come too early to get a spot but it definitely fills up fast and isn't as fun later during the day.

We started our hike around 7:15ish and didn't run into hardly anyone until we were on our way back. The first part of the trail is through some woods and goes over some small creeks. It's a steady uphill climb but nothing major. Once you get past that, you are walking along side of a mountain and there are some pretty nice views of the valley. The first two pictures below is a pretty nice view of the valley headed back to the trailhead and also a view of some small ponds.

Once you get pat that, you can then go right to Caribou Lake or left to Dorothy. We started out going right and as you can see from the picture below, Ali is posing above Caribou. Be warned, it's pretty windy at this point so you need to be prepared. Also, there is about a 1,000 elevation difference between the top of the mountain and Caribou Lake so it makes walking back not very fun.

Once we hit Caribou, we walked about 1.5 miles or so in the valley. It was very pretty with small streams and waterfalls. Yet again, we were the only people there so it was very peaceful.

After we got back up to the split, we then hiked about 7 minutes to Dorothy Lake. It wasn't anything special but since we were there we figured why not. The picture below shows the trail headed to Dorothy.

By the time it was all said and done, we ended up hiking almost 12 miles with quite a bit of elevation gain. As you can see from the green chart below, what really sucked was the ups and downs. But overall I would recommend this trail. It had a very good mixture of terrain and as long as you get there early, it's pretty secluded as well.