Thunder Lake

Last weekend, I made my first hike of the year in Rocky Mountain National Park to Thunder Lake. The stunning lake, still frozen when I visited, is just over six miles and 2,000 feet above the Wild Basin trailhead but still a couple thousand feet beneath Mount Alice's towering face.

There's a patrol cabin built in the 1930 on the lake shore. Situated at 10,500 feet elevated, the cabin was still buried in deep snow. No other humans were around at my destination, but a confused river otter kept climbing out of the water and onto the ice before repeatedly jumping back in. I think he was hoping I'd be gone the next time he surfaced. Eventually, I was.

Maxwell Falls

In late April, two friends from when I lived in DC came to visit Colorado. To give them a sample of the state's wonders, we went just past Evergreen to Maxwell Falls for a leisurely but still soggy hike through Arapahoe National Forest.

Back to White Sands

The first weekend of April, I cleared a few days to re-visit Alamogordo, New Mexico. I wanted to go back to White Sands National Monument.

White Sands elicits a sensation like no other place. Nowhere else does the sky have as broad a canvas on which dash and swirl clouds and sunbeams. The ivory landscape gently bends and curves, accentuated by subtle shadows cut by the wind and surrounded by a jagged horizon of dark mountains. Add in solitude and the overall effect is something not quite real but rather as if in a dream.

On the way there, I stopped in Las Vegas, New Mexico, where NBC was filming the pilot for a TV show called "Midnight, Texas." Las Vegas is also where numerous other movies, including one of my favorites, "No Country for Old Men," was filmed.

Later on the trip, I hiked North Franklin Mountain, the highest point in Texas' Franklin Mountains, spent an afternoon in El Paso, briefly (for about 15 minutes) crossed America's southern border into Juarez, Mexico, and attempted but failed to summit Sierra Blanca Peak in New Mexico's Sacramento Mountains--there was just too much snow obscuring the trail above 10,000 feet.