Bear Peak and South Boulder Peak

3:00 PM... I'm falling asleep waiting for my planning period to finish. The mid-afternoon snooze instinct is kicking in big time (darn college habits!). In the sinusoidal wave function that has become my motivation to stay awake, I text Nathaniel to see if he would join me for a jaunt up Shadow Canyon after work. The weather report looks good, and sunset is clocked at 7:50 PM. Why not?

This is a great hike and whenever I end up along the Shadow Canyon trail I wonder why I don't drive the extra seven minutes from Chautauqua over to the South Boulder Trailhead more often. Unfortunately, on this trip we didn't have our camera out for the most eventful event of the hike - we saw a HUGE bear. This is not a pun. This is not a joke. It was the size of a T-Rex on steroids. It could have easily broken the mountain in half with a well-placed kapow with its paw. It was massive.

There were wildflowers everywhere on the approach to Shadow Canyon.

If I were a bear, this is where I would roam free too.

This section smelled glorious

After a moment of reasoning between colleagues, we decided it was in our best interest to forgo the bear danger and head up into the mountain abyss. This turned out t be a great decision, since the only other danger we ran into for the remainder of the hike was the impending dark.

The Boulder Boner (Devil's Thumb)

At the Saddle

The view from the top of South Boulder Peak:

Longs Peak

Bear Peak

Green Mountain

Pike Peak in the distance

Snow-covered Indian Peaks Wilderness

Mount Evans Massif

Nathanial looking very pleased.

I am also pleased. Pleased to be eating food.

We decided that either way, we were going to be descending the canyon in the dark.  From the saddle, Bear Peak is only about a third of a mile away. Since we were already there, we decided that we should just go for it. I had personally never seen a sunset from the summit of a mountain, and our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were still waiting in the backpack. A short jaunt across the ridge brought us to our second destination for the evening.

The view from the top of Bear Peak:

The lights of downtown Boulder by twilight. 

Trail gourmet with a brochacho. Always goes down smooth.