Capitol to Hell Roaring Loop
For several summers now I’ve headed over to the Elks and pieced together a big wilderness loop of some kind. I’ve always felt if you’re gonna spend all day on your feet whether it’s for training purposes or not, you might as well look for something unique in a cool area to make things more interesting. With its vast network of trails, there are lots of options for these kinds of big days in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. So I decided to check out another loop in the Capitol Peak area of the northern-Elks which had long been on my wish list.
This one is a tad on the obscure side in that I haven’t noticed too many people mention it or run it over the years. One or two trip reports from over a decade ago can be found online, but generally speaking, this linkup doesn’t seem to get as much traffic as some of its more popular siblings (Four Pass, Three Pass, etc). The route goes like this… start at the Capitol Creek TH and follow the ditch trail up to Capitol Lake. Continue up and over the pass north of Capitol Peak… Read more…
Last month Anna-Lisa and I spent a week and a half in Costa Rica. It’s become habit for us to get out of the valley in November and head somewhere warm as a sort of summer encore before the long winter. This time around the trip also marked our 15 year wedding anniversary so we decided to go a bit more all-out than we usually do and splurge on a pair of nice hotels in two very different areas of the country. When it’s just the two of us, even in a tropical climate we try to get outside every day for some physical activity to try to offset the big dinners and Mai Tais. Not to mention it’s just a fun way to explore new areas. This trip was no different and we did a pretty good job of checking out as many trails as we could in the ten days we were there. 