A Betty Bear Christmas
Four years in a row now Anna-Lisa and I have kept up the tradition of visiting a hut on or around Christmas. It’s a seemingly fitting thing to do given the quaint, festive nature of spending a night or two in a small log cabin deep in the Colorado backcountry. This year we decided to head to the Betty Bear Hut west of Hagerman Pass, best accessed via Ruedi Reservoir to the east of Basalt. The Betty Bear Hut is tucked away on the north side of the Fryingpan River valley only about 5 miles west of Turquoise Lake, but the Continental Divide and Hagerman Pass separate the two preventing easy access to Betty Bear from Leadville. 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. 
I reached the trailhead from Big Pine in early afternoon, stowed my extra food in one of the bear boxes, and made the hike on the trail from the backpacker lot. This trail is more scenic than hiking the road, but I can’t think that it is necessarily any faster, as you have to gain maybe a couple hundred feet as the path winds across the hillside, only to drop it all to reach the creek, where the trail splits. On my way out, I took the road. 