Dan & Annie's
Summer Adventure 2006

August 24^th, 2006:

What is wrong with us?

We got out of the woods at 3pm Tuesday afternoon, dirty, sore, and tired. We went in again at 7am Thursday.

We are climbing to the summit of Mt. Ida, 12,880 feet above sea level, in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Here it is from many miles away:

We started at an elevation of 10,700 feet. There was frost on the ground. The ranger had told us it was an un-maintained trail,

but enough people use it that we wouldn’t have any trouble. Not true. We couldn’t even find where the trail started, so after an

hour of fruitless searching and backtracking, we finally set off bushwhacking straight up the mountainside.

Almost immediately we walked straight into a huge bull elk, who had been bedded-down on the mountainside above us, watching us,

and we walked right into him. He stood up and stared at us as we clambered up the steep hillside. We thought it was a moose at first,

he was so big. He didn’t want to move, but we were so frustrated at that point that we weren’t backing down either, and he finally turned

around and headed off. In the next five minutes we came upon two more. After this you should have heard us singing at the top of our

lungs as we attempted to alert every animal for a mile around of our presence. (“Movin’ on Up”, the Jefferson’s theme song, never sounded so bad!)

After an hour of climbing we finally broke through out of the trees,

and shortly thereafter encountered the trail we had been searching for.

From here all the way to the summit was above tree line, and as we were hiking along the Continental Divide that means that

at any time we could look down to our right towards the Pacific Ocean, or over the ridge to our left towards the Atlantic. 

It got steeper and rockier as we approached the summit:

Throughout this trip we’ve been pushing ourselves to climb higher and higher,

and while we’ve been sucking wind on every hike we’ve been on, this one to

12,880’ was the toughest. The views from the top though were worth the effort,

and as an added bonus we saw our first snowflakes of the season up here.

Going down was of course much easier and quicker than going up, and we got back to

the camper at 3pm. Time enough to find a campground, cook dinner, and be in bed by 6:30. 

That’s all for now,

Dan & Annie

August 24^th, 2006

PS. There was one more thing we did today: We called the U.S. District Attorney for the State of Wyoming to plea bargain our antler case.

End result: pay a fine of $275 and we don’t have to return for our court date in December. We wrote the check.