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Mountain Hikingby Harold Sears
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Mt. Sanitas, A Beauty Of A Workout
The trail up the north-south ridge of Mt. Sanitas is well worn. Jagged rocks protrude, but they are worn by years of boot traffic. Walkers climb part way, meditate in the sun, and return. Dog walkers climb until one or the other has had enough. Hikers go to the top and beyond. Joggers rush past, with white iPod wires dangling. There are children and their parents, college students, retired folk, and all ages in between. The dirt is dusty but packed tight. The trail is carved into a trough. There are log steps built into the path, many log steps, up and up, climbing higher — lift, push, lift, push … Well, I thought, we pay money to do this on stair steppers in the gym. The views and smells, textures, and sounds, are much more attractive here. There are rough-laid rock walls along the uphill side of the trail and golden grasses rippling in the breezes down hill and along the flanks of Sunshine Canyon. To the south, open forest spreads out across the north-facing slopes. The trees are not just widely spaced but there are thick stands here and open grassland there. There are soft folded ridges and valleys and a faint social trail winding up one long ridge. A little more to the southeast, Red Rocks reaches up, and beyond that I had a side view of the Flatirons. A raven gave a gravelly caw. I was admiring all this when Meredith asked me if I was finding anything noteworthy. Oh, yes. If one couldn’t find things worth noting, why would you bother to come out here at all? Well, I knew the answer to that one — we’d come out for the exercise, to get the heart rate up and keep it up for so many minutes, to work those muscles. But I do come out here to see and to feel, not to work. We moseyed on.The Sanitas Trail offers climbers’ access, too. Red sandstone cliffs and shelves reach up with green lichen on flat surfaces and white chalk on every outcrop and knob. We noticed that the extent and thickness of the chalk definitely decreased, as we looked higher up the wall. The topmost bumps and ridges were really pretty clean. We climbed ever upward. It looked like the top above us, but no — a false peak, a mere shoulder on the ridge. The back range, the Continental Divide came into view, dusted with new snow. There were stunted and oriental-looking pines growing out of the rocks and wide views over Boulder and the eastern plains. Finally, there was the true peak, a tumbled pile of boulders with an unbroken view to the north. We watched a paraglider swoop and climb in the Front Range updrafts.
Originally published in the
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