Quick Hike to Coyote Ridge

Having gotten back from our tip in pretty good shape from all the walking, we wanted to get out this weekend to try and retain our leg muscles. Katie was meeting up with a friend at 11, so we knew that we had to do something relatively close in order to make it back in time.

We've done this hike a dozen times, but it's a good one because it's a 10-minute drive from our house, it's pretty low in elevation gain (only 600 feet), but still a decent distance (4 miles). We got to the trailhead around 7:30, and it was already in the 70-degree temperatures. The temperature rose about 10 degrees during the hike, which made this a really hot hike. Luckily there was a slight breeze at the top of each ridge that we passed which helped with the heat.

About a mile into the hike, I saw a Garter snake in the bushes that ran right in front of us (and Katie even stepped on it by accident). We haven't had to worry about snakes on any of our other hikes because it was too early, but now that we're getting into the heat of the summer that's something that we need to pay attention to. That garter snake put us on high alert and that was good since there was a rattlesnake just 20 feet from where we saw the garter snake. The rattlesnake was coiled up in the middle of the path and started rattling at me right when I saw it, and I stopped and took a few steps back and it calmed down. Despite having hiked almost 300 hours in Colorado and over 500 miles, this is the first rattlesnake that I've ever seen in Colorado. I attribute that to the fact that I'm not usually hiking at low elevations like this hike. Most of the hikes I go on are above 8,000 feet which is not rattlesnake territory.