Windy Hike to Stone Mountain

It's been too long since we hiked last. But we haven't had many opportunities to go hiking this month due to the weather, Katie getting a cold, and work schedules. This is only our second hike this month, but that's twice the number that we did in this month last year, so I guess it's not that bad.

But even though the weather was forecasted to be horrible this weekend we knew we had to get out since it had been 3 weeks since our last hike. So this week's hike was to Stone Mountain, which is just outside of Loveland. By staying closer to the city (and lower in altitude), the hike was considerably warmer than if we went all the way into Rocky. By "considerably warmer", I mean that the temperatures were above freezing when you don't account for the wind chill. With the wind chill, there were a couple of areas along the hike that were miserable, including the summit with gusting winds that almost knocked me over a few times. But the views were decent (considering our low altitude) and worth the hike.

Other than the views, the lack of people made this a good hike for both of us. There were two other cars in the parking lot when we started. One person went on a different trail and we never encountered them. The other car was a couple around the same age as us that started hiking at the same time. We leap-frogged a few times on the trail with this other couple during the hike, but we were in front of them for the majority of the hike and we stayed out of each other's way. We were breaking the trail from the snowfall from the night before which meant that we were the first ones to the summit for the day which is a special accomplishment having the first view of the day. But since we hike to be out in nature away from people, the lack of people on this trail was fantastic.

This is the second time that we've done this hike, but Katie didn't finish it the first time we hiked it in 2020. But we were both determined this time since we haven't hiked in a while. The hike itself is a moderate hike, but the majority of the elevation gain is in the first half of the hike which makes this a killer hike. By the time we were 2 miles from the trailhead on the way back we were both ready to be done, but to be fair, that's pretty typical for most of our hikes.