I woke up one morning last week disgusted with the fact that I haven’t really been outside of a city block in almost four days. I know, yuck. So I headed off before sunrise to catch some of the great winter morning light on the front range, which I missed by about 10 seconds, also the fact that there were some clouds hanging out over the eastern horizon limited the light to about 45 seconds total! Brushing that off, Malie and I headed west toward Brainard Lake, thinking about what that area looks like in the winter, and I was not disappointed. The road from Ward up to Brainard has a winter closure gate about a mile and a half from the lake itself. From that gate, there are a couple snowshoe trails and a nordic-ski-only trail up to Brainard Lake, and the nordic ski trail continues on up another two miles from there to Lake Isabelle. It was easier to just walk up the road where there wasn’t enough snow to require the snowshoes, and I could avoid the other people as well, since I was in need of some alone-in-the-wilderness time. I reached Brainard Lake in about forty five minutes and was continuing on to the Long Lake trailhead when I spotted what I thought were a cow and bull moose browsing in the willows on the south side of the lake. Not expecting to see much wild life at all, I left my 70-300 lens in the truck, arming my self with only my 18-200. After watching the moose for a while through a measly 200mm, I could see that I wasn’t looking at a cow and bull, but three very large bulls! All of them quite mature, with their great palmated antlers stretching at least sixty inches in width. The wind biting at any exposed skin forced me to move back from the lake shore, into the trees, and on to Long Lake. After another mile and a half, I reached the trailhead to Long Lake. The last time I was at this particular trailhead, my close family and I were beginning the fifteen mile, one-way journey to Monarch Lake, a smaller tail-lake of the enormous Lake Grandby. Here are the images from that journey. The short quarter-mile trip to Long Lake was the only section that required showshoes. I was completely amazed that no one else had broken a trail in the snow from there, it brought to life again my inner explorer to know that I was the first one to tread here for some time. Although it was a nice sunny day in the upper forties down in the city, the wind up at ten thousand feet dropped the temperature below the zero mark. The extremely strong winds prevented me from staying as long as I wanted to. All said, it was a good day outside, with some good photographic results:
