A Tumbling Pace

Yesterday April and I dropped Renee off for a month at Cheley Camp.  After saying goodbye to Renee, April and her bf Shaun headed off for a week of climbing the Nose of El Cap in Yosemite (good luck to them!) and I headed to downtown Estes to my favorite coffee shop so far in the world, Kind Coffee shop.  I sat my ass down and did some work.  Come evening time I headed out to the Lumpy Ridge trailhead and ran northwest on the Black Canyon trail towards Lawn Lake, the signs saying it was a 9.6 miles to the lake, a distance which was perfect for me.  Very soon I came upon a sign that immediately filled me with a great feeling:

Yes, summer is here!  I love this place!    Running this direction on the Black Canyon trail involves a lot of climbing of course but it was surprisingly runnable for the most part.  The section after the initial climb out of Lumpy Ridge and past the turn off for McGregor mountain was particularly beautiful single track.  Then there was a lot more work to make it the final push to the junction with the Lawn Lake trailhead trail.  With about 300 meters to go I almost gave up losing the trail in a snowfield.  But I made myself find the trail because in mountain running it’s kind of silly to work really hard for 2 hours and come just short of rewards like these:

As you can see from the photos the sun was low  so instead of push another .6 miles to Lawn lake I turned around here and ran back the 9 miles to the Lumpy Ridge trailhead finishing in the dark.  After standing in the Thompson River for a few minutes to cool the fire in my running legs, the Lucky Cantina had one more reward: