Getting High: A Road Trip Through the Rockies by Dick Cooper
My wife, Pat, and I aren’t exercise wimps. We work out regularly at the St. Michaels Y, pushing ourselves into a cardio sweat almost every day of the week. But during our recent trip through the Rockies, we were quickly winded just walking through a parking lot. Of course, it was the parking lot at the base of Bear Lake, a pristine, forest-ringed body of water 9,450 feet above sea level. “Why does it feel like everywhere we walk, it’s up hill?” Pat asks as we near the first overlook on the trail
that winds its way around the edge of the lake. “Because it is,” I puff back, sitting down on a welcoming bench made from a split tree trunk. We were near the end of our first day in the mountains on our June driving tour around central Colorado and ~ between gasps for air ~ were humbled by the raw beauty of our surroundings. Being flatlanders from the Eastern Shore, where the highest elevation near our home is the crest of the Oak Creek Bridge on the St. Michaels Road, we were tra-
Bear Lake with Hallett Peak in the distance. 25