Lost Lake, Part I

Made plans to take a photo trip to Lost Lake today. "Photo trip" is really a euphemism for "by myself," since neither dogs nor kids enjoy sitting still while I'm fussing with aperture settings and lenses.

As a bonus we had the total lunar eclipse this morning, so I got up extra early to shoot it on the way. Unfortunately, the mountains proved to be a terrible inconvenience. Their height caused the moon to dip below the horizon before the eclipse was full -- even from the top of Lookout Mountain. So Plan B became shooting the sunrise instead. :)

Some nice alpenglow to the west.

Denver's infamous "brown cloud" does at least give the dawn sky some interesting color.

The trailhead is roughly a mile drive up a road that's 4WD-only. This is as far as I got -- just a tenth of a mile. So that added about a couple of miles to the round-trip hiking distance.

Then again, any hike where you walk for half a mile then see a sign saying the trailhead is another half a mile away is probably a pretty good hike.

This bridge looked like an old sled with runners to me.

The combination of running water and ice fascinates me, but I haven't figured out how to take really compelling pictures of it yet.

Finally, the trailhead! By the time I got here, I was nearly halfway to the lake already.

Some interesting bark. I wonder what mix of forces caused it to end up in this shape?

The trail only had a couple of steep stretches, and less than 800 feet of elevation gain in all. I rolled the dice and just wore my boots instead of renting snowshoes and fortunately didn't have any problems.

Click here for Part II.