Hiking Durango Style

Even when we're on "vacation," we still like to go hiking.  And hiking with friends is even more fun.  So we headed to Lake Haviland north of Durango, and hiked the Wagon Trace Trail.  It's a four-mile loop hike, and Denisa loves to hike loops. It also has some strange-shaped trees, and Mark loves to climb trees.

Bonus--there's even a waterfall on this hike!  You can just follow your ears to find the water rushing down the mountain.

There are rocks to climb, and Steven said this waterfall was his favorite part of vacation.

But where there are waterfalls, there is usually water to cross. Connie did not mention this as her favorite part of vacation.  We do a lot of these crossings, but Mark knows better than to be filming instead of helping Denisa across.  So this was his only opportunity to take pictures of a female crossing a creek.

Besides visiting Lake Haviland, we also visited Durango Mountain resort for a hike.  Actually we were there for the "Walk with a Naturalist," but we checked out the other summer activities at the resort.  They had bungee trampolining, as well as the castle jumper that the children were enjoying.

They also had a climbing wall, a ropes course, and the new water runners (which includes running inside a clear ball on the water).

We also saw the new zip-line, gold panning, and miniature golf that we didn't photograph.  But we did get a good shot of the alpine slide that makes its way down the ski slope.

All of those activities cost $10-15 each, and most are designed for children.  But for free you can sit in the plaza area enjoying the beautiful baskets of flowers in the cool mountain air. 

But we were here for the nature walk, and were excited that it included a ride on the chair lift up the mountain.  We've ridden many of these while snow skiing, but this was the first time to get a green view from the lift.  The only white on this ride were the fields of mountain daisies under the chair lift. 

We thought these flowers were pretty on the ride up, until the naturalist explained that those daisies were non-native obnoxious weeds.  They excrete a toxin that will kill all the other wildflowers in their vicinity.  Sure enough, we found that where we found daisies, there were no other wildflowers.  But they still make for a pretty mountain picture.

We also found wild columbines, one of Denisa's favorite mountain wildflowers. Since we are living in Colorado now, we also know that these are the official state flower.

She's also a fan of wildflowers called paintbrushes, but we usually see them in varying shades of orange.  Today we saw these beautiful rose-colored paintbrushes that she had to photograph.  More information from the naturalist:  the rose-colored "flowers" are actually just colored leaves.  The miniscule flower is actually inside all those beautiful leaves.

When we started this hike, the clouds were rolling in and it was obvious that it was going to rain.  The hike leader knew that the chair lift would be shutting down soon because of the storm, so she gave everyone the option of immediately riding the lift back down to the resort.

She was more than a little surprised when every one of us opted for the two-mile hike down the mountain in the rain.  It was our first experience of walking down a ski run.  We are happy to report that we didn't fall even once as we made our way down this blue ski run named "Diggler."

We are not so happy to report that it did start raining about a mile into our nature hike.  We didn't get much nature talk as we hurried to the bottom of the mountain and the protection of the buildings in the plaza. It wasn't exactly what we had planned, but it was still another great hike Durango style.