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Tag: liberty cap

Colorado National Monument Traverse II

The Monument from Top to Bottom | Black Ridge Loop
Saturday & Sunday, March 28-29, 2015

After completing a traverse across the face of the Colorado National Monument last year I decided that I wanted to put together a longer loop through the Monument to hike this year. The route I strung together begins at the Kodels Canyon trailhead outside of the Monument near Fruita and climbs up the historic Fruita Dugway trail where it connects with the Black Ridge Trail. The Black Ridge trail is the highest trail in the Colorado National Monument topping out at just over 6,700 feet. Since the trailhead is at about 4,700 feet, this route ascends over 2,000 feet of elevation gain while climbing from the lower part of the Monument to the higher part. After following the Black Ridge Trail to it’s end at the Upper Liberty Cap trailhead we would then follow the entire Liberty Cap trail back down to the Wildwood trailhead. Since this route is about 18 miles in length, I thought it would make a nice overnight backpacking trip so that we could take our time and spend a night in the Monument. I stopped by the Visitor’s Center on Friday and picked up a backcountry camping permit so that we could start the hike bright and early on Saturday morning.

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Monument Mesa Loop

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Since I’ve been busy moving these past couple of weeks, we didn’t stray far from home again this weekend. On Sunday morning we woke up early (even after losing an hour of sleep to daylight savings time) and made our way over to the Colorado National Monument to hike a new loop trail I have wanted to try for a while. Ever since I climbed up Otto’s Staircase and visited Otto’s Bathtub last year, I have wanted to combine those trails into a loop across the top of Monument Mesa.

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Colorado National Monument Traverse

The Face of the Monument | West to East
Saturday, April 12, 2014

Years ago I had the idea of hiking across the face of the Colorado National Monument from one entrance to the other but never seemed to get around to planning the route and following through on the hike because I was usually heading elsewhere for my weekends. A few weeks ago I told Diane about this idea and she was interested in joining me, so I finally got determined to follow through and started planning the route. Much of the route follows existing trails that I have hiked many times in the past, but there were a few segments that I needed to check out and find a few connecting off-trail routes between them. Over the past few weeks I have gone out a few times after work and scouted these segments to come up with the complete route.

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Ute Canyon Trail

Sunday, March 23, 2014

After a rainy Saturday, Diane and I headed up to the Colorado National Monument on Sunday to get in a little hiking close to home. It’s been a few years since I’ve hiked down Ute Canyon so we decided to make that our destination for the day. Since I wanted to hike the whole trail from top to bottom we left my Jeep at the lower trailhead and then drove up to the upper trailhead in Diane’s car. When we dropped off my Jeep at the Wildwood Trailhead we found the parking lot full and had to park along the road. There were a lot of people hiking up to Liberty Cap today and I’m glad we weren’t one of them. We didn’t see anyone else in Ute Canyon all afternoon, which was nice.

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Liberty Cap

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Yesterday morning Amanda and I headed to the Colorado National Monument to hike the full Liberty Cap Trail. I have hiked it from the bottom before, which is a shorter, but steeper hike. This time I wanted to start from Rim Rock Drive and hike across Monument Mesa to Liberty Cap, and then finish off the trail to the bottom. The full trail was about 7 miles in length and took us about 4 hours to complete. Here’s a couple of pictures I took along the way.

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