Climbing Round Mountain.

Twila said, "Let's go climb Round Mountain."

"What's this?", I wondered. "Why is she using the words 'climb' and 'mountain' in the same sentence while speaking to me?"

So we put on our hiking clothes and boots and headed to the Round Mountain trailhead. There were several things that sounded more appealing to me at the time, but Twila wants to climb Pikes Peak in July, and I knew I had to start getting in shape sometime. Besides, how hard could it be? It's a Rocky Mountain, sure, but only 30 minutes from our house, and it doesn't look that big.

Our first act after parking at the trailhead was to start removing clothes. We'd dressed for moderate cold, but it was sunny and 70 degrees. Then off we went.

My exercise routine since last year when we went to NY has consisted entirely of climbing the stairs to my Tarrytown office. Unless you count walking to and from the car. I didn't feel like I was in really bad shape, though, because I went up and down those stairs a lot, and I survived the hike we took a couple of weeks ago while staying at the Stanley Hotel.

The guidebook says the first 0.1 mile of the hike is "moderate". They should change that to "inhumanly grueling", IMO. It felt like walking up a wall, and it was unrelenting. We'd been on the trail for 10 minutes and I was already regretting it. After a while there were some level sections, though, and I managed to keep plodding along. Twila remained chipper.

I was glad I'd taken off my fleece vest. By then I'd unzipped my jacket all the way and was still perspiring. It felt like a mild summer day.

On a fairly level part of the trail I heard a grasshopper, but when I looked it was actually a rattlesnake. It's a good thing rattlesnakes have rattles, because if they were silentsnakes, a lot more people would be bitten. I jumped back. We had to figure out how to get by the medium-sized snake, who was right on the edge of the trail, and apparently not in a very good mood. On the other side of the trail was a drop-off. We threw a couple of sticks in the snake's direction, but it just ducked. Fortunately, though, the sticks blocked part of its view of the trail, so we scampered by on the edge of the drop-off.

We continued to climb, climb, climb. I told Twila that my cellphone was in my jacket pocket, in case she had to call 911. She thought I told her because of rattlesnakes, but I wanted her to know in case I went down like a sack of beans. Climbing a mountain after almost a year of inactivity sounded risky to me, considering everything.

We'd started at 5600'. When we'd gone 2.5 miles and our altimeter read 7250' we Googlized Round Mountain to see how long the trail was. It's 4.9 miles to the top, so we decided to turn back.

It was chillier going down. I zipped my jacket again. The sky got gray. Then it started to snow. Colorado - a surprise a second.

On the way back we didn't see the sticks we'd thrown at the rattler. On the plus side, we didn't see the rattler, either.