An Amazing Day...Stopped in its Tracks!

Looking down from St. Mary's Glacier

Chris is moving back to England on Wednesday, and I am leaving for Austria on Monday. A few weeks ago, he had promised me a day that we could just hang out together and not call and text other people all day (i.e. Mia, etc...). Friday was the day, and I was really looking forward to it!


We got off to a good start with breakfast at a place called Snooze in Denver. The food was amazing and plentiful, and the atmosphere was unique. It's very city-ish compared to some of our Boulder breakfast favorites. With our stuffed bellies, we headed off from there for the next adventure. Chris didn't know what any of the plans were for the day, other than we were planning to MTB at Buffalo Creek in the afternoon. After a few wrong exits (in no way intentionally trying to keep Chris confused as to where we were going) we were on our way up I-70.

I had heard a lot about St. Mary's Glacier, and you pass the St. Mary's/Alice exit sign every time you head west on I-70 from Denver, but I had never taken the time to go check it out. After a game of "You Can Only Step on Rocks-No Dirt" on the 0.75 mile hike up to the glacier from the road, we were treated to a really amazing little gem of a place here in CO.

The game ended up tied at 1-1 in the end

There is a small lake that sits at the base of the glacier, and the vegetation in the area is diverse and beautiful! The glacier is not large and will probably be gone in the not so distant future, unfortunately.

The St. Mary's Glacier Lake

We hiked up to the edge of the glacier and enjoyed sitting watching the water drip off and form a little stream down the hillside.

The melting glacier

Chris loves to swim in bodies of water (the really cold ones are his favorite!), and he decided we'd be swimming in this glacially fed high alpine lake. We didn't have our swim suits with us, so we hiked around to a mostly out of sight part of the lake and did a little skinny dipping. Man was the water cold! It took a little bit of your breath away with every breath you tried to take. After our brief stint swimming, we decided that drip drying and then sunning ourselves like lizards on the perfect sunning rock would be a fantastic idea. Long after we were dry, we continued to enjoy the sun/beautiful lake/overall amazing place and decided not to go MTBing and just enjoy the afternoon at the glacier instead.

Scoping out the fishies

Funny, funny!

We decided to take the much less traveled (okay, prolly not traveled by many people at all) route around the other side of the lake and back to the glacier. This adventure was great, we did some super easy rock climbing, some scrambling, and some sweet bush whacking to finally arrive again at the glacier.


All along the way, we took our time and "stopped to smell the coffee". We enjoyed the amazing views, the wonderful mountain air, the fact that there was hardly anyone else up there, and most importantly, each others company.

Cool "waves" formed in the melting glacier

Not thinking that it would be possible to be hungry again anytime before Christmas after our morning adventure at Snooze, we were both a little surprised that we were starting to feel hungry. We also (stupidly) hadn't brought water with us, so decided to head back to the car, albeit via a path less traveled (in hind sight, it was probably on private, no trespassing land, but...we'd been picking up litter all day, so they shouldn't complain at all!!). It was really nice to sit and enjoy some bread, cheese, and a fruity Roobios drink in the sun...then the phone rang. :(

Apparently Chris had lied to Mia and told her that he was going bike riding with James and me, not spending the day with me, sans James. I'm not sure how the convo on the phone went, but the ultimate ending was to cut our day short and race home for him to console Mia (who he had forgotten to mention to me is now his gf, great!). In the end, 3.5 hours later, we did end up going to dinner at Sherpa's (original plan), one of my favorite places in Boulder. Unfortunately, my patience with the bullshit had run too thin and my tolerance for the ridiculousness was gone and left me completely unable to put on a smile and try to enjoy the rest of the evening. :( I couldn't even really enjoy my lamb tikka masala, as those damn salty drops kept falling out of my eyes. Annoying at best! Needless to say, I had no desire to have us do any of the rest of the fun things I had wanted to do for the day, as it seemed like a moot point by then.

Pictures can be very deceiving, as it turns out!

So, what started out as a wonderful and amazing day finished off with more heartache and stupid antics than I ever want to deal with again. One can only take so much, as it turns out. My capacity for it all is (I think) amazingly large, but it has finally reached full up!!

That's all folks, sorry for the sad ending to an otherwise amazing day! Enjoy St. Mary's Glacier, if you're ever in the area, it is WELL worth it!!