9: Colden
The scheduling for our trip to Colden was plagued with uncooperative weather conditions. We had to keep moving the day forward until we had a dry day. This Friday and Saturday showed it would be dry and the clouds starting to clear up around 11:00am on Friday. The report showed gales of 20-40mph on both days at the summit with wind chills in the single digits Farenheit. I like keeping the weekends for family activities and I was dreading dealing with parking on such a beautiful Saturday, so I decided to toss the dice and hope that the clouds would be cleared up when I reached the summit. It started to drizzle on our way north on I87 and hadn't let up when we arrived at the Loj. It was disappointing. I'd only been paying attention to the summit weather and hadn't considered that "cloudy" on the summit might mean "precipitation" on the ground. In retrospect, this should have been a consideration. I hadn't fully researched an alternative hike (again) so...