It's been more than a few weeks since we've been hiking, which is uncommon for us. In fact, it's been 7 weeks... But Katie got pneumonia, which crushed her ability to do any kind of exercising that required heavy breathing, like hiking. So to ease her (and me) back into it, we choose a short hike to Roosevelt Ridge. It's less than an hour from our house and not a popular hiking location. There were several hunters in the area that we could hear shooting every so often, but otherwise the hike was peaceful. We didn't see a single person on the hike which was an added bonus, but the scenery wasn't that great. We didn't make it to the summit of Roosevelt Ridge, which there isn't a real trail to get to, but since we've summited that before we knew the views weren't worth it.

Based on the hiking experience of last weekend, we decided to do something easy again this week. We wanted to do something in the Boulder area so we could stop by Celestial Seasonings to get a some Sweet Harvest Pumpkin tea for me that I've been craving for a little while now. Our original plan was to go into Chautauqua or NCAR, but neither of those sounded exciting. We remembered the hike to Sugarloaf Mountain that started at the Switzerland Trail when we hiked Bald Mountain a few years back. We haven't done this hike yet because the Hike to Sugarloaf Mountain isn't very difficult, but that's exactly what we were looking for this weekend.

Driving up to the trailhead, this hike didn't look very exciting. It was an exposed hike that didn't seem to have great views. But that assumption was wrong. As soon as we started hiking we started to get great views of the surrounding mountains and the city of Boulder. It was a little windy because of how exposed it was, but it was a brisk cold wind that didn't cut too deep and wasn't constant. There were a few inches of snow on the ground making this a snowy hike without being difficult (we didn't even need spikes with how little snow there was). It ended up being a really fun hike reminding us of fun winter hiking. We can't wait to do some real winter snowshoeing!