The weather was exceptionally nice for an early March weekend. The temperatures for both Saturday and Sunday hit 70°, so we knew we had to get outside. We originally planned to go hike Bobcat Ridge in West Loveland, but when I looked at the parking lot web cameras at about 11 am, I noticed that the parking lot was empty, suspiciously so. Bobcat ridge doesn't have a lot of parking space, so I wanted to check to make sure that it wasn't too crowded before heading that way. It turns out the trail was closed due to muddy conditions, so we had to figure something else out.

Since this is the first real hike that Katie and I have done this season, we didn't want to do anything too ambitious. We ended up picking the Wapiti trail because it had some good turnaround points that we could choose how far we wanted to go pretty easily. Once we made it 2.5 miles into the trail, we decided to continue on the Ponderosa Loop, a 2.5 mile loop that took us to a scenic overlook of the western mountain range where we sat and ate a late lunch. It was a little windy since the overlook was exposed, but the views were worth it.

The hike ended up being an ambitious 8.32 miles that took us almost 3 and a half hours and nearly 1100 feet in elevation gain.

Needing to get outside from the stay-at-home mandate, Katie and I decided to go for a hike. Originally we planned on just hiking up Coyote Ridge, but the parking lot was packed. We went to the other end of Coyote Ridge trail, which was the Blue Sky Trail. There were only a few parking spots left so we grabbed one and started hiking.

Blue Sky Trail is a great mountain biking trail, so there were several times we almost got ran over, but it was still a nice hike. I'm definitely going to come back here to do some biking over the summer. It had less than 500 feet of elevation gain and we turned back before making it all the way to Coyote Ridge, making out round trip distance four and a quarter miles and taking an hour and a half.