It was Tuesday night, Wendy and I are hanging out in our condo near school and the conversation went something like this: "Hey Wendy, do you want to hike and ski Timp this week?" Her reply was, "Ok." She's always been a trooper.

So the decision was made to hike up to Emerald Lake, spend the night, hike and ski the glacier the next day, and hike back down. We had most of the equipment, rented some crampons, but since this was one of our first backcountry trips, we neglected to bring beacons, probes, and shovels. Big omissions in hindsight, but we were lucky the snowpack was very stable.

We left on a Friday morning and started hiking from the Aspen Grove side of the mountain. The hike up to Emerald Lake took about 4.5 hours. The weather was kind of poor, and it rained a bit and we experienced some marble-sized hail on the hike up. But the good thing was the cool temperatures kept the snow firm, so we didn't slip as much going across the snowfields while carrying 40 lb packs (ugh). Luckily, we got to the shelter at Emerald Lake just as it started pouring rain and hail. We camped in the shelter that night, and it got pretty cold because the lake was frozen when we woke up the next morning to clear skies. We then hiked and skied the glacier and started hiking down. It was a warm day, but the weather turned on us again. I heard later on that day that it had even snowed at the peak of Timp, but we were already near the base, so it was just rain. It would have been fun to be in the snow storm at the peak...just imagine, snowstorms in June!