Day eleven in my “Leaving Loveland” challenge.

Nathan and Cody and I hiked at Devil’s Backbone today. This place is just on the west side of Loveland, miles and miles of trails that connect up with other hiking areas north of here to Fort Collins. Nathan loves to go mountain biking here. One time he killed a rattlesnake that wouldn’t leave the path. Today we only saw birds, grasshoppers, and some mule deer.

Today was a perfect day for hiking here. In the heat of summer it’s scorching, because there is practically no shade to speak of. Today the sun was warming instead of withering. And since it was a Monday, the trail was pretty quiet, unlike the crowds that descend on the weekends.

I’m feeling a bit sick today so we didn’t go as far as we like to. If you continue taking the trail we were on, you’ll gain enough elevation that you can get some beautiful views of the bigger snow-capped mountains. (Or if you take the shorter Keyhole trail, you get those views much more quickly but you’re actually right at the Backbone formation so you can’t see it like you can in these pictures.) If you look closely at the photo above, off to the right behind the foothills you can see one snowy peak peeking out.