Colorado 2020: Green Mountain

This post continues the retelling of my AmeriCorps service term in Colorado in 2020. The rest of this series can be found here.

The past two workdays – July 20 and 21 – had been full of hiking, which is cardio, and you know how I feel about that. Guess what we did on July 22? Hiked up a mountain.

My AmeriCorps crew and I had a problem. We’d finished our first project too early, and our next one wasn’t ready for us yet. However, we had to do something. Our crew leaders thus had us spend two days hiking around the city of Boulder as training and conditioning.

We piled into our passenger van on the morning of July 22, and drove to a mountain called Green Mountain. This was a surprisingly intense drive for an upper-class city like Boulder, since we had to follow a steep, winding road that was essentially a series of switchbacks.

For better or worse, we survived the drive. We parked our dinosaur of a van on the side of a road near a trailhead, and disembarked. The area where we’d parked was surprisingly lush. There was a sort of “lawn” of short, green grass near the road, which quickly transitioned into an evergreen woodland as we entered the trail.

We followed this narrow, winding, but well-kept trail towards the mountain summit. The views were nice, but since all I had was a cell phone from the 1800s, none of my photos were very good. Being a lowlander, I was also near death the entire time from lack of oxygen, which contributed to the poor quality of the images in this post.

I did get a few chances to catch my breath, though. At one point we stopped to look at the Continental Divide. To be honest, I didn’t know what the Continental Divide was, or what I was supposed to be looking at, but I gathered that it was important. I therefore did my best to look impressed, and to pretend like I knew what everyone was talking about.

As we continued on our hike, something dreadful happened: I began to experience a positive mood. I even began to feel shades of the emotion that some people call “happiness.”

This alarming state of positivity, AKA weakness, nearly overtook me on the summit of Green Mountain. There were excellent views of the surrounding area, and I had to try extra hard to find things to be upset about.

One of those things was that there were people on the summit of Green Mountain. Apparently the Green Mountain hike is a popular one near the city of Boulder, because several groups of people came to the summit to enjoy the views while we were there. I’m used to having trails basically to myself when I hike – probably because I go out during terrible weather – so this concept of having to share was new to me.

We lingered on the summit for a while: taking in the views, enjoying the surroundings, and trying to keep me away from strangers. If my memory serves me well – which it usually doesn’t – we had pleasant encounters with butterflies, dragonflies, and a little lizard on the summit of the mountain.

But as it says in the Book of Duderonomy, one can only linger on top of a mountain for so long before one gets bored. This meant we headed down the mountain after a short rest, hiked to our van, and drove home.

Once we returned home, I was exhausted. We’d done a lot of hiking over the past three days, and I needed a break. So, do you know what we did on July 23? Climbed another mountain.