Trail report: Skip’s Road, Lake County, Colorado

Nearby town: Leadville, CO
Nearby trails: Halfmoon Creek

Highlights: climbs and descents, elevation, scenery, ruts and whoopdeedos.

Thanks to Skip Gossack for the scribbled map to this trail. It show’s up as “Old Mining Road” on Google Maps, so I’m naming it “Skip’s Road”.  The road will take you from Road 300 near the fish hatchery back to Turquoise Lake Road. It’s about 12 miles long. If you’re having a hard time finding the trail, it goes under the power lines but starts just southwest of the power lines. There is private property on each side of the trail so you will see “no trespassing” signs on the trail sides, making it look conspicuously like a driveway. From the start it gets hardcore very fast, with deep ruts in the road. It’s a very fun road but I would not recommend it for stock vehicles as you need high ground clearance, the ruts are very deep. (At the start of the video you’ll see the ladies on bikes who said “you’re never going to get that jeep up there!”)

This video is Roy Haschenberger driving my hummer. 

   Map to the Trail

Driving Directions

From Leadville, CO, take highway 24 south to Road 300 towards the Fish Hatchery. Just past the fish hatchery, turn left into the only trail available once you pass the first set of houses. If you get to the power lines you’ve gone too far. The trail will meet up with the power lines and follow them up the mountain.

There seems to be a lot of talk about what’s in SharePoint 2010, and a lot of NDA/not NDA stuff flying around. While there’s a lot of confusion on what people under NDA can talk about, there’s a ton of content already published by Microsoft. I’m under NDA for many things, so I probably won’t talk about much SharePoint 2010 until closer to 2010 myself. But if you’re already developing code against SharePoint 2007 (aka WSS 3.0 as well), you may want to peek at the 2010 managed code SDK. It’s public. Keep in mind, according to the SDK itself it isn’t complete, it’s just preliminary documentation on managed code APIs.

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=94afe886-3b20-4bc9-9a0d-acd8cd232c24 

Kudos to Bjorn who’s been writing about this. Check out his blog here for lessons learned from the 2010 SDK. Of course,you’ll also want to check out the numerous Microsoft content on 2010.

After 9 years driving a Celica, it was finally time to get a new car. I picked up a used Hummer H3, and it’s been the funnest car I’ve owned. Here’s some pictures from Slaughterhouse Gulch, just outside of Conifer. (Maps and trail details here, from TrailDamage.com)

I took along some friends with Jeeps, which had some trouble keeping up with the Hummer! :) Not by much, but there was at least one obstacle the Jeeps had to go around that the Hummer just rolled over.

One of the best parts about off-roading is picnics in nowhere. Here’s my daughter on the left, along with lunch with friends.

We’ve also started our son out off-roading (at 2 months), but he’s only been on the tame roads such as Dakan Road. Here’s my wife Sallina with the kids grilling some hot dogs (in the rain!)

Yeah, that guy has a bigger hummer, but you can see by the mud that we’ve had more fun with the H3! I think he was worried about getting it dirty. If we have any more kids, we’re going to have to get the H2 to fit them in!