Aspen Vista/Black Canyon Trails

We chose what we thought would be a good trail for today knowing that it was at a higher elevation than Santa Fe - Santa Fe = 7300ft; Aspen Vista Trailhead = 10,000ft. Turns out, that's a big difference!

High elevation view of the Santa Fe Valley at the trailhead for Aspen Vista Trail.

We got some early clues about the trail - that's Frederick wearing his down sweater in near 40 degree temperatures. I'm wearing my winter parka and gloves.

Another clue was that the mountainside was not a bright green from the Aspen trees newly leafing out. And wait, is that snow on the mountainside?

We hiked for about a mile on a perfectly fine trail until we hit the snow-line. We've hiked on snow-covered trail before and it is not to our liking. What was supposed to be a seven-mile hike turned out to be only 2-miles as we retraced our steps to the trailhead and car.

Back closer to Santa Fe we found a short trail not too far from where we hiked earlier this week. Black Canyon was nothing exceptional, but it gave us our steps.

Today's combined hikes:

Length - 4 miles

Duration - 2 hours, 4 minutes (including lunch)

Elevation gain - 810-feet (88 floors on the Fitbit and Fitbit's Satellite Award for a 35,000-floor achievement. Yeah!)