And The Denver Post’s readers love to dig into those stories. This year, as always, skiing was one of the top topics of discussion, especially Epic Pass sales and a resort ranking. But hiking and camping were also big, especially when it came to Rocky Mountain National Park.

We also had an unusual sighting, literally, in our top 10. But we’ll let you see that for yourself. Here are our 10 most-read outdoor recreation stories of the year, with the number-one story at the end.

Bad drivers in the backcountry are a big problem

The sheriff in San Miguel County called a group of people who slid off Black Bear Pass in their truck “ass clowns,” which is funny. But the problem is real: More and more people, who lack skills or experience or proper maps, are driving on backcountry roads they can’t handle in Colorado — or simply ignoring closures — resulting in more rescues.

First-of-its-kind hiking permit proposed for Blue Lakes

The gorgeous Blue Lakes in the San Juan Mountains near Telluride have become so crowded in recent years that the U.S. Forest Service wants to require permits just to hike there during the day — as well as to camp. The goal of the plan, which would be the first in Colorado of its kind on forest service land, is to reduce the environmental impact of recreation.

Colorado’s oldest chairlift will be retired at age 70

Sunlight Mountain Resort’s Sunlight chairlift began its long life at Aspen in 1954 before being relocated in 1973. Since then, it has faithfully served skiers at Sunlight. The relic of ski history engineering is still safe, but is scheduled to be put out to pasture this spring.

High-alpine lake is one of Colorado’s most spectacular hikes

Nearly 2,500 feet below the summit of Long’s Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park is a beautiful alpine tarn called Chasm Lake. The 4.2 hike to get there is strenuous, but the steep rock walls soaring into the air above the water make it one of the most beautiful payoffs in Colorado.

Another hassle awaits Rocky Mountain National Park visitors

Rocky Mountain National Park has been feeling the heat. Not only will its busiest campground, Moraine Park, be closed into this summer (see below), but visitation continues to soar, resulting in what will likely be a permanent ticketing system. To make things worse, one of its two Estes Park-area entrances, Fall River, was under construction all summer and fall.

Epic Pass prices increase, early bird on sale for 2023-24 season

Vail Resorts announced its early bird prices in March for this season’s Epic Passes — and Denver Post readers wanted to know all about it. Of course they did. The pass, which includes Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, Breckenridge and Crested Butte, is one of the hottest items in Colorado. so the costs, the on-sale dates and every other detail is big news.

Colorado ski resort named the best in North America by website

Magazines, newspapers and websites love to rank things, including ski resorts, and since Colorado has some of the best in the world, they often end up on lists. In March, readers of OnTheSnow, a website, voted Steamboat as North America’s best overall resort.

Campground closure at RMNP could have ripple effect across Colorado

Rocky Mountain National Park’s largest campground, the immensely popular Moraine Park, shut down last summer so it could undergo a major modernization project, meaning 244 fewer sites in the area. That figured to put more pressure on nearby campgrounds in the adjacent and already overloaded national forests. The campground will hopefully reopen in June 2024.

Coloradans may see Northern Lights more often in coming months

Seeing the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, is on a lot of people’s bucket lists. So, how cool would it be to be able to see them from Colorado rather than having to travel to the Arctic? Space weather predictors say there is more of a possibility of that happening in 2024 with increasing solar storm activity — something that happens in an 11-year cycle.

Bigfoot may have been caught on camera from Durango train

In October, a Wyoming couple was looking for elk while riding the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in southwest Colorado when they spotted, well, something that looked like Bigfoot. The story made national news after a video taken by another passenger went viral online. Was it really the famed but elusive cryptid? We’ll let you judge for yourself. See our story, with video, here.

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The founder of Oskar Blues Brewery — and namesake of Dale’s Pale Ale — was already a restaurateur when he decided in 2002 to turn one of his favorite pastimes, homebrewing, into part of his business. The decision worked out, to put it mildly. Oskar Blues grew quickly, acquiring other beer makers and eventually becoming one of the largest craft brewers in the country, with production facilities in three states. Monster Energy bought the company in 2022.

But he wasn’t done there. Katechis, an avid mountain biker, also started his own boutique bike manufacturer, REEB Cycles, to help further his love of riding on dirt roads. Other investments have included a hobby farm in Boulder County and cannabis companies.

So, it’s no surprise that his latest passion, a sport he took up about a year ago, is the impetus for his newest venture, an indoor pickleball club and gathering space in Longmont.

This week, Katechis and business partner Adam Kahn will open 3rd Shot Pickleball, at 20 S. Bowen St. With five courts, it will offer coaching and clinics along with tournament play and — of course — a bar, called the Hidden Pickle, featuring local craft beer and spirits.

“I started this as a pet project thing, because I had fallen in love with pickleball,” said Katechis, who was using the building, which he owns, as a sort of private pickleball club. “After (Kahn and I) met, we hit it off and decided to take a shot at this together.”

Kahn believes indoor courts are part of the future of the rapidly growing game since noise complaints at outdoor courts around the country have caused problems. A Wheat Ridge location of 3rd Shot, which also opens in November, includes 13 indoor courts.

Related: Colorado’s largest indoor pickleball complex will open 13 courts in a space once called Lucky’s

But that’s just the beginning. Katechis and Kahn are thinking of mixing in one of Katechis’ restaurant concepts as well. Although Katechis no longer owns the brewery portion of Oskar Blues, he and his family retained four of the associated restaurants, in Longmont, Lyons, Denver and Colorado Springs. In the past, Oskar Blues has also run food trucks, a hamburger concept called ChuBurger and a Mexican restaurant.

Katechis couldn’t say yet what the food concept will be at 3rd Shot, but it will likely start out as a food trailer before morphing into a potential brick-and-mortar kitchen inside the building.

Eventually, the two would also like to build other co-located courts and restaurants around Colorado and in other states. “As we noticed in Lyons, Oskar Blues became a social hub in town,” Katechis pointed out. “For me, this is very similar to craft beer in that it brings people together.”

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Officially called The Outside Lab at CU Denver, its mission will be to provide a space where faculty, students, Outside editors and entrepreneurs in the outdoors industry can test skiing, running, hiking gear and other outdoors equipment using highly sophisticated machinery.

Outside will use laboratory findings to enhance gear review features across its platforms by introducing objective testing data to augment subjective field tests, while students will gain valuable experience operating in a laboratory setting, the university said.

“They might create the next Gore-Tex,” said Outside chief executive Robin Thurston, a CU Denver grad. “Obviously we already have a very robust outdoor industry, but it creates an opportunity for even more start-ups and outdoor companies to come to Colorado for a whole number of reasons — for brands, for individual entrepreneurs — and ultimately all this will benefit the consumer because they’re going to end up getting better products, more innovative products, better materials, even crash-testing for helmets.

“CU has really taken a visionary position on this, on how to get diverse students into the lab, how to expose the lab to their engineering department, as well as other programs,” he added.

Colorado’s outdoor industry has a $9.6-billion impact on the state’s GDP annually, according to the Colorado Office of Economic Development & International Trade.

The College of Engineering, Design and Computing will manage the lab, which received $200,000 from the Colorado State Outdoor Recreation Grant Program, according to Conor Hall, director of Colorado’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office.

The college already has some testing equipment, according to Dean Martin L. Dunn, but much more is coming. “We’re kind of working on things ranging from behavior of wear of shoes to behavior of skis, helmets, even an area we’re soon going to be ramping up, (testing) permeability and behavior of garments,” Dunn said.

“Being able to exercise our engineering chops on really cool products that students will be able to see in a few months, when they’re at the ski lift seeing a pair of skis and saying, ‘Hey, I worked on those skis in the lab,'” he added.

The seed of the idea came from Thurston, who was chief digital officer at Under Armour, a sportswear company, from 2013-16.

“We had a very robust, amazing innovation lab,” Thurston recalled. “It was everything from 3D printing to reliability testing to fabric testing in heat and cold rooms. Having had the experience of seeing an innovation lab like that, I felt like there was a big opportunity to have something that was more open to the industry as a whole, a place where start-up founders could potentially come and test their products, a place for Outside to do more in-depth reviews similar to a Consumer Reports — which does a lot of lab testing on products — but in the outdoor category. CU Denver was just the perfect partner for that.”

For example, Outside gear guru Will Taylor foresees being able to measure the flex and torsional stiffness of skis with a machine that can test a lot of skis in a short period of time. That data can be combined with subjective on-mountain testing conducted by teams of Outside’s expert skiers, which is how skis have been tested for gear reviews for decades.

“You’re bringing those two things together to create very compelling results for our readership,” Taylor said. “We can be like, ‘OK, we felt this ski flex this way on the mountain. We think it compares with this other ski in this way.’ Now we’re going to be able to go to the lab and test that and see if we’re right. Our goal is to give the best objective gear reviews that we can. This takes us light years ahead of where we were before.”

Another machine will be able to test the durability of hiking boots, trail running shoes and road running shoes by simulating the human gait in hiking and running over hundreds of miles in a matter of days to identify the most durable footwear.

“You can take measurements of how the midsole has been affected, how the traction on the bottom has been affected, whether things are wearing evenly or not,” Taylor said.

Students will benefit by gaining experience that is hard to get elsewhere, preparing them for jobs at outdoors industry giants such as Patagonia and VF, a Denver-based outdoors company that includes The North Face, JanSport, Timberland, Eastpak, Smartwool and Vans.

“The student part of it is super cool,” Taylor said. “Engineers that I’ve talked to, these are outdoors people that are like, ‘We wish we had this opportunity when we were in college, that we could touch these machines, work with them, instead of having to get on-the-job training.’ We’re really hoping we can provide a well-trained workforce for people like VF, or maybe it’s one person who’s building bike frames and can use someone who knows how to use the equipment so they can test that stuff. There’s a multitude of ways a student with that training could go into the work force.”

Facilitating the lab at CU Denver fits with the mission of the state’s Outdoor Recreation Industry Office to attract outdoor industry players to Colorado. The grant from the state will be used largely for purchasing more testing equipment.

“In this industry, the big players — the VFs and Patagonias of the world — have their own gear testing labs, but very few others do,” Hall said. “They don’t have the size and economies of scale to make that practical. It’s a great opportunity for our industry here, and a really attractive thing for companies looking to come to Colorado. We see the value in this, and we’re going to do everything we can to help this effort succeed.”

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Colorado Parks and Wildlife is considering closing the boat ramp in the park once a week to motorized vessels in future summers, something it has also done at Highline State Park. Both Paonia and Highline state parks are located on Colorado’s Western Slope.

Related: 5 serene Colorado lakes to explore with your paddleboard

“The closure would allow us to focus our staff on other activities and increase the user experience across the park,” said Jed Potter, senior ranger with the agency, in a statement.

The goal of going “wakeless” is so that “non-motorized boaters can feel a bit safer out in the open water,” added park manager Scott Rist in the same statement.

And Tuesdays are a good day for it as CPW reports that Paonia State Park has had “two or fewer motorized boats launched on 92% of Tuesdays the last three years.” (An exception to the Tuesday closures would be made for holidays, like the Fourth of July, if they fall on that day.)

Highline State Park implemented Wakeless Wednesdays in 2021, and it has since become the busiest day of the year, according to The Daily Sentinel newspaper in Grand Junction.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife is taking public feedback on the wakeless Tuesday idea (send an email to crawford.park@state.co.us by Nov. 25). The 1.523-acre state park is 17 miles northeast of Paonia in Gunnison County, and is popular with campers and wildlife watchers.

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A-Basin officials announced Friday that the 77-year-old area nicknamed “The Legend” will open on Sunday, which will mark the 11th time in 13 years that it beat its local rivals to become the first Front Range area open for the season. It also tied for opening day honors with Loveland in 2015. Wolf Creek in southern Colorado was the first in the state to open in 2020 and 2021.

Related: Here’s when every Colorado ski resort plans to open for the 2023-24 season

“There is nothing I enjoy more than seeing people having fun skiing and riding on the hill,” said Alan Henceroth, the area’s chief operating officer. “Our team is incredibly excited to get Arapahoe Basin open and starting the fun.”

Keystone, Arapahoe Basin and Loveland opened Nov. 6-11 in 2020, but Wolf Creek opened on Oct. 28 that year to preserve Colorado’s October streak. Last year Arapahoe Basin opened on Oct. 23, followed by Keystone on Oct. 28 and Loveland on Nov. 3.

It may take a few more days for Keystone and Loveland to get open, but they will be aided by cold temperatures and snowfall this weekend. Widespread mountain communities will receive snow this weekend, and in some locations, accumulation could be significant.

Joel Gratz, founding meteorologist at OpenSnow.com, expects 10-15 inches favoring the northern and central mountains beginning Friday at midnight and extending through midday Sunday with narrow bands of “intense” snow.

“The jet stream will linger over central Colorado for a solid 24 hours,” Gratz said. “This fast-moving ‘river of air’ at around 35,000 feet, about where commercial airplanes fly, is what will create these narrow bands. While we cannot be certain exactly where the most intense snow will fall, knowing that the jet stream will be overhead explains why the forecast models are all generating deep snow totals in the same general area.”

Gratz said the most significant snowfall should occur along a line from southwest to northeast including Sunlight, Snowmass, Aspen, most of the Interstate 70 mountains from Beaver Creek to Winter Park, and possibly extending to Eldora.

“Snow amounts of 20-plus inches are possible for locations that are lucky and happen to be under the more intense bands for the longest period of time,” Gratz said. “Snowfall rates could peak at 2-3 inches per hour.”

Temperatures through Tuesday night also should allow for productive snowmaking operations as well.

“As we look into the coming weekend, our team is really excited to see longer, sustained temperature windows for snowmaking,” Keystone spokesman Max Winter said. “The forecasts can change on a dime, so it is really hard for us to make any certain predictions about our opening timeline and whether we’ll be skiing before the end of the month, but you can rest assured if there’s snow to be made, we’ll be making it. With around-the-clock, 24-hour snowmaking, we can create enough snow to open our mountain in just two to three days.”

Snowmaking crews at Loveland are eagerly awaiting this weekend’s cold temperatures and natural snowfall as well, according to spokesman John Sellers.

“The ski area will look a lot different Monday morning,” Sellers said, conceding that an October opening for Loveland may not be in the offing this year. “We always work hard to open as soon as we can, but we need help from Mother Nature to get the season started. She always comes through, but it just took a little bit longer. We are as excited as everyone else to start the season and are working hard to get open as soon as possible.”

Starting Sunday, A-Basin will operate seven days a week from 8:30 until 4 p.m. on weekends, and it will open for weekday skiing at 9 a.m. Skiing and riding on opening day will happen on the High Noon trail from mid-mountain to the base. A Halloween band will play from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m., and there will be a costume contest.

The ticket window price will be $129. Skiers and riders must purchase online in advance.

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“She said she’d gotten to one of the harder spots and just couldn’t figure out where to go, so she turned around,” said Atkins, a member of the Alpine Rescue Team, a volunteer search-and-rescue group that conducts missions in Clear Creek, Jefferson and Gilpin counties.

“I asked her if she was using an app, and she said, ‘Yes, I was using AllTrails,’” he continued. “She said all the reviews were really positive about the climb, so she figured with three fourteeners under her belt that she could do it. Her ambitions just exceeded her experience.”

Atkins wasn’t surprised. The popular hiking app, with its digital trail maps and user-generated reviews, is the go-to source for many Colorado hikers. But it doesn’t provide a lot of detail in describing complicated climbs like the Kelso Ridge, which is visible from Interstate 70, five miles west of Silver Plume. He and the Alpine Rescue Team had been there before, responding to other climbers who’d gotten stuck on the route while using trail apps and needed to be guided out.

Public land managers across the country are discovering the shortcomings of crowdsourced apps like AllTrails and Gaia GPS, which show where trails are on digital maps, and provide user-generated feedback and reviews, but leave hikers wanting for specific route details. There are other issues, as well, such as leading hikers to trails that are closed or cross private land.

It has become enough of a concern, in fact, that government agencies like the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have been meeting with these companies and others twice a month for the past two years to talk about solutions.

“It is an issue that we’ve been dealing with in the forest service for a little while now, trying to better understand how we can address it,” said Chad Schneckenburger, trails manager for the Rocky Mountain Region of the USFS. “For us, it’s really a management challenge. All those apps are crowdsourced. It’s essentially user-generated information.”

For Atkins, the issue on trails like the one on Kelso Ridge is with users not understanding the limitations of the apps, especially inexperienced hikers.

“It’s not an AllTrails issue per se,” he said. “Even if she’d had a regular topo map, it would tell her where to go, but it doesn’t tell her how to get through the terrain. The limitations are not necessarily with the apps, they’re in people’s abilities to perceive the terrain around them.”

The working group created to improve the data behind trail apps was spearheaded by Maggie Cawley, the executive director of OpenStreetMap US, the U.S. chapter of an international nonprofit that is a primary source for AllTrails and other apps. OpenStreetMap, which is built with crowdsourced information, is sometimes called the Wikipedia of maps.

Cawley was contacted two years ago by Keri Nelson, then a National Park Service backcountry coordinator for southeast Utah who reached out to report problems caused by trail apps that she was seeing in Canyonlands National Park near Moab. Cawley asked Nelson to give a presentation to a virtual meeting of folks in the mapping community hosted by OpenStreetMap US.

“What we were seeing in the park was, people would add trails or trail systems that aren’t official designated park trails, but they looked like it on the (trails app) map,” said Nelson, now an outdoor recreation planner for the Bureau of Land Management in Moab. “That was causing problems, because people would see these trails, or this data on a map platform, that looked like they were trails. When you see it on a map, a lot of us would expect on the ground that there’s going to be a well-defined, maintained trail there, which often was not the case with these user-added trails.”

Schneckenburger was seeing similar things happening in the forest service’s Rocky Mountain region, which includes 17 national forests and seven national grasslands in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota.

“The issue we were seeing from a management perspective was, when trails information was being reflected on a lot of these third-party apps, there wasn’t anything to distinguish between what is an official forest service system route that we maintain — that we would publish on our own maps — versus user-created social trails,” said Schneckenburger, whose office is in Lakewood. “They were being displayed all the same on a lot of these apps.”

Resource impacts and intrusions onto private land aren’t the only issues. There are visitor safety concerns, too.

“Not everyone who visits national parks is well-versed or experienced in backcountry travel,” Nelson said. “They are relying on these maps to give them data that is supposed to be reliable, which is not necessarily the case.”

After Nelson finished her presentation, Cawley floated the idea of creating the working group to tackle the problem. “I asked everybody in that meeting, ‘Would you want to meet again and see how we can help support this? We need AllTrails in the room. We need the forest service, the national parks, and we need the mappers.’ People said yes, and we’ve been meeting twice a month for two years.”

One goal is to create mechanisms to give land management agencies greater ability to correct misinformation or provide timely updates, such as temporary trail closures.

“We just can’t control what data comes on these private apps,” Schneckenburger said. “We certainly encourage people to use those apps, because they provide a good value to people. I use them myself. We just want to make sure that what’s being displayed is accurate.”

Collaboration is already occurring, according to Meaghan Praznik, a spokeswoman for AllTrails.

“Our trails are developed using many different sources including satellite imagery, country-specific maps, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap data, AllTrails user-contributed recordings, comments and edits, and extensive research conducted by our in-house trail data integrity team,” Praznik explained via email. “Our team also works closely with parks and land managers to curate the routes we provide users. We apply our proprietary trail-clustering algorithms on top of these different inputs, and we are continually improving our trail quality via machine learning.”

Drew Hildner, a spokesman for the Colorado Search and Rescue Association as well as the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, recalls an incident when a woman using a trail app went for a trail run she thought would take three to four hours. She was on the trail for 14.

“We were called out on this rescue at about 9 p.m.” Hildner said. “We knew she was an ultrarunner, and from a search standpoint, that leaves a very large search area for us to cover. Fortunately, just as the search was starting up, she got back to her car after a three times longer day than she had planned. She had quite an adventure, and wasn’t certain that she was going to get out well until she got back to the trailhead.”

Sometimes users just need more detailed information than trail apps provide. Sometimes experienced climbers rate trails easier than they would be for less experienced hikers.

“The biggest challenge is that the mapping apps are quasi-social media platforms, and people believe their reviews,” said Atkins, who has more than 40 years of mountain search and rescue experience. “Almost always, these reviews are glowing; how much fun they had, such a great time.”

Schneckenburger recommends using COTREX, a free trail app maintained by Colorado Parks and Wildlife with the stated goal of mapping every trail in the state, and not just those in state parks. COTREX allows land agencies to edit and update trail info as needed.

“It really does have the authoritative data,” Schneckenburger said. “We have what’s called land manager access with COTREX, where we can work directly with them and have them close a trail on COTREX — to show that trail is actually closed.”

Schneckenburger also recommends that users consult multiple sources. He suggests stopping at forest service district ranger offices before going on a hike on national forest land, or calling those offices a day or two before the hike, to check on current trail conditions. Ranger offices have printed sheets describing many of the hikes in their districts, which are free of charge.

“We just always urge people to be as prepared as you can,” Schneckenburger said. “I’m old school, I carry a map everywhere I go, anytime we go backpacking or hiking. There’s no substitute for a good map and a compass. All the technological innovations we have are great, and we certainly encourage people to use them, but redundancy is really critical when you’re in the outdoors. Having a map and knowing how to read it, and using a compass, is every bit as important as relying on a trail app on your phone.”

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“Last summer, I saw someone had broken the men’s stroller mile record, and out of curiosity … I looked up (the women’s),” Gracey said. “I was like, ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve already done that, just running around my neighborhood with my kids.’”

She made it official on June 30 at Englewood High School, with her helmeted son Rome riding, breaking the previous mark — held by Sally Onn of the U.K — by over 30 seconds. Her new record is 5 minutes and 24.17 seconds. But the actual process of applying for and verifying a Guinness World Record is a lengthy one. It required plenty of paperwork, the presence of USA Track & Field officials and video evidence to verify the length of the track, system of the timing, and legitimacy of the witnesses to her feat. For Gracey, all that work was a no-brainer and a shining opportunity to showcase a combined love for her sport and her family.

“As a mother runner, I really love that there’s a new approach to parenting where you don’t have to give up your own goals,” Gracey said. “For the longest time in the athletics world, once (female athletes) had kids, that was the end of (their) athletics career. I wanted to show that … it’s important to still have goals and still chase down those goals and to take your kids on the way.”

Running has always been a family affair for Gracey. Summers in her early childhood were spent in Boulder with her father and Olympic athlete Steve Spence as he trained for long-distance races at altitude. As she was approaching high school, she saw the national high school cross country championships on TV and was instantly determined to set foot on that track herself. By the time she graduated high school, she was a four-time Pennsylvania state champion.

From there, the goals set themselves, and Gracey only climbed higher. At Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, her dad’s alma mater, Gracey won eight national titles and became a professional athlete after graduating in 2008.

“Once I checked off all the boxes and I got to be the most successful that I could in (each) phase, I tried the next thing, and it was the same,” Gracey said. “I had checked off all my goals, I then became a pro right out of college … and I’m racing the best athletes in the world.”

Her athletic career culminated in a top 10 finish as the top American overall at the Boston Marathon in 2016, where her father finished 19th the day she was born in 1990.

All of these professional achievements and progress towards her athletic goals were time-consuming and, according to Gracey, didn’t leave much room for relationships outside her tight training schedule. She says her life didn’t feel truly balanced until the birth of her two sons, Athens, now 5, and Rome, 2. It was then that she was able to introduce her family to her passion for running and include them in her active lifestyle.

“I didn’t really do anything socially … it made me hyper-focus on my running to the extent that I felt like it became unhealthy,” Gracey said. “I’ve thrived a lot more in having a much more balanced lifestyle – having friends, having the kids, having my job.”

Running is still at the core of what she does, but now, it’s not just a reflection of her own personal performance. It’s a bridge to a well-rounded way of life. She runs a coaching business, called Get Running Coaching, where she and another “mother runner” help more than 100 people create personalized training schedules and meet their athletic goals. Much like her own life, running is the center of her business, but at its heart is a holistic understanding of her clients’ lives and goals.

“There’s a science to running, like anything, but I think the art of it is a lot more fun to me than the science – learning about who the people are, and about them as a whole person, not just as a runner,” Gracey said. “I have to build this trust and relationship with them so that they feel comfortable sharing big things that are going on in their life that may be impacting them positively or negatively when it comes to their training.”

Beyond personalized training assistance for aspiring athletes, her love for her sport and her family manifests into a specialized drive to support female runners. She co-authored a book called “Breakthrough Women’s Running” (2022), which, according to Gracey, contains all of the information she wishes she had as she was starting her journey. It combines aspects of her own experience and the insights of female runners around her, including breathing in rhythm, mindfulness exercises, and training in harmony with women’s hormones through the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and after childbirth.

“I felt like I had to navigate and learn so much on my own,” Gracey said. “At the end of the day, I just wanted female athletes to feel supported by other women, inspired by other women, and recognize that – ‘hey, well, if they can chase their goals, so can I.’”

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In fact, the Global Wellness Institute noted in its 2023 Hot Springs Trends report that, “The benefits of hot-cold contrast bathing have been widely recognized and is now almost universal in hot springs across the globe.”

Jim Mikula, senior vice president for WorldSprings, the company behind Iron Mountain Hot Springs in Glenwood Springs, says the institute “led the charge” by promoting hot springs and cold plunges — also referred to as contrast bathing — starting 20 years ago.

But “in the last four years it’s become really popular,” he said. “You feel refreshed, have more energy, and can almost see better when you go from the hot water to the cold.”

The institute explains the benefits this way: “Guests are seeking active ways to boost their immune system, reduce inflammation and find relief from pain: The combination of heat (in the form of bathing and saunas) and cold (in the form of cold plunges, ice showers and ice caves) provides an evidence-based way to achieve it.”

Others credit Wim Hof, a Dutch extreme athlete who has promoted “cold body therapy,” such as ice baths and cold showers, for the recent popularity of getting very chilly. He has written books about being “The Iceman” and features tutorial videos on his website.

Jumping into freezing cold water for a swim or soak goes back many years in Nordic cultures, but what started as a trend in the U.S. only recently seems to be here to stay with more people willing to take the, er, plunge and get the health benefits with consistent exposure to the cold.

“I’ve been fortunate that early in my career I participated in a sweat lodge and we could get out right in a stream with the water about 40 degrees,” Mikula recalled. “This is similar to the contrast bathing. When you’re in the hot water of about 100 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, your blood is rushing to your skin to help cool you down, then when you get into the cold plunge, your blood reverses to protect your organs and this helps your parasympathetic nervous system so you feel comfortable, at ease, and relaxed.”

Denver Sports Recovery offers even more extreme versions called cryotherapy: for less than three minutes, someone in only underwear immerses all of their body except their head into a chamber with nitrogen set at 240 degrees below zero; professional athlete-style contrast therapy going from a 52-degree cold water tub to a 104-degree hot water tub; right after exiting, about 10 minutes in the heated dry sauna, a dip in the cold plunge with water that is 38 degrees Fahrenheit for four minutes and back and forth.

“It’s the bio-hacking world where we try to better ourselves,” said Shawn Caldwell, owner of Denver Sports Recovery. “If you shock the body into survival mode, it tricks your system, and it’s a little bit of a mental exercise.”

Caldwell does caution people to check with their doctors before engaging in any cold water therapy, and notes that he has seen people faint from attempting these extreme transitions.

“Cold plunges can affect multiple body systems by mimicking hypothermia,” said Jake Murphy, a recovery specialist at Denver Sports Recovery. “The benefits come from your body’s response to stay alive.”

In addition to the recovery center environment, anyone can attempt a freezing cold shower at home, and there are many places in Colorado to try a cold plunge for fun.

There are meetup groups that get together monthly for a natural dip in Boulder Creek or Clear Creek. These groups meet year-round, so precautions should be taken in winter for icy conditions and in the spring and summer for high water flows that can be dangerous.

Iron Mountain Hot Springs in Glenwood Springs added a cold plunge pool to its new Upriver World Experience, which opened in June. Upriver includes several pool experiences situated alongside the Colorado River that are inspired by famous hot springs around the world such as Japan and Iceland.

“We are blown away by how popular it is,” Aaron McCallister, general manager of Iron Mountain Hot Springs, said of the cold plunge. “Once they experience it, the shock is something else! Then they become kind of addicted to it and you see people cheering each other on and it becomes a fun environment.”

Despite its small size, this is not a kiddie pool; Upriver is for guests who are 21 years old and up with a recommended time limit of 30 seconds to two minutes while moving about.

“Our biggest learning was that you don’t just go right back into the pool,” McCallister said. “Allow your body to bring your temperature back up, then get into the hot springs pools again.”

Mount Princeton Hot Springs outside of Buena Vista also has a cold plunge pool in its Relaxation Pool area, which is reserved for guests who are ages 16 and up. The big pool in this area is kept at about 90 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit, with nearby Cascading Pools at a nearly scorching 100 to 107 degrees, which might inspire that cold dip. Visitors can also walk down to natural pools in Chalk Creek where the designated spots can range from 32 to 120 degrees, so a cold plunge can just be a matter of where you step in this natural environment.

The Springs Resort in Pagosa Springs offers a Warrior Plunge, a guided experience to cool off in the San Juan River that flows alongside the resort’s 25 terraced hot springs pools. The river temperature will vary, but will be decidedly freezing cold — especially when compared to the 100-ish-degree temperatures of the pools.

The Dryland Fitness studio in Breckenridge’s Gravity Haus includes indoor hot and cold tubs as well as a dry sauna that are available year-round for this type of full body experience.

Many spas — Red Rocks Spa in Denver, Soak Wellness Spa in Montrose, Camino in Colorado Springs, and others — offer a cold plunge experience with more traditional massage and body care services now.

“Right now, it’s kind of trendy and popular,” Mikula said of taking a cold plunge. “It’s still a really good wellness practice that anyone can do at home. The difference in doing it at Iron Mountain Hot Springs is that you’re looking at Red Mountain, sitting by the Colorado River, and it’s another treat for your senses, like forest bathing.”

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Bailee Mulholland, 26, was on Blitzen Ridge on Ypsilon Mountain, a jagged, but relatively easy climb, according to experienced rock scramblers, but one that highlights the risks climbers take while scrambling — or “free soloing” — on routes with steep faces and extreme exposures.

“This is hitting our group pretty hard,” said Bill Wright, the founder of Satan’s Minions, the club that Mulholland belonged to. “We don’t promote this stuff, we don’t recruit people. We’re a group that does this stuff, we love this stuff and we know it’s potentially super dangerous because you don’t have a rope. It’s a tough line to walk because we’re up there for fun. We’re not trying to be daredevils. She wasn’t trying to be a daredevil. This climb was quite an easy climb.”

What she was doing — what all of the 100 or so members of the club specialize in — is different than ascending straight up the side of the mountain, which is what many people think of when they imagine rock climbing. Scrambling means negotiating rocky crags, usually on an angle, without using ropes to protect against falls. The terrain where she fell was not highly technical.

“She didn’t climb up a face that was 500 feet. She scrambled up stuff that’s more like hiking than scrambling, and then she goes across this ridge which is 500 feet tall. So she didn’t solo up some giant vertical 500-foot face,” Wright explained.

Like many club members, Mulholland frequently scrambled up the Flatirons before work as part of her morning routine. Wright would often see her when he was there doing the same thing. “She was…super positive and really excited to learn and get better.”

Michael Reese, another club member who often begins his days running up the Flatirons, said Mulholland was the best female scrambler in Boulder.

“That’s what made [her death] especially shocking,” Reese said. “We’ve been talking a lot about it in the community and the scrambling club. Her ability far exceeded what was needed to climb the route she was doing. When something like this happens, it makes everyone take a look and realize the risks never go to zero.”

According to the Boulder Daily Camera, Mulholland was born in China before being adopted, and she grew up in Boulder where she was attracted to running and playing the violin. After graduating from the University of Colorado, she became a software engineer and ultrarunner.

Running led her into the scrambling subculture that thrives on scampering up the Flatirons. Boulder is known for world-class runners and fabled rock climbs in Eldorado Canyon, Boulder Canyon and the Flatirons, so the connection comes naturally.

“In our group, we have two kinds of people, runners who climb and climbers who run,” Wright said. “The climbers who run are the safest. They’ve probably taken falls with ropes. They know the consequences. They’re much more precise with their feet because they’re coming from rock climbing, where you have to be very precise to climb hard stuff.”

To weed out those who don’t fully respect the consequences of scrambling up Flatirons angled at 50 to 60 degrees without protection, the club requires that new members pass qualification standards. The final test is an “interview scramble” with Wright observing nearby, scrutinizing every move. If prospective members make him nervous, they aren’t allowed to join.

“She was a runner who climbed, but she had gotten to be a very good rock climber,” Wright said. “She did a lot of rock climbing, and that really helped her scrambling, being really solid and really safe. Well, it’s hard to justify saying ‘really safe,’ because what we do is not safe, but to do enough practice and get enough laps on things that we may get safe enough.”

The day after Mulholland’s death, a climber scrambling near the top of the First Flatiron fell 100 feet before landing on a ledge and was seriously injured, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. That person had to be evacuated by rescue crews.

For some, the attraction of scrambling is the challenge of speed. Reese holds three speed records in the Flatirons and is training now in hopes of breaking the speed record on Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. For others, it’s about the ability to climb “light,” unencumbered by heavy equipment.

Scrambling is essentially the same as free soloing, which became a hot topic in 2017 when Alex Honnold free soloed a 2,900-foot route on Yosemite’s vertical El Capitan. Scrambling of the kind practiced by Satan’s Minions is lower angled, although the consequences of a mistake can be the same.

“There’s no thought of cheating death or doing anything like Alex Honnold does,” Wright said. “The mindset of our group is not that at all, it’s just to go out and enjoy these beautiful structures. We’re not trying to push the limits of difficulty, we’re trying to scramble stuff.”

They all know they can’t afford to fall, though.

“At the end of the day, there’s always that risk, even for someone experienced,” Reese said. “The scrambling people do, probably the majority of it, a fall would be fatal on the Flatirons.”

Wright said Mulholland didn’t mind the risks.

“It was in her blood, and I think she found her calling when she discovered scrambling and climbing,” Wright said. “She was already a runner, but this was a whole new world for her. She loved it and she was going hard into it. She had a lot of talent. And so positive, endlessly positive. Always smiling and just loving life.”

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Two decades later she was diagnosed with left ventricular non-compaction cardiomyopathy, and 15 years after that she received a new heart. In the five years since the transplant, running helped her discover what she calls the “athlete inside” of her. Three weeks ago she ran the Slacker Half Marathon, 13.1 miles from the foot of Loveland Pass to Georgetown, and on Sunday she will run the Donor Dash 5K in Wash Park.

“Right before my transplant, I couldn’t walk up a single flight of stairs without pausing to catch my breath,” said Ogg, 57. “I couldn’t walk across my living room without pausing. I could no longer go to the grocery store by myself. To go from that — remembering how hard it was to take those first few steps after my transplant, trying to learn to make my legs move again — to running down this massive hill (in the Slacker race) with all of these other people whom I think of as legitimate runners, wow.

“What an incredible thing that I’m only able to do because of a selfless stranger, and the decision they made to donate their organs,” she added.

Ogg doesn’t know the identity, age or gender of her donor. All she was told was that the person was young. “I’ve written to my donor family and shared my unending gratitude with them, but I never heard back,” Ogg said. “And while I would love to know who my donor is, of course I absolutely respect the family’s wishes.”

Ogg was unable to have children because her weak heart couldn’t support a pregnancy. Her condition was diagnosed when she was 36, giving her feelings of validation because it proved she wasn’t lazy after all. It would be 15 years before her condition deteriorated to the point where she was placed on a heart transplant list.

“One Saturday morning, I stood up and walked over to my bathroom sink, and before I made it all the way to the sink, I could feel that I was starting to lose consciousness,” Ogg said. “I grabbed the edge of the counter. My husband was laying in bed and he heard me say, ‘Oh my God, oh my God.’ Then he heard me hit the floor and I died. I was fortunate to have an implanted defibrillator that brought me back to life.”

With her heart racing at more than 320 beats per minute, she was rushed to the hospital, unaware the defibrillator had saved her life. That was late in 2017. She went on a transplant list in March of 2018 and received her new heart that July.

“All those years, people had been like, ‘Hey, how are you feeling?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling good, I’m feeling great.’ I never felt good,” Ogg said. “I only realized what it felt like to feel good when I woke up with a fully functioning heart for the first time.”

A couple of months after receiving her new heart, she started cardiac rehab and soon joined a gym to gain fitness and strength. When the pandemic hit, she was forced into “serious lockdown” because she was immuno-suppressed.

“I decided to use that time getting into shape,” Ogg said. “I lost a bunch of weight. In 2020 I started hiking, and in 2021 I started hiking a lot more, doing brisk walking.” Early this year she decided to do the Slacker half, in honor of her donor, after a friend suggested they run it.

“I had always wanted to run, I had just never been able to run,” Ogg said. “It was like a bucket list item for me, so I decided to start training for a half marathon.”

When she went to a running store to pick up her race packet, she was stricken with imposter syndrome. She thought, “All these people are real runners. I’m not a real runner,” but she soon realized it was “ludicrous” to feel that way.

“I am a real runner,” she said. “One of the things I so love about the running community is that the community sees me as a real runner, too. Just like everyone, I’m out there trying to get better at it.”

That awakening left her wanting more of the kind of experiences she’d lived without for five decades.

“I had no idea that I had this athlete inside of me,” Ogg said. “Now I do. That athlete woke up, and I don’t want to not be able to do anything. I don’t want to miss a thing. I feel like I lived kind of a half-life for 52 years. I’m trying to make up for all that lost time.”

In Sunday’s race, she will get to connect with other transplant recipients, donors and their families. The Donor Dash, in its 24th year, is organized by the Donor Alliance of Colorado and Wyoming. Spokeswoman Cheryl Talley said organ donors can save as many as eight lives, and save or heal up to 75 others through tissue donation.

“This gives us an opportunity not only to honor the generosity of the heroic donor who made that decision to give the gift of life but also to celebrate alongside other recipients who are having, like Andrea, this miraculous second chance at life,” Talley said. “She is living it to the fullest, and honoring her donor while she’s doing it.”

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