St. Mary's Glacier, CO

Last week I took a little road trip back home to Colorado to visit family and friends. One of the main focuses of the trip was taking some pictures of my niece Annabelle for her birthday and a Christmas card (the Christmas card photos also included her dad (my bother) and her mom, but at less than a year old, baby is really always the star).

I'll have another post on the experience of doing the baby pictures, but this post will be about where we went for the Christmas photos, St. Mary's Glacier.

It was suggested by my Sister-in-law before I came to town to check it out. I had never heard of it (being that I'm from Colorado and spent the first 21 years of my life there, I would later feel a little embarrassed I never knew of this place). As we talked about what to do with their Christmas photo the decision pretty easily came that it needed to be outdoors and preferably in the mountains somewhere. Partly because they are outdoorsy people, but also because doing any of the other typical indoor Christmas themed photos seemed really boring (plus their not the kind of family that wants to wear matching sweaters, thank god!).

So the decision was to try St. Mary's Glacier (which non of us had ever been to), and what a great decision it was. This place is a great day trip to make from Denver, it only took about 45 minutes to get to it. And Although the elevation gain is about 1,000 ft. to hike to it, the hike is only about a mile or so.

Once you reach the base of the area you're greeted with a fantastic view of a little lake along with what is called St. Mary's Glacier. It's a perfect place to visit during those really hot Denver summer days, as the temperature always stays cool. The snow never melts and you can ski or snowboard it year round (in the picture above you can see a few black dots on the right side of the snow, those were folks skiing), but I learned it's not technically a Glacier. The reason it isn't considered a Glacier is because it doesn't flow, it never moves.

I still need to edit through the rest of the shots, but thought I'd at least post this photo. If you find yourself in Colorado, I highly recommend you take a look at this place. It's great for quick day hangout.