By the time this article goes to print, the streets of Boulder will likely be buried in a wet slurry of dirty snow, and the high country will be harvesting its snowpack foundation for the winter ahead. For those seeking outdoors adventures, the time between late October and January can feel like something of a dead zone.

The shoulder season could use a PR makeover. Too many people think autumn is a time to stay home between summer camping and winter skiing and snowmobiling. They pack up their camping gear after Labor Day and wait for the snow to fly. But it really makes no sense.

The snow has started to fall. But let’s be honest. To really get the ski and snowboarding season up and running in style, Mother Nature needs a bit of help. A push in the right direction. A jolt of winter. Some snow. And any kind of snow will do. Enter snowmaking. Without it, many Colorado ski areas would face a fickle opening date. With it, some consistency is created.

Sorry, guys, just a little rock in the road there.” The “rock,” a German shepherd-size boulder, jarred us, but it was otherwise no match for Jess Caton’s hand-built, heavily modified Jeep. The road is one of the worst — or best, depending on your interest in rock crawling — in Colorado, the often-loathed, sometimes-controversial forest track known as Lake Como Road.

Pyramid Peak, located just outside of Aspen, stands at 14,018 feet and is the 47th highest mountain in Colorado. In contrast to its aesthetically symmetrical neighbors, the Maroon Bells, Pyramid has a raw, jagged quality evidenced in the broken yet graceful lines that adorn the rugged peak.

The hike started innocently enough: a well-trodden trail from a Utah campground near the small ski resort of Brianhead. Soon, though, we left the trail and started bushwhacking up a steep ridge. The terrain was rough.

There are more than 23 million acres of public land in Colorado, from dizzying mountaintops to lush valley bottoms, dusty canyons to glassy lakes, where in a few hours’ drive you can escape the noise and traffic of city life for a weekend wilderness adventure.

As if projecting rock climbing routes — the multiple attempts climbers put into mastering a particularly tough route — weren’t enough of a challenge, local filmmaker, artist and rock climber Craig Muderlak has set a goal to visually represent more than the physicality of climbing. He wants to capture the climbing life, and to represent, in his art, that life as a work of art.

What defines a flow trail? Let’s think back to the halcyon days of a kid’s summer, dripping popsicles, scabbed knees and all. Remember the big hill in your neighborhood where the local tough guys and girls built milk-crate jumps and effortlessly aired in banana-seat high style?

The creek has been a time-honored escape from the heat of summer for decades. And with this years heat lingering and looking like blasting us in an inferno through September, the creek is the obvious place to go to cool off..