"Make a wish,” said naturalist Paul Gayer. I wished for a beer. Sure, the steep hike up Catamount Trail near Colorado Springs, in the heat of Indian Summer, had left everyone thirsty. But this was more than a longing for some suds.

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.

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.

Flip through the channels of cable television on any given night, and you'll probably find a survival-themed reality TV show. I Shouldn't Be Alive.

Nature's alarm clock is ringing early for black bears, and some aren't hitting the snooze button. Recent warm weather in Colorado - temperatures as high as 75 degrees - is stirring some bears from their dens a few weeks early, and officials are.

It’s the East Rampart Roadless Area, one of hundreds of places Colorado has proposed to restrict road-building. The U.S. Forest Service in 2008 called it the “largest and least human-impacted area remaining in the Rampart Range.

Getting yourself on base isn’t as tough as it used to be. All you have to do is show a driver’s license or other government issued ID, pop open your car’s trunk and choose your adventure — be it a long mountain bike ride, a brutal slog up a peak, or an excursion into the national forest.

But the trees hold a hidden danger, a threat that is little-known and poorly understood among skiers, one that claims a life on Colorado’s slopes nearly every year: tree wells, deep, soft snow that collects under pine trees and can pull down and drown a skier like quicksand.

That’s why they chose Keystone, which Pond believes is more familyfriendly than other resorts, with tubing, ice-skating, Ripperoo the ski school mascot, face-painting, balloon animals and other activities around the base area, all to keep the kids having fun when skiing has grown boring.

The two snowboarders from Denver usually ride the resorts along Colorado's Interstate 70 corridor, a region that an El Nino weather pattern has kept brutally dry this year. As of late January, most central Colorado resorts had bases of just 30 to 40 inches, with hard snow and exposed rock and dirt.