Slightly winded at 12,700 feet, we make our way up to Arapaho saddle just half of a mile southeast of the rocky pyramidal peak of South Arapaho. Every time we stop for water, we can see further into the Rockies; range after range of the kind of mountains John Denver sang about. But when we crest the saddle, oxygen seeps out of us as we hover in snow precariously close to an abrupt drop off. One wrong step here would send us over the edge, down 400 feet to an unpleasant landing on the Arapaho Glacier. Housed in a high alpine cirque in the shadows of North and South Arapaho, crevasses and bluish ice leave evidence of the glaciers slow movement. It seems incredibly pristine, perhaps because of its restriction to hikers due to the glacier's location within land set aside by the City of Boulder for its water supply.
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