We moved to Colorado a few years ago from the East Coast and probably did what most transplants do: jump in with both feet into weekend hiking. It started with mini-hikes (sometimes we barely left the parking lot, my 2 little kids were more interested in bugs and leaves than in walking), and eventually turned into longer jaunts.
The first year my mother-in-law came out to visit over her birthday (in January), during a particularly dry and warm stretch, and we decided to share the mountains with her. It had been in the 70s for days, so I thought it'd be safe to walk the relatively flat, 3 mile loop in Boulder's Betasso Preserve. It's not really in the mountains, more in the foothills, so I figured we'd be spared altitude challenges. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we were in tee-shirts.
While the front of the loop had been a delightful walk across a dried dirt trail, the back was a solid sheet of ice.
I'm not making this up when I say that it took us 4 hours to complete the loop. That's less than one mile an hour. That's a crawling pace. Try it... please. Get on a treadmill at 1 mph, and see what it's like. Now incline that treadmill to 4 degrees, and turn it into a skating rink that you take on your hands, your knees, your butts. Or straight down the hill into the nearby brook, which only minutes prior had been part of that sheet of ice.
The thing is, we kept seeing people walk right by us without issue, like they had some Coloradoan superpower. It was maddening. Come to find out later that they all had these marvelous little shoe attachments called Yak Tracks. (You can buy them at Costco.)
I'd say the score was Colorado: 1, me: 0, but my MIL was the one who fell into the brook. I'm at -1.
The second time we took her hiking, I was ready. It was a year later, and we all had enough time to work up the courage to try again. I chalked the first failure up to ignorance. This time would be a success. I had the gear. I had the snacks and the drinks. I even brought a map, though we'd hiked North Tabletop Mountain in Golden already once before, and the trail was both well worn and within sight of a strip mall for a good chunk.
But none of that mattered. About a mile from the end of the trail, my MIL slid on some loose gravel and fell. And broke her leg.
It didn't help that passers-by were telling us how lucky we were that we hadn't come just a few hours earlier, when a mountain lion had taken a deer down right about where we were standing. (At first I thought the hikers were being snarky punks, but the story was validated by the EMTs and Fire/Rescue who eventually carted my MIL down in a wheelbarrow.)
The score became me: -2. Colorado: minus infinity.
So we tried a middle-ground this year. We just got back from a big family trip to the Riviera Maya in Mexico, where evidently Mr. Murphy's too drunk on margaritas to pay us any attention.
If that's our win-win, I'll take it.
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