Much has been made in the past day about a New York Times story chronicling Swiss hikers taking to the trails in the nude. “There’s not much to discuss,” one hiker told the Times. “It’s freedom. First, freedom in your head; then, freedom of the body.”

The hikers were interviewed on the trails of the Appenzell region, an idyllic slice of the Alps near the Austrian border. I’ve written about the area in this story for the Star Tribune. There were lots of laughs and peculiar sights along the way, but, alas, no nakedness. What I experienced was more akin to this video of senior citizens lapping the youngsters who clogged the trails.

Aspen at Bear Lake.

It was “free” weekend at Rocky Mountain National Park, meaning everyone in Denver with a car came on Saturday and Sunday to see the aspens change and the elk bugle — two events that decisively mark the season in Colorado. I made the mistake of arriving mid-morning Saturday, with everyone else. There is something very, very wrong about a traffic jam in a national park. I parked and took a hiker’s shuttle, which was also functioning more like the Ginza line in Tokyo than a serene transport to the wonders of nature. All that receded into the background once I’d gotten a mile onto the trails. More than 90 percent of the visitors to Yellowstone National Park never set foot off of concrete, and I suspect the ratio holds in Rocky. That’s as sad as a traffic jam in a national park, but it’s just as true.

The mountains grandly presided over the various processions and spectacles. Elk bugled and mated as tourists idiotically wandered toward them with their digital cameras held in front of the their faces like chalices to the altar. I did my hike, endured another jam-packed shuttle ride (with the driver cursing all the cars illegally parked on the sides of the road) and spent part of the afternoon with the milling crowds in Estes Park; more traffic jams, and shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks. At a coffee shop, the kid at the counter laughed hysterically when I asked him if he considered it a busy day. “Medium,” he said. “Check it out in August.”

The next day I got to the Bear Lake parking lot at 7:30 a.m. and had it to myself. I wanted to climb a mountain and I chose Flattop, an relatively easy 12,320-foot peak. It was a 4.4 mile hike with a 3,000-foot elevation gain. The woods were mostly empty. I ran into a couple of local hikers in their 60s with “Beep or honk when passing” signs attached to their daypacks. The man was a transplant from Jordan, Minn. He was wearing an “Up a Mountain, Down a Beer” T-shirt. “This is what we do on Sundays,” he said.

The trail was rocky, but gently graded, and relentlessly sloped upward. The trees got smaller and more sparsely distributed the higher I got. In 90 minutes, I was above the treeline. The wind picked up. I could see snowy peaks, eye-dropper lakes and in the distance, the shore of the Great Plains. Along the path, I encountered a metal plate, bolted to a boulder. It was headlined “The Mountains Don’t Care.” The sign explained that storms could rise at any moment, and that the paths across Flattop would be hard to follow in a whiteout. Every year, prepared and unprepared hikers die at the whim of the weather and chance.

I made it to the top, and had lunch in the lee of a big rock, out of the wind. I watched other climbers cross a ridge and ascend Hallett Peak (photo). From there, I could see both sides of the Continental Divide. And I could see that the parking lot at Bear Lake was now full. When I got off the trail, there’d be another traffic jam to endure, and on the radio, news of national disarray. The mountains don’t care. Scary, and reassuring at the same time.

The September issue of Coastal Living magazine named Duluth the third best B&B town, after Santa Barbara, Calif., and Troncones, Mexico. Our northern city beat out such B&B icons as Key West, Fla. and Kennebunkport, Maine. The magazine singled out the Firelight Inn for being a place that’s particularly great for birders. The other B&Bs mentioned were Olcott House and Solglimt.

What do you think of these choices? Do you go to Duluth for a vacation, or is it a quick stop on your way to the North Shore or beyond? What are your tips for visiting Duluth?

Photo by Chris Welsch

Rust colored lodgepoles, doomed by pine beetles, ring a meadow on the Green Mountain Trail loop in Rocky Mountain National Park.

Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park is known for its spectacular alpine highway, Trail Ridge Road, which rises to more than 12,000 feet above sea level as it crosses the tundra, high above the treeline. That treeline is in big trouble. I went to the park on Saturday — it’s less than an hour away from Boulder — to take a long hike in the western part of the park. As I drove through the eastern side of the park, I caught glimpses of the mature lodgepole pine forests that are characteristic on the slopes of the park’s dramatic mountains. Symmetrical and tightly ranked, the trees form a geometric pattern of deep green that pleases the eye. On the western side of the park, the same kind of pattern could be seen but in a deep shade of rust. The pine beetle epidemic is deforesting the park with amazing speed. Whole mountainsides are red with dying pines. As of 2007, 1.5 million acres of Colorado’s pine forests were lost to the epidemic. Experts say that in 5 years, most of the lodgepoles in the state will be gone. Warmer winters have allowed the beetles to migrate north. There’s no effective or affordable way to stop them. This is a dramatic example of how the landscapes we love are being dramatically altered by climate change. It’ll be interesting to see how the mountain eco-system regenerates in coming years. Like the blowdown in the BWCA (but on a much larger scale), the repercussions (fires, erosion, etc.) will be coming for years.