Walking our pack o' hounds at Michigan's Maybury State Park, we'd snort with laughter when we saw perfectly able-bodied people using trekking poles to traverse the flat, small (1,000 acres) park. "Must be training for Everest," we'd snicker.

Flash forward to Mother's Day 2008 in Rocky Mountain National Park: If someone had been hawking trekking poles on the trail to Dream Lake, we'd have overpaid for them in an instant.

We're still getting acclimated to the Colorado weather and topography. Temperatures swing 30-40 degrees from one day to the next. Even though we can see the snow on the biggest peaks from here in Arvada, well, I guessed we thought we wouldn't be up that high any time soon.

Things were pretty dry in the foothills of the park, where the mule deer, looking bedraggled in the transition from winter to summer coats, were grazing. Tourists were jumping out of their SUVs in T-shirts.

We'd decided to hike in to Dream Lake, elevation 9,900 feet. It's apparently a popular trail in the summer, but on Sunday, most tourists pulled up to the trailhead, saw the snowpack, and opted to just walk the few hundred feet to Bear Lake for their photo ops. (Note: Many tourists weren't dressed even for summer hiking; in the windy trailhead parking lot, one middle-aged woman with an updo kept moaning, "I just know I'm going to lose my hairpiece . . .")

Gillettes are hardy souls, though, and, by God, if, in the comfort of the foothills, we said were going to hike to Dream Lake, then we would do it, snowpack or no snowpack. The views were more than worth the effort. But trekking poles don't look nearly so silly in the Rockies as they do in suburban Detroit and would have made the going easier on the narrow spots with steep drop-offs. And those cool, high-tech snow shoes might have kept me from stepping knee-deep in snow when I moved aside to let some climbers pass us. I'm not sure we'll be pairing snow shoes with shorts, though, as one young fashion-conscious couple we passed did.