Day 60: 15 June, 15.1 miles today (+1.3 miles on Creede Cutoff returning to CDT, not added to total), 827.2 miles total, La Garita Wilderness, CO
The ride back to the trailhead up the old Creede mining road was uncomfortable, to put it mildly. The driver had thrown an old army duffel with some padding in the truck-bed for us, but somehow Sean Meadow had gotten all the stuffing, leaving me with a couple layers of worn canvas to protect my tailbone from the endless cascade of bumps and jolts. The road was very steep and very rough, so I spent most of the ride holding on my pack with one hand and the truck with the other. Our driver had insisted we could ride in the cab with him, with masks or without, even though Sean Meadow had been upfront about the fact that she’d tested positive for Covid. I suppose if anything, that only increased our obligation to ensure that we didn’t get him sick, since he was unlikely to take any precautions with others he might then expose if we did. We’d paid him $20 a head to drive us 7.5 miles, but it saved us a 3,000+ foot climb, so it had been worth it.
It was only once we started hiking that I started feeling sick myself: a sore throat that make the exertion of hiking uphill more unpleasant than usual. This despite the two negative results I’d gotten from the home test kit the Mineral County Health Center had decided to give me in lieu of a proper Covid test. It wasn’t great timing, but it really didn’t change anything. Neither of us could have endured yet another day in Creede. I’d just feel crappy while walking instead of while sitting in a dugout in the little league park. At least this way I was getting somewhere.
Sean Meadow still wasn’t 100%, but was definitely moving better than she had been when we’d bailed to town. We had at least a couple of days of relatively easy-going terrain ahead of us, so we were hopeful we could make decent time even if either of us felt particularly well. At this point, PA, Elf, and Shorty were three days ahead of us, while Unknown was a day or so behind. We might eventually all reconnect, but in the meantime Sean Meadow and I were alone in a way we had never been on the entire trail this far. After leaving our ride to hike up to the CDT, in fact, we didn’t see a single human soul the entire rest of the day. That had never happened before. The bubble, it seemed, was well ahead of us, leaving us completely on our own. Not that we couldn’t handle ourselves, even in our diminished condition; but that kind of solitude really highlights the size of the wilderness and heightens the sense of remoteness that comes from walking and sleeping and eating and living in the backcountry. In all likelihood we’d start running into other hikers the next day, but in the meantime, the valley through which we were hiking was the entire world, and tonight at least, we were the only people in it.
Too bad we both felt like shit.
Day 61: 16 June, 24.2 miles today, 851.4 miles total, Gunnison NF, CO
The mosquitoes had been out in force the evening before, which had been a warm one even above 10,000’. It had felt like summer in the mountains, for maybe the first time all of June. And then, when we woke up, I found that the bottle of filtered water I’d left outside the tent had grown a skin of ice. Packing up in sub-freezing morning was unpleasant, to be sure, but at least it kept the mosquitoes away.
It should have been a relatively easy day. The terrain was forgiving and the weather was nice once the sun rose above the mountains and warmed up the valley. The problem was my throat, which was low key enough to ignore most of the time, but which felt like it was being torn to ribbons by an angry chipmunk any time I had to climb a hill steep enough to cause me to breathe heavily. Beyond the failings of my frail mortal form, once we left the valley through which we’d meandered for half the morning, it was like we’d somehow walked back into New Mexico. Everything was dry and dusty and exposed to the sun, the water sources were thin trickles (when they flowed at all), and the entire rest of the day was spent on dirt roads with nothing to look at. It was a slog. And still we saw not a single other hiker.
Still, we made decent progress. Maybe not as much as would have had we been in better form, but it was our first 24 mile day in a very long time. I was a small wreck by the end of it, but all the same we’d done it. 24 miles closer to town. 24 miles closer to a hot shower and a warm bed. 24 miles closer to nyquil.
Day 62: 17 June, 21.1 miles today, 872.5 miles total, Gunnison NF, CO
I overdid it.
Day 63: 18 June, 24.6 miles today, 897.1 miles total, Salida, CO
There had been several difficulties the day before. It was the first day we’d ever had to cope with the infamous afternoon thunderstorms of the Colorado Rockies. It was also the first day that the forest came totally alive with mosquitoes any moment we were below treeline. It was our first day with a cumulative elevation gain greater than 5,000’. But mostly it was all of that in tandem with the fact that I was sick.
It feels churlish to complain about a case of (very probably) Covid so mild that I’d barely have noticed it in town when by this time the illness had killed a million people in the US alone. As I had been vaccinated and boosted at my earliest opportunities, my bout with the virus amounted to a sore throat, stuffy nose, a cough, and fatigue and muscle aches that could also easily have been the result of hiking 20+ miles through the mountains everyday. I basically had a small cold, and would probably never have assumed it was anything more sinister if Unknown and Sean Meadow hadn’t both tested positive. I was extremely fortunate that it wasn’t worse. If we hadn’t pushed hard, I might have even escaped without having had a single particularly bad day.
It started promisingly enough. The pain in my throat felt muted as I woke up and got ready to start hiking, and I assumed that it was a sign I was already pretty much over it. We started the day with long climb, and I learned that this day, all exertion would lead to a painful coughing fit. With 5,000’ of vertical to climb, it wasn’t long before my throat was a ragged, agonizing mess once again.
Every break we took was cut short, which didn’t help me recover my strength throughout the day. We packed up lunch quickly when thunder and an ominous dark and fast-rolling cloud told we’d better get moving. Every other time we even slowed down, the mosquitoes descended ostensibly for our blood, but it felt like they were after our bone marrow, or possibly our souls. I wouldn’t realize it until the following morning, but in the course of a single day I’d sustain enough bites to turn both my legs and both my shoulders into gnarled masses of itchy welts. It was like I had grown bark.
I ran out of gas three miles from the place Sean Meadow and I had agreed to camp. I had to make it there: she had powered on ahead, but I had the tent. It was also at the next water source, and I barely had enough as it was. But as I came to the bottom of the days final long climb, I was completely, utterly spent. I needed at least to take a break, eat something, and try to recover my strength. At least the mosquitoes were finally leaving me alone—probably because this area was open and exposed and the wind had picked up.
It started raining, cold, mean little drops that seemed to soak right through my skin and freeze my core. I should have dug my rain gear out of my pack, but I knew it was buried near the bottom. It would obviously have been worth the effort, but in the moment any extra expenditure of energy felt like an impossible ask. I picked myself up and dragged my defeated carcass up and over that last mountain, amazed that it was possible for me to move so slowly and yet remain upright. At least the rain stopped. I even saw a rainbow and was blissfully distracted from the screaming in my empty, worn-out leg muscles by the train of thought that in the biblical story of Noah, the rainbow functions much the way a bouquet of roses might from the hand of an abusive spouse: a token apology that doesn’t even begin to make up for the scope the violent betrayal that had just been committed.
I found Sean Meadow waiting me, who had had time to scope the area out and had determined that our best hope of keeping sheltered from any weather overnight was to continue a half mile on to the forest on the other side of a meadow. I wanted to argue in favor making camp where we were, but she was right, and I knew it. We trudged on until we came to a suitable place. At that moment, a hiker came up behind us—the first one we’d seen since we bailed to Creede. Our conversation was brief (on my part at least because I was dying on my feet), but he mentioned that we were also the only other hikers he’d seen in days. Then he said something about getting up early to make it town by mid-day, which seemed insane given the day we’d just had. Then he was gone.
As soon as we had the tent up, I got my bed together and got in. Sean Meadow was alarmed by the disappearance of my usually dependable appetite, but all I could think of in the entire world was getting warm and lying down. It was my own fault for pushing myself too hard, but for the first time I felt genuinely, completely sick. I needed to sleep.
As far as I knew, I never had a fever—but when I woke up briefly at 0300hrs, I felt as if I had had a fever which had broken in the night. It was the feeling of having turned a corner; that the worst was now behind me. And drifted back to sleep listening to tip-tapping of a light rain against the tent wall that would last until almost the very minute we got up in the morning.
At 0530, Sean Meadow’s alarm went off, and almost at once a nearby animal I could only assume was a coyote (or several) started making a sound that at first I thought was a rooster, before eventually deepening into a more robust howl. I hoped to see a few when I emerged from the tent into the grey morning, but they were either farther away than I’d assumed, or they’d vamoosed the moment they heard me blundering out of our shelter.
I felt great, at least comparatively. I was still a bit stuffy and sore, but my throat didn’t hurt and my cough was all but gone. More importantly, I had energy. I may not have been bouncing up and down at the prospect of hiking all day, but I at least felt like I could which was a significant improvement over the evening before. Sean Meadow had been concerned enough to have figured out a bail-out option that would get us to town 10 miles sooner, but I didn’t need it. I was ready to hike.
The day had the sort of close, oppressive feeling that comes from dense cloud cover and rain in the mountains. While I would say that clear days are preferable, it’s not a bad feeling. It’s more like seeing into the secret life of the mountain. Animals seem more active when the weather is like that—in fact Sean Meadow and I had seen a solitary juvenile black bear the day before when the afternoon clouds had rolled in. It crossed the trail a few hundred feet from where we stood in a clearing, the gamboled along the edge of the forest for a good five minutes before disappearing from sight. This morning as we were coming into a broad, open meadow, I heard en elk bugling, and paused for a moment to listen. I was about to start walking again when I saw a couple up ahead, a cow and a calf. As I pointed them out to Sean Meadow, I noticed another cow and a couple more calves beyond them. As we stood there, there was movement in another part of the clearing, and we saw another two or three adults. The longer we waited, the more elk we noticed. We’d stumbled on entire herd of females and little ones out for a morning feed.
I was just wondering if it would be at all possible to walk by without disturbing them when they noticed us. An alarm went up, passed from one adult to another as the animals started bolting for the trees. The entire clearing came to life, as dozens of elk ran for cover, far more animals that we had realized had been out. The mountainside rang with their desperate bugling as their hooves thundered across the earth. We watched in awe as 30 or 40 elk ran for cover, the piteous bugling of the young ones still echoing around us long after the last of the herd had vanished into the forest.
Most of the rest of the day passed like a gentler version of the previous day. There was a fair amount of vertical to contend with, but it wasn’t nearly as onerous, and I was still feeling a great deal better. The main difference was the increase in the number of mountain bikers from zero to dozens, which was unexpected but made sense when we accounted for the fact that a) it was Saturday and b) we were within easy riding distance of a couple of trailheads. We even learned from a friendly pair of bikers that the stretch of trail we were on was considered one of the best for mountain bikes in the country. Who knew? The mountain bikers were nice.
The dirt-bikers, on the other hand, are forever welcome to go fuck themselves with their stupid wet-fart chainsaws-on-wheels in the privacy of their own goddamned homes.
We were stopped at the last water source before Monarch Pass, where we’d cross the road that would lead us to Salida. We had to make a choice: camp within the next half-mile, or push the remaining seven to the pass. The rain that had been forecast for the evening had been reforecast as storms, so it was a choice between finding a well-protected spot and making a solid camp before weather hit, or trying to burn trail so we could hit the pass, get to town, go to a hotel, and be out of the weather entirely. We opted for the latter, which gave us a super thin margin for error, since getting a ride after the dark is generally considered difficult, if not impossible.*
So we needed to make Monarch Pass before the sun set and the weather turned for the worse. We were off to a good start, but were halfway up a mile-long climb to a ridge-walk when a sudden storm rolled in. This wasn’t the forecasted overnight weather come early, but rather one of the violent tantrums that the Colorado Rockies are famous for—something we’d long heard about but hadn’t much seen thus far. There was obviously not a lot of shelter on the approach to the ridge, and of course an exposed peak is absolute worst place to be if there’s any lightning. But it did look as if the far side would be better protected, and I thought we might be able to make it over before the worst of it hit. About that, I was incorrect.
This is how I found myself struggling up a steep incline as the sleet that had started below treeline turned into hail when I had absolutely nothing to hide behind. I was amazed at how much it hurt, each iceball stinging my skin as if none of the layers I was wearing were there—and there were thousands each minute. When I finally crested the ridge, I was grateful to be able to turn my back so that most of the hail was now sticking my pack and not me, but that gratitude was short-lived as I quickly noticed the lighting dancing behind a neighboring peak. I was exactly where I shouldn’t have been, and now it was up to luck to keep me alive.
I was able to get off the ridge line and onto a slightly lower slope with a few stands of trees scattered here and there, where I waited as the brief storm passed. Sean Meadow wasn’t anywhere to be seen, which was unsettling in my distinctly spooked frame of mind, but I still figured that most likely she’d taken shelter somewhere below treeline and waited for the storm to move on instead walking straight into it like an idiot. When she eventually came walking cheerfully up the trail in the eerily silent aftermath of the tempest, I learned that that was exactly what had happened.
The rest of the walk to the trailhead was much less harrowing, but cold. The wind steadily picked up and the temperature dropped. We popped out of the woods with maybe 40 minutes of daylight, technically, but the night’s long storm had begun. It was already raining, the wind whipping the water sideways into our faces as we tried to thumb a ride in the prematurely fading light. Hitch-hiking requires patience, but freezing rain sort of demands immediate attention, so it was hard not to read each passing vehicles indifference as evidence of some massive personal shortcoming on the drive’s part. In truth, we were only out for 10 minutes before a kind couple took pity on us and stopped, but it felt like we’d been at it for hours.
An hour later, we were showered, warm, and stuffing ourselves from a stack of piping hot food-like objects from Dominoes in PA and Elf’s hotel room in Salida. It had seemed so remote, so untouchable a possibility just a few hours before when discussing our options at the stream. It hadn’t even been a glimmer of an idea that morning, and yet here we were, in a sheltered space with friends, eating our fill of hot grease as the gentle lower-elevation rain pelted the roof over our heads. We were clean. We were dry. My cough had returned, a result (I assumed) of having spent several hours being cold and wet in the hope of making it to town earlier than planned, but nonetheless, we were lucky.
*I’ve done it, actually, but was so convinced it would never work that I barely put in the effort to stick out my thumb and so was doubly astounded when a car actually pulled over to let me in.
Day 64: 19 June, 0.0 miles today, 897.1 miles total, Salida, CO
The big lie about most zero days—more so on the CDT than any trail I’ve walked—is that you very rarely get though them without walking. We didn’t bother tallying the day’s off-trail miles, but could easily ballpark them somewhere between six and seven. Most Americans don’t walk that in a week, and here we were, putting those steps in on our ostensible day off from putting in steps. The problem is that as foot-powered transients, we have no vehicles in the towns we stop in, most of which have no form of public transportation. That means we walk everywhere, whether we like it or not; and if the town we’re in is as spread out as Salida, it means we walk a lot.
Unknown made it into town maybe an hour after PA and Elf had left, around the time I was heading back to the hotel from Walmart with grocery bags laden with four days of food, a can of 98.11% deet, and a variety pack of generic-brand day and ny-quils. We both had packages waiting for us on the other end of town, so we walked down that way. In addition to the package I was expecting with a new pair of shoes and a few other odds and ends, I discovered (or rather, Unknown discovered and pointed out to me) the packages I had specifically asked the folks at Ghost Ranch whether they had forwarded to Salida as I’d requested and which which they had specifically told me they hadn’t. That made the resupply I had just purchased, opened, and repacked in town redundant. This was trail food we had been forwarding to ourselves since Silver City, NM. And now we were just gonna have to forward it on. Again.
Well, if walking for hours hadn’t spoiled our time in town, another errand wouldn’t either. We’d just have to hope that between all the running around, the necessary gear repair, the clean up, the reorganizing, and the shopping, we might actually find a moment during our day of rest to, like, you know, rest.
