Day 65: 20 June, 16.0 miles today, 913.1 miles total, San Isabel NF, CO
The wind was a living nightmare from the moment we exited the camper van whose driver had so kindly agreed to ferry us all the way to the parking lot at Monarch Pass. We’d stopped talking to Coloradans about it, actually, because the conversation was always the same: “Well, I lived here 5 years…” “I lived here 20 years…” “I lived here all my life, and I’ve never seen wind like this.” Bullshit—we had been living in Colorado almost a month and had seen this same damned wind pretty much every day. This constant gale that blew through the mountains, knocking you off balance and leaving you cursing the very air itself, this was a Colorado wind, as much a part of the state as the Rocky Mountains, overhopped beer, or (apparently) 20-year old jam band music.
The wind made it all but impossible to appreciate anything else. The trail tread wasn’t hateful, the climbs manageable (if long), the views spectacular. We’d finally bridged the San Juan range to the Collegiate range. No more road walking through sun-baked prairie. No more steep climbs up mountains that had been only fair to middling. We were back in amongst true alpine splendor—and we were gonna work for it. As an alternate route for the Colorado Trail, the West Collegiate route, official red line CDT trail all the way, was actually maintained. So even though several of the climbs took an abruptly cruel turn near the end and basically just started going straight fucking up, at least the path wasn’t also littered with 20 years of dead trees.
We had to push to get to our agreed-upon campsite—it had almost been midday by the time we even got to the trailhead—and the sun was setting by the time we’d gotten the tent up. It was freezing; maybe not technically, but it was one of those evenings where everyone eats as fast as she can and goes running for cover. We were back in the mountains, back above 12,000, back freezing our tired asses off above treeline. We could only hope the mountains appreciated it.
Day 66: 21 June, 20.7 miles today, 933.8 miles total, San Isabel NF, CO
It was difficult to accept that the summer solstice both began and ended with Sean Meadow and I wearing almost everything we had, huddled in our sleeping bags, and still uncomfortably cold. Like most unpleasantries in Colorado, it somehow seemed deliberate and unfair—as if the temperature was something the CDT was doing to us. Why else would it keep getting below freezing in the middle of fucking June?
We were back in snow country—now that my micro spikes had migrated to the very bottom of my pack. So far, we’d seen little more than small patches, most of which were equally easy to avoid or cross. If we were lucky, this trend would continue and we could shed our snow gear in less than a week; but being lucky wasn’t exactly our habit, so we were mentally preparing ourselves to lug that gear all the way to Wyoming.
20 miles was a big ask today, and probably would be until we finally left this state behind in 400 miles (give or take). It was undeniable that we’d become stronger, faster hikers since we’d set out from the Mexican border two months prior—but it felt as if the terrain had outmatched our process by a grossly inappropriate amount. You really can’t focus too much on the big picture when thru-hiking, or you will absolutely fall to pieces. You just have to trust the the daily, incremental progress you’re making is going to be enough. The thing is, that’s hard when it’s getting into late-June and a 20-mile day feels like it breaks some piece of your soul you can never recover. When the small picture is this difficult, the big picture just seems laughable. Impossible. Stupid.
Of course, it doesn’t help matters that you’re still trying to get over being sick, not getting enough sleep, and falling into coughing fits anytime your lungs have to work hard. Maybe the best thing you can do for your hike right now is to stop writing in your dumb diary and get a little sleep while you’ve got the chance.
Day 67: 22 June, 23.0 miles today, 956.8 miles total, Collegiate Wilderness, CO
We pushed hard today, climbing more vertical feet in a single day than we had thus far, and making better mileage at the same time. It was gratifying, but exhausting. I could point out details—such as my profound personal disappointment that the Cottonwood Pass trailhead/parking did not have a pit toilet after a morning spent above treeline in desperate need of a place to poop, or the bird’s eye view we had coming down Lake Ann Pass of the overnighters with a campfire and a highly instagrammable tent site next to the lake that was going to warm them freezing wind and copious condensation, or the fact that today I renamed snow “trash water” because fuck snow—but the day’s hiking left me completely worn out, so I will talk about none of those things.
Day 68: 23 June, 20.0 miles today, 976.8 total, White River NF, CO
Different people handle different aspects of hiking differently. I mean, duh, but what I’m getting at is that in my experience shorter people tend to hate going uphill but relish going down; it is tall people—who may not necessarily love going uphill either—that recognize the grueling, unending misery that is downhill. For us, it feels like falling, but with a constant bodily flailing to keep a patina of control over the endeavor. Going downhill strains the muscles and slams the joints while the brain works overtime to keep the body from going ass over teakettle. It’s painful, it’s stressful, and it takes forever. Meanwhile, short hikers literally run down the mountain.
We had a pretty easy morning. After a steady diet of steep climbs and steep descents, we’d been granted a few mile’s reprieve, a gentle walk through a valley, the trail occasionally rolling up a bit or down, but never very much and never for long. We’d fallen farther behind Unknown since the first night out of Salida: his ambition had landed him a couple of miles ahead of us on the second night, and by the third he was five miles up. It was impressive, especially since we were convinced on the third night we must be close behind, considering we hiked until 2000hrs and all. Nope.
Our easy morning came to an abrupt end when we came to a trail junction, where the CDT turned up a drainage and went straight up to Hope Pass. It was as if the trail had heard our complaints re: all the steep ups and downs of the last 80 miles, and its measured response was, “if you wanna cry, I’ll give you something to cry about.” A 2,400’ climb in 2.3 miles—not only had we not yet tackled anything that steep on the CDT, I was hard pressed to think of another trail I’d ever hiked with a grade like that. 2,400’. That’s just under half a mile, straight up. It was a shock to the system to hike up that grade for that long; when the trail would level out momentarily so that it was only steep instead of vertical, the sense of relief that washed over me was both immense and a bit concerning.
The grade on the way down the north slope wasn’t nearly as murderous/suicidal, but it still wasn’t easy. We were trying to hit up a small, extremely overpriced general store (in a town called Twon Lakes, consisting almost entirely of that shop, a burger stand, and two lakes), and we needed to make to good time to get there before it closed. I was doing the best I could with the uneven, downhill terrain, but it wasn’t long before Sean Meadow came flying by. We stopped for a quick snack, but the moment we stepped back on the trail, she vanished. Short people and their downhills.
The walk to town included a two-mile roadwalk, which I happened to start just as the rain hit. While I was grateful not to have been up at the bare and exposed pass while it was storming, it still wasn’t fun. The wind whipped cold rain at me while I stumbled into the brush to avoid each oncoming car. I’ve certainly found more enjoyable ways to pass 40 minutes, but few of them ended with meeting not only Sean Meadow and Unknown, but also Elf and PA right across from the burger stand. PA, who’d arrived in town that morning with Elf and had apparently been drinking ever since, was particularly overjoyed. “The band’s back together!” he exclaimed several times.
We all ate our fill, bought what we needed from the extremely overpriced general store to fill out our food supply, and started working our way back to the CDT. The town food did a number on several people’s tummies, and there were a few mad dashes into the woods during our short hike to camp—though surprisingly I was fine. We found an area the guide had over-promised would be a camper’s delight, but we made do with a few lumpy spots, and then everyone went to bed early, driven into our tent’s by the evening rain. It was good to have the band back together, to be sure, but damned if the band wasn’t sleepy.
Day 69: 24 June, 23.2 miles today, 1000.0 miles total, Holy Cross Wilderness, CO
When we woke up, everything was wet. You do what you can to mitigate the problem, but sometimes the moisture just wins—and Colorado, we had learned, is a moist state. None of us would have been surprised at this point to have seen that single word printed along the bottom of the state’s license plates. Our entire experience of the last 400ish miles was of managing wet feet, wet clothes, wet tents, wet sleeping bags: half from snowmelt, the other half from condensation. We had only barely entered what the locals referred to as “monsoon season.”
There’s not much you can do with a tentful of soaking wet gear but pack it up and hope for a few minutes of sun later in the day, so that’s what we did. As we were getting ready to leave, we were taken aback by a stream of maybe two dozen parents and small children, all marching up the blocked-off access road by which we’d camped. These were people who had slept indoors, in (presumably) dry beds, who had gotten dressed for an early-morning nature walk, so they could walk by me at 0600hrs, standing in my long underwear in the morning dew and brushing my teeth.
We’d only vaguely begun to realize it, but we’d entered an area heavily frequented by both day-hikers and weekend backpackers. My first encounter had been a couple miles out of Twin Lakes, when I’d had the stereotypical experience of a seasoned thru-hiker encountering a day-hiker in the woods: I could smell them well before I could hear or see them. Thru-hikers stink, and badly, but normal people have a reek all their own. I couldn’t place it right away, but I noticed that the forest had become saturated with a cloying, sickly sweet perfume, harsh and artificial—like a clown had exploded inside a fake-flower factory. I recognized the source shortly before I saw them: two young women, redolent with the scent of fabric softener, soap, and perfume. It’s a combination of smells most Americans without specific allergies or chemical-sensitivities barely notice, if they do at all. Spend enough time living in the mountains, though, and you lose the desensitization you had previously taken for granted: most Americans smell like a child burping frosting into your face.
And suddenly they were everywhere. We had gone from seeing nobody but ranchers in the backwaters of New Mexico, to seeing nobody else in Colorado at all, to being suddenly inundated by casual outdoors people, many of whom looked like spooky, cleaner versions of us—just with nicer clothes, heavier shoes, larger packs, and a general aura of some artificial rose-scented chemical. The novelty wore off fairly quickly, as we found ourselves constantly stepping off the trail to let them by, or gently asking to pass if we were moving in the same direction. It’s hard to find the right internal balance, because on the one hand you recognize that these people have as much right to the wilderness as you do, and a part of you is genuinely happy to see so many people take at least a weekend-level interest in something into which you’ve already invested two months of your life. On the other hand, this endless stream of bodies is an obnoxious obstacle, just one more thing you have to dodge on the trail, and you will be frustrated and baffled by the fact that it isn’t even technically the weekend yet, and seriously don’t any of these motherfuckers have jobs?
It was a bit before 1100hrs when we finally found a clearing with an accompanying sunbeam to “yardsale” our gear, spreading it out in the sun to dry. I was banking on a solid 20 minutes—pretty much all of our stuff is built to survive getting damp and is made to dry quickly. The occasional obscuring cloud notwithstanding, the plan went off without a hitch. I had just checked everything and was sitting down to give everything a couple more minutes, when without transition or warning it suddenly started raining. There was a mad dash to get everything—especially the down-filled gear—put away as quickly as possible. In less than 90 seconds, we had everything packed up and were huddled under a series of nearby trees when the rain turned to sleet.
It passed quickly, and once again we were on our way. Sean Meadow and I would be stopping in Leadville, but the others had different plans that would take them ahead of us. We’d meet up with them in a few days, after they’d stopped in one of the towns a little bit further. But in the meantime, we wanted to get as close to the trailhead as we could manage. So we bid a temporary farewell to Elf and PA as a dense cloud of mosquitoes tried over and over again to pierce our protective deet shield, and did the same at Unknown’s campsite a mile farther on. We knew we’d hit our 1,000th mile if we walked far enough, and that seemed as good a stopping point as any, though we were far too tired to do much of anything in celebration beyond writing “1000” in a bank of snow. Despite being on a colder, more exposed side of the mountain than the others’ camps, ours was no less buggy; but we managed to eat and get into our shelter without succumbing to the hoard. Mosquitoes rule the moist woods of the Colorado Rockies, and their dominance is impossible to deny—but in the sanctuary of our mostly-dry tent, at least, we were safe.
Day 70: 25 June, 8.0 miles today, 1008.0 miles total, Leadville, CO
A blessedly short day that started with me getting lost. I wasn’t sure at what point the trail I was following had stopped being the CDT—I only really noticed when it stopped being a trail, at which point I figured out the real thing was a 1/4 mile to the northeast over a series of rocky hills. Maybe I’d been distracted by the obnoxiously chronic cough I still couldn’t shake despite in other other ways feeling healthy, or maybe it was the marmot that had watched me with suspicion from a rock until I was right next to it, at which point it dove into a hole and started yelling at me from its refuge in its eerie marmot whistle-language. Or maybe the CDT just isn’t well-marked a lot of the time, and maybe I need more than the one cup of instant coffee before starting my day.
At any rate, I met Sean Meadow at the trailhead well within the agreed-upon timeframe, we got a ride into town without too much trouble, and got started on our town chores. We were lucky to have a pretty easy day, and the hotel let us check in early. While I never did figure out why the single toilet needed two tp dispensers, the room was clean and comfortable and sheltered us from the rain that would roll in over the evening. We’d be hiking out into it the next day, but for the night at least, we’d be dry.
For once.
