Day 71: 26 June, 10.2 miles today, 1018.2 miles total, San Isabel NF, CO
If it had been raining when we left the hotel in Leadville, we’d have marched straight back inside and booked another night. We knew the forecast, but the promise of rain later was made bearable by the fact that it wasn’t actually happening yet; so we stood by the roadside with our thumbs out, smiling at the passing traffic like dry idiots until a man wandered over from the hotel parking lot to ask where we were headed.
We explained to him where we needed to go, Tennessee Pass. He said he knew it, and we jumped into his sedan and headed north, quickly bypassing the turn to Hwy 24 that would take us back to the trail. We both tried to explain to him that he was going the wrong way, but there was absolutely no convincing him. You want to be pleasant and polite to the person doing you a favor for no personal gain whatsoever, but he simply wouldn’t accept the fact that we were on Hwy 91, not Hwy 24. “I know this road like the back of my hand,” he insisted, driving us farther and farther away from our destination.
I don’t know how Sean Meadow finally got through to him, but it was she who eventually convinced him we were on the wrong road. Once he accepted the validity of what we’d been telling him since the turn I pointed out to him and he’d ignored, he was super good-natured about it, self-effacing and apologetic. He took it with good humor. It had just been a surreal experience riding the wrong way with a driver so utterly convinced he was right.
When we got to the trailhead, there was another pair of hikers thumbing for a ride into Leadville, so we exchanged places with them—but not before posing for a souvenir photo for our beleaguered driver. That done, we shouldered our packs and started up the trail, just as the first drops of rain started to fall. It wasn’t bad, really, just a light pittle pittle pittle against the hood of our rain jackets. It even cleared up long enough for us to eat a quick lunch just outside a long row of abandoned army barracks. The dark mass following us from the west as we started walking again, however, did not look promising.
We had just begun a long, 3,000’ climb when the weather broke, and we struggled up the side of the mountain in a cold, soaking downpour. We were freezing, and neither of us was willing to push on in the rain above treeline, where we would then have to walk miles of open, exposed ridgeline, all above 12,000’. We found a viable campsite about halfway up the slope, and set up the tent in as sheltered a spot as we could manage. It was barely 1600hrs, but we were wet, cold, and miserable. So we climbed into our shelter and tried to warm up while waiting for the weather to pass. We could only hope that the next day would bring us better luck, and less rain. In the meantime, we’d bury ourselves in our sleeping bags and while away the evening with podcasts, bad jokes, and dreams of someplace warm and dry.
Day 72: 27 June, 26.8 miles today, 1045.0 miles total, Dillon, CO
The rain had largely stopped by 1900, leaving us with the surreal experience of just hanging out in the tent, next to the trail, just kind of waiting in slowly-fading sunlight for everything to dry…but nothing did. What followed was the most miserably cold night we’d had so far, the pervasive moisture making it impossible to get warm or comfortable. While still above freezing, this was the kind of cold you feel in your bones. Neither of us really slept, and it was something of a relief when the alarm went off at 0500hrs. At least then we could do something.
I was packing up the sodden, dripping tent when I heard a sudden, sharp sound coming from my backside. My $75 rain pants had ripped down the butt. This was the first time I’d worn them for anything but laundry, and they were ruined.
There’s a delicate dance most hikers do between gear that is lightweight and gear that is durable to withstand the rigors of thru-hiking. Ideally, you can find pieces that satisfy both requirements, though you usually have to pay more for it. That’s why I hadn’t thought twice about paying that much for a pair of lightweight pants from a niche company with a good reputation; but sometimes a promising piece of gear just sucks. I tried to adjust my now very much not rainproof pants to prevent any further damage, but as I continued to pack up the wet tent, the rip widened until it ran from the waist to the ankle. Too frustrated even to bother taking them off properly, I ripped the remainder of what was now literally a piece of trash off of my legs, cursing into the cold and humid morning air.
The weather was, in stark contrast to the forecast I’d downloaded before leaving Leadville, nice. The sky was clear and the wind was still, though everything was still damp and cold. The long, sleepless night hadn’t left me feeling great—something exacerbated by the remaining climb up the mountain, which seemed to trigger the latent cough I hadn’t been able to shake, and the fact that snowmelt had turned the alpine meadow at the top of the ridge into a muddy swamp with three inches of standing water. I was fixated on the myriad small problems that were ruining the morning, when I came upon Sean Meadow, sitting on the edge of a patch of snow, clutching her ankle. She’d twisted it, badly enough that she needed to sit down and investigate, but not so badly that she wasn’t back on her feet and leaving me on the dust after ten minutes of rest.
By around 0930, we’d come down far enough to have escaped the melting snow and the sun was high enough to be warm, so we stopped to yardsale our packs and let everything dry on a patch of rocks. It was while we were waiting that I finally had my breakfast, brushed my teeth, and did all the usual morning things I’d skipped in camp in an effort to start moving and get warm. We spent an hour sitting in the sun, slowly rotating our belongings and feeling the world slowly right itself. Sean Meadow discovered that she had cell service, and received a clutch of messages from Elf about a shortcut we could take using a bike path that would get us into town that day, instead of the next as planned. It was like a brand new start to the day when we left: our gear was dry, we were properly fed, and we knew that we’d be in a hotel bed at the end of the day.
The bike path, which lead from the Copper Mountain ski resort to the twin towns of Silverthorne and Dillon, was a flat, paved stretch that we later learned had been used heavily by CDT hikers in previous years, though we hadn’t heard of anyone taking advantage of it in 2022. I hadn’t missed the paved roadwalks of New Mexico, and the 14 miles we spend walking the path did beat my tired feet into raw hamburger by the time I stumbled into the lobby of Dillon’s Super 8; but the detour through the little tourist trap of Frisco was actually kind of fun, and allowed me to pick up a milkshake (and later a 7/11 roller hotdog) to enjoy while walking through the town.
And at the end of it, we got to sit down with our friends in a Mexican restaurant across from the first REI we’d come across on the CDT, freshly showered and stuffing ourselves with fajitas. It had been a long day, with a distinctly inauspicious beginning, and yet here we were, in town, full of hot food, and once again warm and dry.
Day 73: 28 June, 13.2 miles today, 1058.2 miles total, Ptarmigan Peak Wilderness, CO
The day’s first order of business was to stop by the UPS store and send home our ice axes. We hadn’t truly needed them—and hadn’t used them for anything but expedited cathole digging—since we’d left Pagosa Springs. Reports were that what little snow remained in Colorado was melting fast, and even those us with lightweight axes were eager to shed an item that was a pain to affix to your pack, at which point it became a hazard anytime you needed to take anything else out. We held on to these things long enough, we figured. Time to send them off.
After that, I was off to the local REI, to examine in frustration their perplexing available selection of rain pants. The only variety stocked in my size was one that cost an astounding $100 and weighed over a pound due to a huge pair of thick zippers running the length of both legs. They fit, but they were dumb. I ended up going with a pair of the lightweight variety (but still, it should be noted, thicker and seemingly more durable than the pair I’d lost to misfortune and shitty materials the day before) that was honestly too small for me, but nonetheless held together as I bent and squatted and high-legged my way around the dressing room.
We were taking the Silverthorne Alternate route, so we could avoid one of the few sections of Colorado which recent reports had suggest still harbored a troublesome amount of snow. For me, at least, it wasn’t even about the danger of slick chutes and fragile cornices; I was just sick of dealing with what I’d started calling “trash water,” and there was a way to avoid interacting with it in any way, I was on board. Taking this alternate meant that we’d be skipping past Grey’s Peak, the high point of the CDT and the only 14’er on the trail, but so be it. If going that way meant having to clamber through yet more trash water, it just wasn’t worth it to me anymore.
As it turned out, the Silverthorne Alternate was both beautifully scenic and ridiculously strenuous. The trail seemed to consist of little more than a series of steep, steep climbs and descents linking one part of the red line CDT to another. It was exhausting—and a likely sample of what we’d find once we returned to the CDT proper, now that it had finally parted ways with the carefully groomed and managed Colorado Trail—but the views were spectacular even as we climbed through the outskirts of town, and only got better as we left the day hikers behind and entered the backcountry. The next day we’d be back on the red line, back in the bubble of NOBO hikers we’d been bouncing around for most of the state. For the evening, at least, this part of the country belonged to the five of us, and not one single other soul.
Day 74: 29 June, 20.9 miles today, 1079.1 miles total, Arapaho NF, CO
I don’t know what we missed on the CDT red line, but the Silverthorne Alternate was possibly the prettiest part of Colorado we’d hiked through, in my opinion. I wasn’t an easy alternate, but generally it felt worth the work—I do wonder, however, whether those steep climbs contributed any to the pain that began gnawing into my left shin after we rejoined the CDT at lunch.
It really wasn’t unmanageable for most of the afternoon. I was moving noticeably slower than my usually slow pace, but probably only as far as I was concerned. But after taking a break before the day’s last big push, the pain got worse and I watched as everyone else slowly disappeared up the massive ridge we were climbing, until I was completely alone—I human speck, hobbling along the spine of a giant in the sky.
The solitude was kind of amazing; it’s a sort of rush to truly feel yourself alone in a landscape as vast and dispassionate as that. Well above treeline, I was as much a part of the sky as the ominous dark clouds swirling both ahead and behind me. I was a mote of dust, carried on the wind, but one whose shin was bothering them quite a bit by this point. I started thinking about how lucky we were, to be in a position to choose the ways in which our lives would be difficult; to choose the broad outlines of our own suffering, if not the specifics. Those opportunities are fleeting—even if you are fortunate not to have your difficulties thrust on you by fate, life would eventually come up with something. But at the moment, stumbling awkwardly along a path beaten atop a mountain so high it created the rain, I was among the happy few who had chosen to suffer here and now.
I got the parking lot we had agreed to camp by well after everyone else, and didn’t see a soul. I checked the area the guide had recommended, but no one was there. Assuming they must have pushed on a little bit further in search of better camping, I hiked on, but every likely site was completely empty. I climbed higher and higher, wondering where they could be, and why they’d have gone this much further without finding some way of letting me know. I had cell service, but couldn’t get ahold of anyone. I was choking back a degree of panic by that point, trying to figure out whether I should press on or turn back to the last place we’d agreed to meet when I got a text from Sean Meadow. They’d camped back where’d we planned, they’d just been hidden on the opposite side of the lot from where I’d been looking for them.
I found Sean Meadow waiting for me at the far end of the lot. We hurried down to the area where everyone else had already pitched their tents, and rushed to get outs set up. We didn’t finish a moment too soon, as it started raining almost the moment we had everything in place. We scrambled inside and made dinner in the vestibules, while I sipped a beer she had yogi’d for me from a van in the parking lot while I was limping my way down the mountain. It was a perfectly weird, but happy moment at the end of perfectly weird day. Beggars may not be choosers, but right then I don’t know what I’d have done differently.
Day 75: 30 June, 10.9 miles today, 1090.0 miles total, Arapaho NF, CO
The phrase “monsoon season” conjures up images of days of endless rain, of cobras slithering through the mud, of water pouring in sheets from thatched roofs, of a truly horrifying story a friend once told of backpacking in Southeast Asia when he discovered dozens of creepy crawlies trying to escape the rain…by joining him in his bivvy sack. But the main thing those words suggest is a warm place, somewhere tropical, where seasonal rains wreak havoc on local infrastructure, but do much to make up for the brutal heat of the rest of the year.
In Colorado, “monsoon season” means “summer,” and it is surprisingly, horrifically cold.
We got a taste of it this morning almost as soon as we started hiking. The first mile or two out of camp really wasn’t bad at all, but the moment we got above treeline, we were hit with the usual fierce Colorado wind. That wasn’t unusual in itself, but this time it was blowing mist, or clouds, or drizzle—or any case something cold and wet and being blown too fast by the gale to really take any form more substantial than “uncomfortable.” We were climbing up to a high, exposed peak, so we could immediately hike down and walk along a high, exposed ridge, the pointless of which was really brought home by the fact that for most of the way up visibility was less than 20 feet. Which was how I was surprised to find a pair of young day-hikers suddenly walking right behind me when I was still 1/4 mile or so from the summit. “Are you hiking the CDT?” one of them asked. “I am,” I replied. “You’re doing great!” she said. “I’m struggling today,” I said, opting for naked honesty. “But you’re doing it!” she said, which I guess was technically true. “What’s your trail name?” she asked. “Bodhi,” I said. “Birdie?” she asked. “Bodhi.” “Birdie!” “B-O-D-H-I” “B-R-D-H-I” I gave up. “Yes, that’s it,” I said. If this woman wanted to call me Birdie—or Brdhi—I really didn’t have the energy to try to stop her.
The way down the ridge at the backside of the peak was, if anything, worse. It was a long meander through a massive rockfield, the trail marked occasionally by cairns that were completely indistinguishable from the piles of rocks that had occurred naturally. While I had rhapsodized the day before about the joys of solitude and of choosing your own difficulties, here I felt exactly none of that. My still painful shin had left me alone once again, but this time it really sucked. The rocks aggravated the injury, and I was growing increasingly frustrated as it became increasingly obvious that I wouldn’t be able to get down off the ridge before it started raining in earnest. I lost the trail over and over again, through the rocks, under snow fields, and once as I bushwhacked through a stand of trees growing on a nearly vertical slope. I was cold and miserable and wished I was pretty much anywhere other than where I was.
When I finally made it down to the valley, I found Sean Meadow, wrapped up in a sheet of tyvek like an ersatz Bedouin. She was waiting to direct me to the small stand of trees everyone was using for shelter. I wasn’t the only one who’d been unnerved when I’d passed by the group the evening before.
She said as much to me when we left our break, fully outfitted to walk out into the rain. In fact, she stuck with me the rest of the day. We shared a tent, she pointed out, and there was no sense in the two of us getting separated. We had a brief break in the weather, which we used to quickly filter some water and gobble down a fast lunch so we could get started on our next climb before the weather really turned. We were climbing up to a high, exposed peak, so we could immediately hike down and walk along a high, exposed ridge. Yet again. But this time the weather really shit on us as we started making our way up. We met a guy who looked vaguely familiar going the other way—it turned out he was a fellow NOBO who was heading back into the valley to escape the worst of the wind and the cold, if not the rain. A few minutes later we ran into Elf and PA, who were scouting for places to camp just below treeline. It seemed too early to stop, but then Sean Meadow and I started taking another look at the situation. In half a mile, we’d be above the trees, completely exposed to the rain and the wind that would only grow colder as we climbed higher and higher. Worse, it was already 1500hrs, making the prospects of our covering before dusk the next 13 miles of difficult terrain before the trail returned to the shelter of the trees unlikely. It was frustrating, but the right move was to make camp at this spot, unplanned early day or not. That way we’d be sure to clear the open ridge tomorrow, regardless of how slow we ended up moving. We just had to
Make peace with yet another disappointingly short day. Colorado had been full of them.
Unknown had pushed on when Elf and PA stopped. That was pretty typical for those three, but still we hoped he’d made the right call. He was a fast hiker, and it was likely he’d found a sheltered spot on the ridge even if he hadn’t made it all the way down, but the roaring of the wind through the trees we had camped under was not exactly a reassuring sound.
Day 76: 01 July, 22.4 miles today, 1112.4 miles total, Arapaho NF, CO
Maybe it was the fact that we’d had to pitch the tent on a slope, or maybe it was the sporadic weather throughout the night, or maybe it was just the fact that we’d been lying around awake since 5 hours before it even got dark, but whatever the reason neither Sean Meadow nor I really slept. That was probably a contributing factor as to why, when the alarm went off at 0445 hrs and I stumbled out the tent to pee, my shin/ankle situation hurt worse than at any time up to that point. I’d hoped that yesterday’s extra hours of not walking would have cured it, but clearly that hadn’t done the trick.
It was a bummer to have lost several hours’ worth of hiking to shitty weather, but we did end up with the perfect window for summitting James Peak. The weather was crisp and clear—freezing, but what else would you expect in July in Colorado—and the scenery was expansive in every direction. Convinced as I was becoming that humans didn’t belong over two and a half miles into the sky, it was hard to argue with the view. Inhospitable to the tender human form or not, I had to admit that the mountain was absolutely beautiful.
The rest of the day was kind of a shitshow, with me trying spectacularly unsuccessfully to make up for yesterday’s lost time. I found ways to wrap my shin that would take the edge off the pain—and I spent the day on a full hospital dose of ibuprofen, but I could not get my body to move quickly with this protesting, damaged limb. In fact, despite my efforts I was still even slower than normal.
After 15 or 16 miles, the trail mellowed out, but it was too late to help me much. I’d already been beaten down by the mammoth ascent and even mammoth-er descent that had defined most of the the day up until then. The last few miles weren’t hard, per se, but they were a slog—even after I found Sean Meadow waiting for me by a creek, tucked under a sheet of tyvek to hide from the hundreds of mosquitoes circling her in the sunlight. She walked with me the rest of the day, as my energy flagged further and further. We ended up stopping 20 miles from our next town, which was an unfortunately long distance to have to cover into town, but at that point there wasn’t anything else to do. Elf and PA had made it
farther than we had, but we wouldn’t know how far until we met them in town. I desperately wished that the walk wouldn’t take all day, but the throbbing in my leg suggested otherwise.
At least if we could sleep tonight, we’d have a leg up on today. All we had to do was find a flat place to pitch the tent, and we’d be golden.
Day 77: 02 July, 20.0 miles today, 1132.4 miles total, Grand Lake, CO
So we were golden. Also wet. An apparent feature of Colorado’s monsoon season was that we would wake up every morning to a sopping wet tent that would drench anything that touched it—usually the foot box of our sleeping bags, at least.
I’d slept much better than the night before, but woke up with a stiff and painful leg situation regardless. I dismissed the hypothesis that amount or quality of sleep had anything to do with it; maybe it was more the fact that it simply hadn’t been stretched or moved all night. I took another hospital dose of ibuprofen and set about stretching out the area as best I could while Sean Meadow got started for town like a bullet clad in dirty, sweat-stained pink. I wrapped up my shin with a compression strap Sean Meadow had leant me, and then got started walking.
And then stopped. The leg was suddenly worse than ever, and I was barely moving. I readjusted the strap and tried again, but again I barely hobbled down the trail. Then I took the strap off, stowed it in my pack, and walked. I was fine. In fact, I continued to be fine almost all day. At first I wasn’t sure what the difference was, but eventually it occurred to me: the CDT, for last 20 miles into Grand Lake—unlike pretty much the rest is the state of Colorado—was more like a hiking path and less like an obstacle course. The exception that proved the rule appeared when I came to an exceptionally awkward blowdown laying across a bit of trail that had been partially washed-out. Navigating that was actually really painful, and was the worst my leg felt all day. Otherwise it was fine.
It was a pretty tedious day. It was nice not to have any major climbs to contend with, but the walk to town was generally pretty boring. I was just thinking to myself for the umpteenth time how fed up I was with the trail’s course along this or that boring-ass man-made lake, when I spotted movement in the grass abutting the lake shore. It was a moose, a giant, stately cow wandering into the lake for a drink. She was my first Colorado moose, and the first I’d ever seen while thru-hiking.
I startled the second moose maybe 15 minutes later, crossing a meadow. This one was smaller, a juvenile I’d have guessed. Her head tracked my slow walk down the trail; she stared at me with hostile suspicion until I was well out of sight. Two moose! Just when I’d given up hope of ever seeming any! I was marveling at my good fortune, with less than three miles to go, when the CDT ran straight into a bog. There was no way around, no stones to hop on nor plank bridge to cross. I’d just have to wade through it and walk into town with damp, stink-ridden big shoes. C’est la trail, I suppose. C’est la vie. At least my damn leg didn’t hurt for once.
Day 78, 03 July, 18.1 miles today, 1150.5 miles total, Never Summer Wilderness, CO
From the moment we passed the boundary marker, I struggled how the title “Never Summer” applied specifically to this designated wilderness area and not Colorado as a whole. Now into July and at elevations well below 12000’ it remained a struggle to keep warm in the backcountry.
Anyway.
The 25 miles of the CDT that pass through Rocky Mountain National Park have always posed a challenge to thru-hikers. Camping in the RMNP backcountry requires both a permit and a bear canister—and unlike other parks with this requirement (e.g., Denali and Olympic NPs, to name two from my own personal experience), this stingy-ass park doesn’t provide them. No thru-hiker ever carries a 2lb bear can unless it is required, so unless you can find someone in Grand Lake who can loan or rent one to you, camping on that stretch of trail is out. The traditional CDT hiker solution has long been to hike that section in a day and camp outside its boundaries. Unconfirmed rumors on trail suggested that as of this year, the permitting and bear can requirements would not be waived even if you had no plans to camp within the park. The only way to avoid having to find and carry (and return) the damn can, then, was to take the shortcut alternate trail that would bypass the park altogether.
The problem rendering all of the above moot was that, due to a fire last year, both the last few miles of the red line CDT and the last few miles of the shortcut alternate were closed. Reports from hikers in the guide were mixed, confusing, and unreliable, but seemed generally to suggest that passage via either path was forbidden, and that strict and grumpy rangers had been posted to deal with any hiker who chose to flout that restriction. The easiest and probably best option was simply to walk the highway into the park boundaries, and reconnect with the CDT at a point well beyond anywhere that may or may not be closed and may or may not require a permit.
It was a simple plan, tested only briefly when the young new ranger at the gatehouse on the highway attempted to charge Elf (who was in front) a $15 entrance fee before her elder coworker stuck his head out the window, asked Elf tersely “CDT?” and then waved him through. She didn’t even acknowledge the rest of us as we passed.
We ate lunch shortly after making our way back onto the CDT proper. We’d come to a stream wide and deep enough to pose a challenge. Sean Meadow and Unknown balance-walked a fallen tree several feet above the surface of the water. Elf and I were convinced we’d call if we tried such a feat, so we forded the stream—though he took off his shoes and socks to keep them dry and I just plowed straight across. We were settling down on the far side to eat when PA came charging along, feet dry from the plank bridge he’d found in plain sight beside the trail…the one the rest of us had all missed.
The rest of the day was spent navigating the Colorado CDT we’d come to know, clambering over blowdowns and trying to find the driest way to walk through a massive patch of mud—thankfully not usually at the same time, usually, though that unfortunate combination wasn’t super rare. We were enjoying a break on an open ridge, the apex of the day’s hiking, when concern bubbled up regarding some ominously dark clouds in the distance. I was in the middle of making some unfounded claim that it was probably fine when a bolt of lighting shot out of the stormy mass and stuck a peak a few miles away. Just like that, we were on our way down the far side of the pass, making our way toward the relative safety of lower ground.
An hour later, we were much lower, making our way toward camp through the forest, when the storm came. A cold rain pounded us through the pines, soaking everything not covered by rain gear. The nearly omnipresent mud became thin, slick, and oily. The thunder boomed, roared, and echoed across the mountains until it was right on top of us. I thought to try to count the seconds after a particular flash of lighting, but didn’t even finish the “one” of “one mississippi” before the thunder struck, a deafening explosion I could feel on my skin as much as hear. I was in as safe a place as I could possibly be while outside in a thunderstorm, but good lord that was far too close for comfort.
And then it was over. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later as I walked into camp, the sun was shining and the sky behind it was a clearing, open blue. Like nothing had ever happened, black clouds of mosquitoes rose from the forest around us and enveloped us as we made camp on the sodden ground. Dinner was a comical dance, everyone trying to shoo their own personal cloud away long enough to bring their food up to their face. With constant slapping coming from Unknown’s direction, he claimed to have killed at least 50 insects by the meal’s end. There was nothing left to do then, but crawl into our tents, change into dry clothes, and try to keep warm as the freezing July night rolled in.
Day 79: 04 July, 19.6 miles today, 1170.1 miles total, Never Summer Wilderness, CO
It was a pretty normal morning in Colorado. As usual, everything in the tent was soaked when we woke up, and by the time we were packed up and eating breakfast, the mosquitoes had us surrounded like Custer at Little Big Horn. Because yesterday’s storm had come so late in the day, nothing had dried, and walking to dig my morning cathole left me with shoes so wet my socks were soaked before I even got my pack on. It was going to be that kind of day, slipping and sliding along mud-washed train so rutted we frequently found ourselves suddenly walking in a sodden three-foot trench.
We had a long, long climb to the peak of the largest mountain in the area. I got there a ways after everyone else, but once I was up, I was impressed by the dark, ruinous storm cloud racing toward my incredibly exposed location. Whoops. I hadn’t been able to see the sky on the far side of the mountain, and hadn’t heard any thunder until I’d made it to the top. I hate running downhill, but I gave it my best go, as the storm seemed to be coming fast and I had a mile of exposed ridge to cover before I’d make it to the relative safety of the saddle far below. I could see the rest of the group taking a break down there, but it felt like it took me forever to cover the distance.
Once I was down, we watched the weather slowly pivot and change direction, missing our location entirely—but only just. The storm went its own way, grumbling all the while, and we went ours. We managed to stay dry the rest of the day, the price of which was the continental onslaught of overeager mosquitoes that dogged us all the way into our tents. But at least we weren’t wet when we got there.
Day 80: 05 July, 25.8 miles today, 1195.9 miles total, some cow-hammered piece of dirt, CO
It was the first dry morning, seemingly, that we could remember. The first in god knows how long that we didn’t wake up with the walls of the tent running with condensation, the feet of our sleeping bags drenched and cold. It wouldn’t last, but in the morning Sean Meadow was too excited by the change to greet the day with anything other than unbridled enthusiasm. “Our stuff is dry!” she called out to the other tents. “It’s a miracle!”
It did seem like a good omen, to be sure. Added to that was the fact that my latent, post-virus cough—which had kept me doubled over in violent spasms any time I climbed up even a modest incline—seemed to be abating bit by bit. At any rate I was now only coughing a little when going uphill, a much more delicate, almost polite little rasp that shared none of the quality-of-life-diminishing qualities of the death hack that had haunted me for weeks. My shin, too, seemed to be on the mend. It was still quite stiff in the mornings, but hadn’t risen above a dull, forgettable ache in the past couple of days. And then, somehow, I wrenched it while pooping.
The day started slow for me. Never a fast hiker, and only occasionally average, I was once again back to half-limping my way down the trail, the large dose of ibuprofen presumably doing something to take the edge off the pain in my leg, though what exactly I couldn’t say. The trail meandered around a ridge, going over a series of PUDs (or Pointless Up and Down, a term imported from the Appalachian Trail, but honestly far more applicable in this setting) so steep as to defy reason—I continually rechecked my location just to make sure that, yes, this was actually the trail I was supposed to be on. This went on until the trail disappeared entirely. I walked in the direction is was supposed to go, but there was no trail that way. I started climbing up a slope, hoping to find the trail where it crossed farther uphill, but there was no trail up there either. Supposedly, it would switchback and cross once more still farther up, so I continued onward, climbing up dead trees piled on top of dead trees, meticulously trying not to slip on slick and sodden wood as I cursed my way up several hundred feet and finally on to an old, overgrown dirt road. Things got easier after that.
I ran into Sean Meadow and Elf at a spring—the last water for the next 10 or so miles. Apparently, I had missed the older Swiss couple we’d been hiking around the last couple of days. I was moving slowly down the trail (not unusual), and Sean Meadow had asked them if they’d seen me. The wife reported that she’d last seen me hiking the wrong way down the mountain, much to Sean Meadow’s consternation. Seeing that this repartee was upsetting her, the husband managed to say in his broken English, “Is joke. No listen to my stupid wife.”
Sean Meadow and Elf had also lost the trail and had had to bushwhack uphill to find it again, which helped restore a small bit of confidence in my route finding ability. The entire rest of the day, by comparison, was a simple dirt road walk. Easy, but boring. The only break in the monotony of the long afternoon hours came when an old man in an ATV stopped to chat for a minutes, telling me he had water and cookies for thru-hikers over at his camper down the road. “But only two cookies per hiker. I hand ‘em out nowadays. Used to pass ‘em the box, but a young man took 6, if you believe that. So now I just hand ‘em out and everyone gets two.” He seemed nice enough, so I wished him well and continued on my way. A half hour later, I passed his camper with the ATV parked behind it. A hand-lettered sign read “come to the dark side—water and cookies for hikers.” I kept walking.
When I got to camp a couple of hours later, Elf’s disembodied voice reported from his tent, “man, those cookies sucked.” It was a good thing I hadn’t stopped. No sooner had Sean Meadow and I gotten the tent up than it started to rain. We’d walked ourselves into the middle of cow country, and there wasn’t a tree or any sign of shelter for miles in any direction. We’d woken up dry this morning, and now Colorado would make damn sure that wouldn’t happen again.
Day 81: 06 July, 9.8 miles today, 1205.7 miles total, Steamboat Springs, CO
We woke with all the energy and drive that town can inspire flowing in our blood. I was so eager to get going I skipped my normal cathole routine just so I could start walking that much sooner. “There are bathrooms in Steamboat Springs,” I thought, “I’ll be fine.”
The entire day was a roadwalk down CO Hwy 14. It was a short day, but even so it dragged. Road walking is about as tedious as it gets, especially when it’s a paved state highway. Even if the road hadn’t been fairly socked in, I doubt there would have been much to look at. All told, this stretch wasn’t as bad as most of the road walks in New Mexico; this was more like a reminder from the CDT that it had given us several miles of groomed, well-managed dirt track…and it could just as easily take it away again.
We made it to the intersection with CO Hwy 40 and started thumbing for a ride into Steamboat. We’d been getting passed by a slow but steady stream of cars for maybe ten minutes when the older Swiss couple came along and took a post a couple hundred feet down the road. That in itself wasn’t a big deal, but it was fairly irksome when we looked over some ten minutes after that to see them getting into a truck. They had gotten a ride. They had gotten our ride. Sean Meadow went running over toward them, asking the driver if she had room for two more. “No,” came the reply, “we’re all full.” Then the pickup with the extended-cab and completely empty bed drove away, leaving us to watch by the roadside as nearly empty vehicle after nearly empty vehicle passed us by.
Eventually, another truck pulled over and disgorged an unknown figure who was clearly a thru-hiker returning to trail. He waved us over, and the driver told us he could take us all the way to Steamboat. The guy was an impressively embittered curmudgeon, who didn’t understand what the CDT was in any way, and had no interest in learning about it. The hiker whom he’d dropped off was French, and as soon as the door was shut, he started off on how he hadn’t been able to understand a word he’d said. He was absolutely confounded when the young man, who had told him he was hiking northbound, starting walking due west. “That’s not north!” he exclaimed. “He’s going the right way,” we tried to explain, without going into the intricacies of a 3,000 mile footpath between Mexico and Canada. It just didn’t seem worth the effort.
Our driver spent most of the drive railing against the town of Steamboat Springs, which had been a great little town in the 1970s, but had gone straight to hell now that it was all “hoity-toity,” as result of the influx of “rich snobs” from California (I use the quote marks only because these were specific phrases he used a lot—despite the man’s incredible venom at the cultural, demographic, and architectural transformation of his adopted home state, I do think he had a point). When he wasn’t complaining about how hippies from the west were pricing out local “rednecks,” he regaled us with stories of all the flip-phones he’d broken or lost and been forced to replace—the latest just the night before. It was a difficult conversation to find a way to contribute to. Fortunately he didn’t seem to need us to say much of anything.
He dropped us off at the post office, a five minute walk from the diner PA and Elf had found once they’d made it into town. In a short while, we’d make the walk up to our friend P’s house, and begin the process of cleaning and repairing our gear and ourselves. When P came home, we’d pile in his truck and have a drink at a nearby brewery that overlooked the local mountains. We’d sleep in a soft bed, for once actually too warm instead of the other way around. But first we had to put down a couple plates of eggs Benedict and a gallon of coffee. We had a lot to get done, but we had to maintain our priorities.
Day 82: 07 July, 0.0 miles today, 1205.7 miles total, Steamboat Springs, CO
It was our first zero day in seemingly forever, though that did little to quell the anxiety slowly mounting in the back of mind that we (i.e., more specifically, me) were moving too slowly to finish the trail by the arbitrary deadline imposed by our jobs or the very firm deadline imposed by the autumn snows in northern Montana. Regardless of how antsy I may have felt, however, we needed a rest day. After apparently somehow re-injuring my shin while pooping, my leg was in bad enough shape that standing to grate mozzarella for P’s (delicious) artisanal homemade pizza was a painful, grueling ordeal. How I was going to walk a further 1,400 miles without remediation was an impossible question. I wasn’t.
I spent the morning bustling through all of the chores I’d been too tired to attempt the day before: repacking my food, drying the tent and ground sheet, repairing my air pad for the jillionth time. It was something of a relief just to stop running around P’s house long enough to put some ice on my shin. It was a further relief that doing so provided, well, relief. Whatever this injury was, it was confusing. Shin splints, the most commonly known overuse injury to that part of the leg, usually took weeks to months to heal, but whatever was happening seemed to bounce back much more quickly under the right circumstances. Google had proven useless in providing a contrary diagnosis. So all I could really do was ice the site and rest as aggressively as possible for the rest of the day.
The rest would be in the trail’s hands.
