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The Million Steps: Backpacking the Colorado Trail


HappyHour

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A long hike is more than a short hike extended. At nearly 500 miles long, it takes a million steps to get from Denver to Durango on the Colorado Trail. A million is, by just about anyone's reckoning, a large number. And that means that long hikes are subject to the Law of Large Numbers: anything that is not impossible is inevitable. Hike long enough and you will see beauty on a grand scale as well as many tiny ones, experience freakish weather, fall down, get lost on an easily-followed route, see unfamiliar birds and flowers and animals, encounter odd people, be surprised by gear failures, and receive unanticipated kindnesses and unexpected moments of both bliss and gloom. Take enough steps – and a million is usually enough – and all of these things will happen.

Backpacking the Colorado Trail

Hikes of a few days or maybe a week tend to be goal-oriented: get to the lake, get to the summit, complete the loop. A long hike too has a nominal goal: get to Canada or Katahdin or maybe Durango. But this goal is so far removed from all but the last few days of the hike that it becomes meaningless, a nonce word for the benefit of trailside interlocutors, an evanescence. One's focus is instead on the instant and the immanent: the next pass, the next water source, the next break, the night's campsite. But even these goals fade and dissolve, as there are many passes and campsites behind and many more ahead. You will climb that pass when you get to it, find a campsite when the day nears its end.

There are birds singing, sun shining hot or rain falling cold, flowers blooming, grass waving, bugs hopping, wind and sky and clouds. Always there is the trail, a trail that is by turns smooth, rough, slippery, wet, steep, gentle, narrow, wide, or non-existent. The trail pulls you along step by step, an almost umbilical connection that orients and engrosses even when it is barely noticed. The trail becomes like water to a fish or air to a bird; it is there, it is all around, it bounds one's world even as it leads to new worlds. You are on the trail; you are of the trail.

Colorado Trail Thru-Hike

The transition from short hike to long hike is different for every hiker and for every hike. For me, it began somewhere around mile 125 of the Colorado Trail (CT) on the extended tundra walk across Elk Ridge. From a section hike some years previous I remembered the hike up Guller Creek to Searle Pass to be something of a slog, but now found myself up there almost before I realized it, without much effort or strain. My feet, which had been stumbling and slipping for the first hundred miles, seemed to be operating without much conscious supervision. My mind was no longer attuned to the mechanics or the effort of walking; these took care of themselves. I was in the zone, the mental state where I could just enjoy the sensation of flowing through the wilderness without worry or words. I was through-hiking. Or maybe just walking.

Walking: it is among the most fundamental of human acts and attributes. As infants, learning to walk changes our relationship with the world forever. We no longer wait for the world to come to us; we go to it. It is no coincidence that we learn to talk at about the same time we begin to walk. One skill lets us describe our world; the other opens the world that our words describe. Together, these skills transform us into an active agent in the world, able to see beyond the next bend, the next rise, to imagine the possibility of a better place, and to then take ourselves to those places.

Mt. Elbert - Arkansas River on the Colorado Trail

We are good at walking. Some thinkers reflect on human physical skills and wonder how we survived: we are not fast, nor especially strong, we are not sharp of tooth or strong of claw.

But if we were not good walkers, perhaps our cleverness would be for naught. We might never have survived the various droughts and ice ages that wiped out other large mammals. When things got bad, when the climate did not suit our clothes, we got up and left, going down the road feeling bad, looking for a place where the water tastes great and the chilly winds don't blow. Walking is what we do.

On the Colorado Trail

And I am on the trail, doing my best to put this skill to use. The tundra on Elk Ridge is still soggy and brown due to the late wet spring, and flowers are scarce, but the view is still one of the best in Colorado – the wild ragged peaks of the Gore Range to the north, Mt. Holy Cross to the west, Mts. Massive and Elbert to the southwest, Jacque Peak and the Tenmile range to the south. My feet are quickly soaked – a condition that would persist for weeks through a rainy July – but I don't much mind as the walking is fine. Snowmelt springs fill every gully and provide the finest and purest drinking water imaginable.

I continue across the ridge and through Kokomo Pass, down Cascade Creek with a stop at the falls where it empties into Eagle Park. The CT follows the road into Camp Hale here, but I cut over to the Eagle River and get out my Tenkara rod, casting into every likely looking pool while following the river. Fishing with my pack on, I land a quartet of fat brook trout before intersecting with the trail, and beginning the hike up toward Tennessee Pass. Although I end up camping rather close to the highway, it's hard to imagine a much better day of hiking.

Hiking the Colorado Trail

The next days take me through the Mt. Massive Wilderness, where the late snows and daily rain showers have kept the route muddy and well-provided with mosquitoes. On a high ridge overlooking Leadville, I get out my phone and check the CT Facebook group. There is an invitation from the Colorado Trail House, a recently opened hostel, to join them tomorrow for a barbeque and live stream of the Grateful Dead's farewell concert. Tomorrow will be July 4th – what could be more American and patriotic than hamburgers, beer, and the Dead? I hustle down the trail the next morning to Halfmoon Creek, hitch a ride into Leadville and soon join a dozen hikers, travelers, and locals in partaking of Rick and Becca's hospitality, all of us in our own way reveling in the freedom of the trail and of our lives in the USA.

The next morning Rick drops Reed and me off at the trailhead. The forecast from Leadville was two days of rain followed by a clearing trend, and we hike unsurprised through the drizzle to the Mt. Elbert trail junction. I am not much of a peakbagger – my last 14er was Long's Peak in 1985, and that hardly counts as there is a county ordinance requiring all residents of Boulder to climb Long's at least once. But Elbert is the highest peak in Colorado, the Rockies, the Mississippi Basin and the second-highest peak in the contiguous states. It would be a source of everlasting shame not to make the four-mile detour off the CT and climb it. Reed and I climb a thousand feet or so up the steep trail, looking for a sheltered campsite before we hit treeline. He settles for a small site that has a suspicious bit of toilet paper sticking up out of the ground; I continue on and am rewarded with a bench site with open views of the Arkansas Valley. The rain slacks, the clouds part a bit, and I watch a hanging rainbow form and dissipate over the valley.

Colorado Trail Trip Report

Given the threatening weather, I am scrupulous in getting an alpine start the next morning, though not at the expense of forgoing my morning coffee. I am well above timberline when the sun eases up over the Buffalo Peaks and its rays wedge between the clouds, opening up views of the Collegiates to the south, Mt. Massive to the north, and Twin Lakes and the Arkansas River below. The thin light provokes a pair of ptarmigans to fly screeching down the lee side of the ridgeline out of the cold buffeting north wind. The views continue to expand until I hit the 14,000-foot level, where a cloud layer is well-settled. I spend a half-hour at the top hoping for a break, but am driven down by the cold wet wind without getting my summit view.

I head down the trail passing dozens of hikers heading up, including a sixty-eight year old man heading for his sixty-eighth summit of a 14er – and first after heart surgery. There is also a trio of CDT northbounders carrying their full packs up the south trail to the summit, where they will continue their through-hike down the north trail back to the CT/CDT. We need all the hikers we can get; they will make the country better.

Colorado Trail

The CT is at an interesting stage of development. It is not nearly as popular as the AT or PCT, the latter being especially busy this year due to the Wild movie effect. Most days I pass a couple of NOBO CDTers, but encounter no other CT hikers. There is not a lot of trail angeling going on – a bag of Jolly Ranchers in Long Gulch (mile 50) and a cooler full of sodas near Wurtz Ditch (mile 145) are the only stationary trail magic I will encounter – but the operators of hostels and stores in the towns along the CT are aware of the trail and no longer mistake hikers for hobos. Ten years ago I was only grudgingly served a hamburger at the Mt. Princeton resort, and the server seemed shocked when I paid by credit card. But now we have become welcome customers. Even better, stores have begun stocking items that hikers need – HEET, canisters, freeze-dried dinners, Pop-Tarts, Snickers, and more – as I discover when I make it down to the Twin Lakes General Store later in the morning. As pleased as I am with the General Store, I am distressed by the lack of opportunities for a second breakfast, as I have been craving waffles all day.

The dining room at the Twin Lakes Inn does not open until 2p.m., so the hikers hang out at the primitive cabin rented out by the general store, sorting resupplies, trading information on trail conditions and hikers ahead and behind, eating junk food, and being stared at by tourists heading to Aspen. We wave; most wave back with delighted grins, some snap their heads forward and pretend they weren't looking. Not everyone is ready to distinguish hikers from hobos. It starts raining, and I head for my room at the inn for a nap. A check of the weather report reveals a forecast of rain for the next two days followed by a clearing trend, so I decide to stay an extra day. I am meeting my wife in Salida and am a day ahead of schedule; no point in spending an extra day dawdling on the trail in the rain.

Mt. Elbert - Colorado Trail

We pay our bill and adjourn to the hiker shack for more talk, but soon it is well past 9, almost 10, a scandalously late hour for hikers. In the morning we split between those following the standard East Collegiate route and those going west. The east route skirts the Arkansas face of the Collegiate Range. Although it has plenty of up and down, the elevations are mostly below 11,000 feet and the trail is a forest trail. The west route follows the CDT up and over Hope Pass, Lake Ann Pass, and a host of other passes named and unnamed, threading its way through and around a series of 14ers. It is largely above treeline and mostly exposed. The weather makes me consider taking the east route, but I have section-hiked it before and so go west. I can deal with the rain.

The rain does not take long to appear, and my poncho is on before I have finished the 2 miles of road walk to the Willis Gulch Trailhead. I stop to pull out my phone and check my location and a chickadee flies out from its nest in a nearby bush, bravely attacking me and driving me off. I pick up Hamid along the way, the only other hiker going the west route, and we hike together until he gets ahead and takes a wrong turn while I am dawdling. It's a 3000 foot climb up to Hope Pass and not great fun in the rain, but it is just rain – there is no thunder and lightning to stop my progress. The rain lets up for a while and I enjoy a break on the lee side of the pass, with its views of Missouri, Columbia, LaPlata, Huron, and other 14ers before heading down to Clear Creek and beginning the climb up to Lake Ann Pass through intermittent showers.

Mt. Elbert & the Collegiates on the Colorado Trail

The wildlife takes advantage of the occasional breaks in the weather, and I see deer, beavers, and woodpeckers going about their business. I stop below timberline, take off my poncho and pitch it as a tarp. Although it has rained most of the day, I am only wet from the knees and elbows out, and quickly dry off using one of my three bandannas, change into a dry pair of socks (I brought four), and enjoy an appetizer of triple chocolate trail mix. It begins raining again after dinner, this time with thunder and wind and I sleep all the more soundly, secure and warm under tarp, bivy sack, and sleeping bag.

I've passed an important trail marker, but it is not one that measures miles. It is the one that says I have passed the point of worrying about the weather or anything else on the trail. It's the one that says "This way: just keep walking".

Need to Know

Information

The best information on the Colorado Trail comes from the Colorado Trail Foundation. If you are hiking the trail (or even just thinking about it), you should donate money or sweat to the foundation to help maintain this national treasure.

Best Time to Go

June through September to avoid most early season snowpack and chilly fall weather / snow.

Getting There

Neither of the trail terminals are very accessible by public transportation. Unless someone is driving you, you will need some combination of planes, light rail, buses, and taxis to get to Waterton Canyon (near Denver), Junction Creek (near Durango), or any points between.

Book and Maps

The official data book can be found here at Amazon. The current data book has been updated to include the new (and superb) section of the Collegiate West Route. The Colorado Trail Guidebook is also a suggested resource. It contained all the information I needed for planning. The National Geographic Trails Illustrated Colorado Trail Map Pack covers the trail. On the trail I used FarOut's CT app frequently, and found it well-designed and very useful. It includes the current Collegiate West Route.

Editor's Note: You can read part 2 and the continuation of this article here in Issue 27. This article by contributor Drew "HappyHour" Smith originally appeared in Issue 27 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here for additional photos and content. Download the high definition copy of Issue 27 here ($10) or included with an active TrailGroove Premium Subscription.

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