Contributed by:
Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com
Article Contributed on: 6/28/2006 5:07:25 PM
Emily and I decided last weekend would be a nice time to head up into the mountains for a little camping trip. I realize now that it was a little ambitious to try to hike 17 miles between 8,500 and 11,300 feet and sleep at 10,600 feet, especially this early in the summer. But it's nice to get out into the great outdoors, and why should we wait for the "perfect" weekend later in the summer.
I was thinking the same thing when we were standing a few hundred feet below Grassy Pass and it started to rain, just after two giant thunderclaps. Then it sleeted a little bit. Then we lost the trail under a huge patch of snow.
The first wrong turn we made, however, or, I should say, I made, was early in the day, when I failed to see the sign for Colorado 14 off of Colorado 287 west of Fort Collins. That cost us at least 45 minutes. However, we made it to the trailhead and actually started hiking by 11:30, when it was nice and hot.
At noon, uphill.
12:30: Mosquitos.
From about 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., we climbed and climbed, slowly but surely, until we were finally on top of Grassy Pass, which was still covered in snow. The clouds were dark and rolling right over our heads, which made me worry that I was going to get nailed by a bolt of lightning, but I didn't tell Emily that. As we went down the other side of the pass, we started seeing alpine lakes to the west. They were beautiful, and I wished we had more time to stop and look at them, but we needed to get out from under a storm, so we took a couple of photos and tramped on.
About an hour later, the trail faded next to a small lake, and under the trees, we found lots of snow. The trail went under the snow and usually popped out the other side. One time, it didn't. We totally lost it and spent a good 15 minutes wandering around trying to find it again, then decided the hell with it, we'll just go north and we'll eventually run into it again.
And we did, but not before we had to pick our way down a creek drainage and try to tiptoe across a marsh without soaking ourselves. After we found the trail, we pushed on for another mile and finally got to Camp Lake at 7:30. Every piece of land sloping more than 1 degree off "flat" was soaked, so we ended up pitching our tent a totally illegal 100 feet from the lake itself. I filtered enough water to get us through the next day, and both of us were too tired to cook, so we ate some granola bars and went to bed.
I had forgotten how dark it can get out in the wilderness, until Emily woke me up at about midnight, asking me what the flashing light was outside the tent. We had only seen two other people since 3 p.m., and they were the nice guys camped about a hundred yards behind us. A light was flickering five or six times about every ten seconds. I grunted that it was "probably heat lightning" and tried to keep sleeping. Nope. Okay, so we zipped open the door of the tent and looked north. There was a thunderstorm probably 15 miles northeast of us. There was lots of lightning, but we couldn't hear any thunder. Back to sleep.
We were up at 5 a.m., packed and walking by 6 a.m., and trying to bushwhack around the marsh surrounding the lake until almost 7 a.m. It took us almost five hours to get through the seven miles back to the car, and almost another three to get back to Denver, where we demolished the buffet at
Sweet Tomatoes.
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