We are finally on the Colorado Trail!

There were several steps to get here, and we have received a lot of help from our family and friends. Our neighbors drove us to the bus stop. The bus (driven by our bus driver neighbor!) took us to the light rail. The light rail took us to the airport where we stayed at a hotel for our early morning flight. The flight took us to New Mexico, where some of Julie’s father’s friends picked us up at the airport and brought us to his house.

We spent some time with Julie’s father and did some light hiking up at 7000 feet elevation to try to start getting acclimated to the altitude and, as it turned out, also getting acclimated to 90 degrees and sunny weather.

Then we drove up to Colorado where we visited my sister at 8300 feet , then to Denver where we stayed with my father while we did our final preparations.

After a day of visiting with family, my dad drove us here to the trailhead early in the morning. My dad is a critical part of our support team - he is our emergency contact, he will bring a box of stuff to us at trail mile 70 on day five so that we can change our minds and exchange things that we brought with different stuff, and also get a little more food. He will mail a resupply box to us around mile 200, and likely will be our ride out if something goes wrong and we have to leave the trail. Assuming everything goes as planned, he will pick us up in Durango at the end of the hike.

Those same friends who picked us up at the airport are going to let us stay at their condo in Frisco at trail mile 104. We also have friends who are looking in on our house, and others helping take care of our garden while we are away for two months.

Some people do this trail without all this support, but we feel very fortunate to have so many friends and family members making this easier for us.

We plan to keep posting updates here at this URL as we make progress on the trail. We will probably only be able to update the blog when we are in towns with good service (about once a week), but we may occasionally be able to post from ridge tops or other places with cell service.