Colorado Trail Day 5
June 29, 2026
We got up and took quick showers (again!) and then walked a mile into Bailey to eat breakfast at the Cutthroat Café.
A young couple who had passed us by with their dogs at our first campsite recognized us at the cafe. They had gotten off-trail because their dogs were struggling after the exposed segment 2. She is going to continue from Kenosha Pass, but he will stay home with the dogs. Anyway, they told us about a forest fire near Leadville and apparently a couple trail segments are closed at this time. That is still a week ahead of us so we will have to see what develops in the meantime.
We got a ride from the café from David, a school teacher in Bailey who lives only a couple miles from the Rolling Rock trailhead, which is where we needed to get back on trail. He was nice enough to take us back to the Two Bridges Lodge so we could pick up our backpacks and then take us up to the trail. We learned about a big wind storm That occurred in this area in December, and many trees have been blown over and there are some thinning and fire brick cutting operations going on. We would walk through one of them about a mile at the trail.
We hadn’t crossed paths with too many other through hikers in the previous segments, but we found several other people who are also hiking the whole trail at the start of this segment. We got on the trail at almost exactly 9 o’clock.
This segment climbs over 3000 feet so we definitely started climbing right away. After about a mile and a half we entered the Lost Creek Wilderness.
The trail begins following and what used to be an old road. We interrupted a mother Dusky Grouse and her little ones, a couple of which went to the other side of the trail so we stopped so the family could reunite.
Initially the old road is fairly pleasant with a few somewhat steep climbs, but generally level or rolling. However, about 5 miles in after crossing a creek, the road begins to climb steeply. The steep and rocky climb continues for over a mile. Eventually, a trail breaks from the road and goes uphill from there! The road was very rocky and difficult to walk on even if it hadn’t been so steep, but at least the trail starts with a nicer tread. However, as the trail continues up the hill there becomes less and less soil, so it becomes rocky as well. In just over 2 miles the trail gains 1200 feet elevation.  Eventually, at about 10,600 feet elevation, the trail reaches a little spring where we filtered a couple liters of very chilly water.
After that, the trail slowly descends, joining another old road on the south facing slope of a ridge where we saw only coniferous trees.
After a mile or two of gradual descent, the trail leaves the Wilderness and emerges into a long meadow in the valley of the North Fork of Lost Creek. It goes up this valley at a slight slope for 6 miles. Light smoke from some distant fire seemed collect in the valley.
Somewhere near the start of hiking up this valley we would have passed trail mile 49, which means that we were 10% finished!
We got really tired about half way up the valley. We realized we hadn’t really eaten anything since lunch and it was almost 5:00. We stopped to rest and eat some snacks, then filtered some more water, then finally arrived at the campsites we had planned to reach at 7:30. A long day!
We made dinner and set up the tent. The site that we chose had a magnificent view back down the valley to the east that we had hiked up. We saw a couple deer out there late in the evening. They took off suddenly and a little while later we heard some coyotes. We finally got to bed just after the full moon rose, red from the smoke, around 9:15.
14.4 miles and 3000 feet total elevation gain over ten and a half hours.