Brian’s Microblog

July 12, 2026

We didn’t sleep as well as we had hoped - maybe the motel bed was too comfortable. Julie got up early and walked to Walmart but didn’t find much of what we wanted. The motel breakfast started at 7:30 which felt late to us, but they had a few nice things.

We spent over an hour doing sink laundry and washing our camp cookware and mugs. I worked on updating the blog and ran into some difficulties because Flickr (where all my photos are hosted) did a major update to their app. Eventually I found a way around the problem.

The main shopping area in Salida is in the old downtown, over a mile and a half from our motel. I looked at Lyft but they wanted $40 for a ride so we decided to walk. There are some neat old houses - Salida was founded in 1880.

Between Natural Grocers, Salida Mountain Sports, and Safeway we found most of what we wanted and substitutes for the things we couldn’t find. Not having our box meant we had to change several meal plans.

There is a candy shop that has some nostalgic candy - it was fun to see candy from the 1950’s, 60’s, etc. We got some Big Hunks (which don’t melt) and some hard candy.

There was a group of mostly KTM riders from the Denver area on a three day loop taking jeep roads to Lake City and on to other destinations - it’s going to take us a week to get to Lake City! We talked with one of the guys for a while and I would definitely like to bring a motorcycle out to explore some of the jeep roads in the area.

We had a tasty pizza for lunch at Moonlight Pizza & Brewing.

The bags of food, stove fuel, and toiletries felt heavy as we walked back to the motel. Julie sorted out the food and repackaged some things while I worked on the blog, paid some bills, and caught up with emails.

My dad had been valiantly exploring every avenue at the Post Office to try to figure out why our wayward resupply box went to Kansas, and when it would get to Salida. No explanation could be found, but it went from Kansas to Alaska - WTF USPS!

We walked to Casa Calaca for dinner and had some entertaining drinks. The food was good, too.

Julie researched the next stretch of trail and we did some planning. If we returned to the Boss Lake trailhead it would be 112 miles to Lake City where we would resupply. If we skipped the trail between Boss Lake and Monarch Pass it would only be 101 miles. We weren’t sure how many days it would take us, but we decided to skip the 11 miles. We can stop at Monarch on our way back from Denver to New Mexico and hike those 11 miles and pick up the resupply box that will (presumably) be waiting at the Butterfly House.