Brian’s Microblog

July 28, 2026

We left the Avon Hotel at 7:00. We walked to the Whistlestop gas station at the south end of town. We got some sausage and egg bagel sandwiches for breakfast and ate them.

Then we went out to the highway to hitch a ride up to Molas Pass. Unfortunately very few vehicles were going south of town. Lots of people went to the gas station and then went north or back into the town. Eventually a truck with three Hispanic guys stopped and picked us up. It was a little bit different than our previous hitches because there was very little conversation, and what little there was took place mostly in Spanish. We arrived at the Molas Pass scenic overlook a little bit before 8:00.

Note that this hitch has us missing about 6 miles of trail from the train tracks up to Molas Pass. We had been told that there was a way to take the train back to the flag stop and continue the hike without any gaps. However, it turns out that we would have had to buy round-trip tickets from Silverton to Durango and back, then I think ride all the way from Silverton to Durango and then get dropped off on the way back to Silverton. Those round trip tickets are very expensive and it would take all day to ride the train back and forth, so we are missing six more miles of Colorado Trail.

We walked for a couple hours and then stopped and ate the leftover pizza from the night before at a fairly scenic spot.

We walked another hour and stopped around noon to eat the sandwich that we had gotten “to go” from the restaurant. As we ate, the skies darkened further and it started raining. We decided to sit out the rain since we already had a pad set up to sit on. We were also not going because we could hear thunder. It mostly seemed to be just cloud to cloud lightning since we did not see any strikes, but we were nearing a saddle and did not want to be exposed during the thunderstorm. The rain was heavy off and on for about half an hour.

Eventually, the rain stopped and the skies got a little brighter so we decided to get going again. We hiked up for another 20 minutes or so and it started hailing. We found a little place to put our sitting pad and sat out the brief hail storm.

Finally, the hail subsided to a light rain and we made it up to the saddle only to find that the trail followed around the shoulder of a mountain to a different saddle a couple hundred feet higher up and across the small valley. The clouds continued to look threatening, but it was only light rain off and on.

As soon as we crossed this higher saddle we looked out on a sunny valley, and the weather looked much better on that side. We walked a couple hundred feet down from the pass and took all our rain gear off. We continued hiking down and within 10 minutes we had to put our rain gear back on because, despite the sun shining, it began raining again. It rained for a surprisingly long time all while the sun shone on us.

We finished listening to the audiobook Listen for the Lie. It was enjoyable - the writing is good and the personalities of the characters are interesting, but the mystery hinges on a sort of hard to believe event.

Eventually, the rain stopped and we stopped for a snack and to let some of the rain gear dry out.

The valley was pretty and we descended quite a way before following around a mountainside to Cascade Creek. There are a number of good campsites near a bridge that crosses the creek, but the best sites were already taken when we arrived at 4:00. We found a less-sheltered site and set up the tent just before another rain shower.

After pumping up our air mattresses we laid down and read for a while. The rain ended and we kept relaxing until we realized we should probably make dinner. We got out of the tent and found “Lifer” talking to our new neighbors. He was camped just a little further upstream. We talked to him while Julie made some Italian split pea soup she’d found at the Silverton grocery. It tasted good but maybe a bit too salty. We split a giant rice crispy treat for dessert.

We’d used the last of our water to make the soup so we had to go filter more from the creek. We talked to Lifer a bit more since he was close to where we got the water. Then we went to bed - neither of us had slept very well the second night in Silverton.

14 miles in eight hours.