Brian’s Microblog

June 27, 2026

We slept a little better as it was substantially cooler than the night before. We got up a little before six and decided to just strike camp and head to a trailhead with a toilet, getting us on trail at 6:30. About a mile down the trail at the Little Scraggy trailhead we took care of “business” and then made hot drinks and had some protein pucks for breakfast. The bathroom here was surprisingly popular, with several people driving in just to use the bathroom and others using it before heading out with their mountain bikes.

Our walk from the trailhead started through a nice Ponderosa forest with interesting large rocks scattered here and there. Eventually, it dropped down into a little valley with some aspen trees along a creek.

The little valley was underneath some very large and impressive rock formations. We went about 3 miles and took a break to have a snack and some drinks. We found a tick here on Julie’s sleeve.

We finished the break around 10 and it started feeling very warm. We crossed paths with a lot of bicyclists on this trail or, really, they crossed paths with us. But they were almost all very polite and a few stopped to talk with us.

The trail climbed a small ridge out of the valley and crossed rolling hills of Ponderosa Pines.

We met three ladies hiking near the turn off to the Buffalo Campground. They were really nice and offered to give us some water, even though the campground does not have water. It turns out that they had filled large containers at the same firehouse that we had yesterday. We took a liter just to make sure that we could make it to our planned crossing of (and filtering at) Buffalo Creek.

We also were able to dump half a pound of trash in the dumpster at the campground and use the vault toilet there. Then there was a quarter mile hike back up the hill to the Colorado Trail.

We arrived at Buffalo Creek about a mile later. We checked out several of the many campsites on either side of the road and creek before choosing one. We stopped here for the day after about nine miles of progress at about 1:00 because the trail will climb almost a thousand feet over the next four and a half miles - we needed to give our legs some rest and it would be better to do the climb in the cool of morning.

We ate lunch, filtered water in the creek, set up the tent, washed ourselves a little and washed socks and underwear. Some other through-hikers began appearing, looking for campsites, around 4:30.

We were worried that the afternoon would seem overly long, especially since there is no cell service in this area. But with all of the tasks and some journaling and reading, the afternoon passed quickly. We had another dinner that Julie had prepared, this one with powdered black beans, rice, dehydrated vegetables, and mole which was very tasty.

9.5 miles over five hours with only 600 feet elevation gain.

June 26, 2026

At around 5:00 the birds were determined to wake everyone up. The tent was dry inside and out, so it must not have rained for long last night. I woke up and saw more lightning flashes around 1:30 - a somewhat stormy night.

The morning view from our tent was pretty with gentle morning light on the cliffs across the river.

We made hot drinks and ate a couple Protein Pucks. We packed up and headed down to the river before 7:00. Once there, we had a lot of water to filter and we also both wanted to use the vault toilet. We finally started making progress on the trail at 7:45. It was a pretty early start for us but I think we were the last through-hikers to get on the trail. We saw a few leaving as we finished filtering water, and one of them stopped to introduce herself and chat. Many of the hikers seem really friendly.

The trail climbs and switch-backs up and out of the South Platte River Valley. After about a mile, it enters a rolling, treeless area. This is the burned area that many sources warned us to try to cross as early in the morning as possible due to the lack of shade and considering that the next reliable water source is in ten miles.

As predicted it felt hot in this area. It was in the 80s after about 10 AM, but a number of thunder clouds rolled through and we got sprinkled on a few times, and at other times had clouds with a good breeze, so it didn’t feel too bad most of the time. This part of the trail seems like it meanders around kind of aimlessly, although it does eventually make its way around this really big rock outcropping called Raleigh Peak. I lost the nifty clip that holds my umbrella onto my pack strap somewhere in here. We used our umbrellas initially for shade and a few times for rain showers. We started trying to take a photo of every different type of wildflower that we saw along this stretch.

To help get through this section we were listening to music and audiobooks. I ended up finishing one, The Death of Sleep, that I had been working on for the past couple weeks. It was an interesting story but not amazing. We stopped for water at the North Fork Volunteer Fire Station where we saw three other hikers and a bike packer all using the water spigot. Then we went just under a mile further and found a nice level campsite (with cell service!) a bit west of Deckers Road around 4:00.

We ate one of the curry meals that Julie had prepared for dinner and then had some Twinkies with dehydrated fruit for dessert. The dessert was based on a backpacking recipe for strawberry shortcake by Chef Corso.

We took a short stroll after dinner to a little hill with a panoramic view of the area and the distant mountains to the west.

With the long evening and cell service I played a couple phone games and then got some photos and a journal entry for day one of the hike uploaded.

Almost eleven miles in a bit under eight hours with 2,400 feet elevation gain.

After a nice evening having dinner with my father, stepmother, sister, and brother-in-law we slept pretty well, except for knowing about that 5 AM alarm clock.

We arrived at the trailhead chauffeured by my dad about 7:15. We got our obligatory photos at the trailhead sign and we were on the trail a couple minutes before 7:30. It was a cloudy morning and we started our walk in some rain showers. One of the showers was significant enough that we put our umbrellas up, but the other ones were all pretty short and light.

We did see some wildlife: we saw a group of deer right near the start of the trail, a Heron, and some cormorants. We were not able to see the elusive bighorn sheep that frequent the Waterton Canyon.

We finished the six basically flat miles on the Waterton Canyon Road in about three hours after a couple of short stops. Where the dam for the reservoir is there was a picnic shelter where we ate the first half of our subway sandwiches.

After that, the road begins to climb for about a half a mile, and then you leave the graded road and follow a sort of Jeep road for a short distance, and then it turns into a regular trail. Once you get on that trail, the climbing really begins. We climbed up to the top of a ridge and found a bench that was placed in memory of Lawrence Stilwell. This is known as Lenny’s rest. We took a little break here And then continued down the other side of the ridge towards Bear Creek.

Bear Creek is still barely flowing and we stopped here to eat the other half of our sandwiches and filter some water for the rest of the trail today. A young man from Nashville arrived shortly after we did and also took a break and filtered some water so we had some good conversation with him. Interestingly, he seems to have read and/or seen a lot of the same things that we have so we have some similar gear and got a lot of the same information. We may not see him again on the trail because he is planning on doing a lot more miles per day than we are.

After leaving Bear Creek the trail climbs for about 4 miles. There are a lot of switchbacks and the slope is mostly gradual, but there were a few pretty steep sections and our legs were definitely wearing down. We took another break at the trails highest point for the day, which was at about trail mile 12.

Then the trail slowly switchbacked down toward the South Platte River, meeting it at about mile 16. We found a really nice camp spot just off the trail but tucked between some juniper trees, just a couple tenths of a mile before the river, around 6:00. Sixteen miles over ten and a half hours.

We were both pretty tired but we made a “boil in the bag dinner” and then walked down to the river to get some more water. By that time it was starting to get dark so we went to bed around 9:00. Unfortunately, it was around then that gusty winds started, and we tried to fall asleep as distant lightning flashed. It rained lightly for some time, but we managed to fall asleep.

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.

We are planning to start backpacking the Colorado Trail on June 25th. Over the seven months leading up to this through hike* Julie spent hours each week studying the trail guide, watching videos or reading the internet, thinking about food (recipes, calories per day, and how to re-supply), and we both worked on our fitness. Some of the online resources are listed below.

• What is a through hike? Normal backpacking is usually either a “there and back” or can be a “shuttle” hike from one end of a trail to the other, but a through hike involves hiking a long enough distance that you have to stop in some towns to re-supply.

We also took a few shake-down / test run short backpacking trips both to get used to carrying packs loaded like we expect, and also to test some of the new gear we purchased. Speaking of new gear, another thing we did to get ready was a lot of shopping. We bought a lighter tent, I bought a lighter sleeping pad and rain gear, we paid stupid tariffs to import four ounce hiking shirts made in Japan, and we both tried different shoes and clothing.

We also weighed things. We know how many ounces of socks we are carrying, how much our rain coats weigh, and that our tent weighs two pounds three ounces. Here is what we are bringing and how much it all weighs (courtesy of the free, open-source LighterPack website):

Brian’s List

Julie’s List (Note: several items with quantity zero are in my pack - these are the back-up plan in case I bail out)

Note that the weights are all just the permanent things - food, water, and cooking gas weight will add ten or more pounds to each our packs.

Resources we found helpful:

• Colorado Trail Guide book and Data book published by the Colorado Trail Foundation
• Snackbox on YouTube - Outside Comfort Zone - Snackbox (his trail name) creates very detailed and helpful videos covering each segment of the trail, and he has even re-made several of the videos to update them.
• Reddit r/lightweight has discussions about how to lighten your pack base weight
• Reddit r/coloradotrail discusses the CT
• Facebook has a CT group for every year
• Chef Corso on YouTube has creative backpacking meal ideas