Brian’s Microblog

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