Currently, Nicholas and I are gearing up for a relatively long backpacking trip - the 160 mile Collegiate Peaks Loop, which covers the Collegiate East and Collegiate West sides of the Colorado Trail. Our original plan this summer was to spend three weeks hiking the 220 mile John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevadas, but 2017 decided to be the year for record breaking snowfall in the High Sierra. Given that most of the passes on the John Muir Trail will be very dangerous without mountaineering gear, coupled with impassable rivers, resupply points being closed, and the road to our trail head still being closed, we decided to postpone our John Muir trek to a time when we can really enjoy it.
That being said, the Collegiate Peaks Loop was already on our list for a future summer, so we decided to bump that up to this summer! Those dates are set for June 26 - July 10.
But before taking off on our first long hike, we needed some shake-down trips. We had been acquiring the gear since December, and it was finally time to test it out. On the evening of Sunday, May 14, Nicholas and I headed out to Estes Park, looking to camp that night and begin the 16 mile Little Matterhorn Loop in Rocky Mountain National Park early the next morning.
The plan was to camp in Estes Park on Sunday night, hike from Cub Lake Trailhead to our Upper Mills Creek campsite on Monday, and finish out the hike on Tuesday. Spoiler alert: The mountains just weren't having it on that trip. We did not end up completing that loop, but we did learn a lot, and we did get to see the most beautiful waterfall!
Back to Sunday night...
After much ado, and many more campers than I expected for a Sunday night, Nicholas and I found a campsite in Estes Park that miraculously was not taken, and set up our camp for the first time. This is the first time our new backpacking tent (REI Quarter Dome 2) had seen dirt.
Nicholas and I had already delegated camp chores for this trip, and all trips we will take together (including Collegiate Peaks). Nicholas is completely in charge of the menu and all food-related things, including planning, testing, cooking, and washing dishes. I do get veto power on meal choices, but have only had to use them once or twice 😜. In turn, I am in charge of any and all logistical planning, and setting up camp. So, I find and plan the routes, plan parking, campsites, resupplies, daily mileage, etc (Nick gets veto power on these decisions as well, but has yet to use it), and when we reach camp, I pitch the tent, inflate the sleeping pads and pillows, lay out the sleeping bags, all that good stuff. For this reason, Nicholas carries the "kitchen" (stove, fuel, pot, bowls/cups, cutlery) in his pack, and I carry the tent. We both carry our own sleeping gear other than the tent, and bear canisters with food and our personal toiletries - anything smelly a bear would be interested in - though Nicholas has the large canister and I have the small one.
So, we get to our campsite on Sunday night. I pitched the tent in probably the least efficient way possible, but it still came together in about five minutes. I also realized I had never put the rainfly on, so that was a learning curve. I know it will get much faster as I do it more. The sleeping pads and pillows were easy enough, but I can see how they might make a person dizzy trying to inflate them at high altitude. Note to self - take a break between each sleeping pad and avoid passing out. Here it is all together!
Nick made black beans and rice for dinner on our adorable little camp stove, and he did a bang up job! He even brought the stuff to make us Old Fashioned's with Maker's Mark. While cleaning up the dinner mess, he blew my mind with his "flashlight on the water jug" trick, making a lantern that cast a soft light over the whole area. 10/10 impressed.
We made a toast to the adventures that lie ahead with our little plastic camping cups of Old Fashioned's by our campfire, and went to bed early.
The first thing we learned about the sleeping pads and pillows is that they are far more comfortable if not inflated 100%. This allows them to move and mold more to your body. I also learned that two side-sleepers in a two-person tent results in the lighter party waking up with their face in the tent mesh.
The next morning, it was a little below freezing temperatures. I had been a little chilly off and on throughout the night, but nothing unbearable in my 30 degree REI Joule sleeping bag (20 degree lower limit). Sleeping in my comfy Patagonia thermals certainly helped. I did learn that it is very smart to have my down jacket in the tent with me for when the warmth of my sleeping bag is much stronger than my will to get out of the tent. Nicholas was smarter than me on that front, and he was already bustling around camp making tea while I sat shivering, so he was kind enough to bring me my jacket.
The hot tea helped warm me up, and I commenced breaking camp while Nick cooked breakfast. The tent was really wet from condensation and dew, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. I dried it off as best I could before rolling it all up into its bag. The good news is, this tent packs up super easily, as long as I use half a brain cell. The sleeping pads are a bit more particular about how they like to be packed up, and that will take some getting used to. The valve end has to be the last thing to roll up, and it needs to be facing outward so the air can continue to escape as I compress it. Keeping it folded multiple times as I roll it up is the tricky part. Many times, I ended up with what resembled a botched attempt to re-roll the toilet paper after the cat has gotten to it... and that doesn't fit into a pack very nicely.
Finally, we were ready to go. We picked up our backcountry permits and hit the trail from Cub Lake Trailhead. The ranger at the Wilderness Office said, and I quote, "You might run into a little bit of snow," but said that it shouldn't be much of a problem. We did run into little patches of snow on the way up to the highest point of the hike, but by the time we hit Fern Lake, it was straight up snow-covered. I was testing out new boots on this hike, fully aware I would be fighting blisters, but not prepared for the fact that they would already be painfully out of control in the first couple of hours. I kept stopping to apply bandages, then duct tape, then MORE bandages and duct tape, but they all rubbed off. My socks were soaked with nasty blister pus and blood, and that was even before the whole trip went downhill.
Past Fern Lake, the snow got much deeper and became treacherous. You know those trails that are cut into the side of a mountain? They're really pretty and neat in the summer time, but when the whole slope is covered in snow, that cut out trail completely disappears, and you're just kicking footsteps into the side of the mountain and trying not to fall. I did fall, several times. The first time, I slid about four feet before hitting a tree and catching myself, and was able to scramble back up to the trail. I turned around, wondering where Nicholas was - turns out he had fallen at the same time behind me.
The snow was a complete disaster. It was exhausting and scary, and before long my leg muscles were shaking with the extreme effort of keeping balance and testing every step. Nicholas and I are pretty accustomed to winter hiking in Rocky, with spikes and snowshoes on frozen snow, but that is an actual cake walk compared to spring hiking on melting snow. As we neared Odessa Lake, the location of the trail was anyone's guess. At this point, tracks were going several different ways, and we wandered around for several hours (and extra miles) trying to figure it out. I was under the impression that we needed to get down to Odessa Lake to find the trail out towards Mills Creek. Since we could not for the life of us figure out how to get down there, we both tried to go down a certain steep section of the trail, and we both fell pretty hard. I scraped up my arm and hand, but we were otherwise fine.
We took a break at Odessa Lake and tried to find the trail that would take us out and away from the lake. There was one set of footprints leading away from Odessa, so we followed them. The post-holing here was REAL, and every step was utterly exhausting. At one point, a deep pop sounded from underneath us, and there was a rush of cold air coming from the ground. We had been hiking along a river that was covered over with ice and snow, and it had just cracked. From then on, we avoided the river big time.
We followed those footprints up a steep ridge, which I was only able to climb using Nicholas' footprints as stairs, and came face to face with a horrifying realization. We were not supposed to be in this valley. This was not the way out, and there was no way out behind us. The footsteps we had been following looped all around, and eventually disappeared over the top of an impossible ridge before us. I have no idea who made those prints or how, but apparently they are capable of walking on vertical snow. Looking at the map and our surroundings, we recognized that we were at Grace Falls, and our trail was supposed to turn away from Grace Falls behind us... up on the ridge we had so gracefully fallen down. There was no way forward, and clearly no way we were getting back up the way we had come. To make matters worse, the weather chose that moment to turn sour, becoming very threatening in a matter of minutes.
With no other options, we made the decision to backtrack the last mile back to Odessa Lake in hopes of finding a better way out of the valley. I did not have a warm fuzzy feeling about all this, with the sky growing darker every second.
Halfway back to the lake, we heard a loud crack that made us both jump. Thinking it was thunder, I spun to look at Nicholas, but he was staring at the peak ahead of us. An avalanche had started down the mountain, straight toward the valley we were standing in. Luckily (I'm looking at you, mountain spirits), it did not pick up speed and stayed contained on the mountain top. Nicholas' exact words, as calm as could be, were, "All right, well, let's get out of here, shall we?"
And get out of there, we did. We made it back around the lake, and found the place we had originally fallen down into the valley. We searched for a good while for a better place to climb back up to where we knew the trail was. I found a place that didn't seem too steep, and said I thought we could make it up. Nicholas went first, making giant stairs in the snow as he had done before. It was a tough task to follow, as I have much shorter legs. I clung to the dense trees for support and leverage to help pull my body up. We both breathed a huge sigh of relief as we found that the trail was exactly where we thought it was, and we recognized our own boot prints.
Once out of the valley, we had two options: try to find the trail forward and press on to our planned campsite, or backtrack to the trailhead and call the whole thing. According to our map, we were equidistant from both options, and it was getting to be late in the afternoon. We decided to try pressing on. We found where our path went wrong hours earlier, and found the faint but correct route around the ridge over Odessa.
Unfortunately, the snow here was even worse. It completely obscured the trail, and the fall would be nasty should a slip occur. The snow was holding firm for the most part, until all of a sudden it wasn't anymore. I postholed to my hips and lost balance, only catching myself from falling by jerking my pack weight to the high side of the trail, causing my torso to lean away from the drop-off side. I had no leverage to help myself out, and no guarantee that I could put weight on any of the snow around me, as it might be just as rotten.
Somehow, Nicholas found good footing behind me, and after about ten terrifying minutes was able to help extricate my lower body from the snow via my pack straps. Admittedly shaken up, we very gingerly turned around on the trail and threw up deuces to this trip.
We backtracked away from Odessa and back towards Fern Lake starting at about 5:00pm. I knew the sun would set a little after 8:00, so the question was: Could we get back through the snow we came through earlier and make it back down the trail that had taken us about eight hours to hike, in three hours? We were going to find out.
The snowy part remained slow going. Footing was still treacherous, and after my little incident, I felt nervous about every step. Nicholas slipped along the trail back, and caught himself with his trekking pole - so hard, in fact, the the pole bent almost in half. He bent it back, but after catching himself with it a second time, it was obvious that the aluminum was compromised. New trekking poles went on the REI shopping list for Nicholas. But we did eventually make it out of the major snowy part and past Fern Lake, and after that the pace picked up considerable.
I hadn't even had time to think about my blisters for the past several hours, so concerned I had been for our lives. But now that I was out of the snow, the pain in all parts of my body, from blisters, to leg muscle exhaustion, to shoulder pain from my pack apparently being adjusted weird, came flooding into my consciousness. We plodded down the mountain about four times faster than we had climbed it, doing our best to reach the trailhead by dark. We didn't beat the sunset, but we did beat total darkness, which was a victory to us.
That night, we stayed in the Rodeway Inn in Estes Park and ordered pizza from Dominoes, camping plans be damned. As we sat in the hotel hot tub in what was basically our underwear, we figured that we had hiked a solid 17 miles out and back to the Lake from Hell, with all the looping around and backtracking we had to do.
Things I learned:
1. Snow sucks
2. Blister prevention is a thing I need to take VERY seriously
3. Make sure everything is out of the tent before you pack it up (my glasses spent the whole day packed away in the tent bag because I'm a genius)
4. Don't inflate the sleeping pads and pillows all the way
5. Leave your jacket in the tent for the cold mornings
6. Nicholas learned not to leave your socks on top of the tent overnight...
7. It's better to make smart choices and not finish a trail, than to push forward when it's unsafe. Know your limits.
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