Frisco, CO

I think I'm getting soft. 3 Showers in the last 7 days and I'm doing laundry once a week like a regular person (of course normal people don't wear the same shirt/shorts/underwear for the entire week, but I digress.) I'm actually at my friend Carolyn's house outside Boulder for the night, the fourth night I've slept in a bed in the last month and a half. I did a couple 12,000 foot passes on Wednesday to get to Twin Lakes, one of which was Hope Pass which plays a prominent role in the Leadville 100 and has something ridiculous like 2,500 feet of gain in two miles from either side. A 16-hour day yesterday, and two more similar passes today, and I got to Copper Mountain. I started a low route to Silverthorne so I could be near a road for Carolyn to pick me up for the night. Good thing too, because there was a traveling BBQ festival in Frisco, about halfway between Copper and Silver.

So things are going OK. I get crazy ideas about doing big 35+ days and making up time, but then the Colorado mountains think it proper to remind me that, just like the San Juans, they can kick my butt any time they please, so the trail climbs 1,000 feet in a mile and then gets routed on some spruce-covered north face that's covered in rotten waste-deep snow that I have to swim my way through, and every time I posthole the snow grabs the heel of my shoe and reminds me I've got a quarter-sized open blister. I get really mad, but I keep on trudging, and when it gets dark and I set up my tarp-tent wherever I happen to be, I usually realize that I did manage to do 25+ miles at 11,000 to 12,000 feet and I'm doing fine by my schedule. Or I walk right through a BBQ festival. Funnel Cakes!

Comments

  1. Aaron3:21 AM

    mmm... funnel cakes--that's my kind of hiking...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:26 PM

    dude- you're halfway across the country! nice!

    ReplyDelete

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