WalkingCarrot

After nine days on the trail we are enjoying our first zero day at the home of our friends William and Colleen who run the Los Manos Bed and Breakfast out of their home in Buena Vista (lovely place - beautiful straw bale house totally off the grid, amazing mountain views and a B and B friendly resident feline).

“Buena” or “good” to you gringos does not even begin to describe the views (vista) from the town or the nearby Continental Divide.  Most definitely an understatement. But, then again I think that words, and even photos, fail to adequately portray the sublime alpine scenery. From micro scale: Moss Campion, Stone Crop …

July 2010

Dear Friends and Family,

Deb, (the Walking Carrot) and I are about to take off on another long hike, our third summer on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT). Our intention is to walk an unbroken path which will cover roughly the “middle third” of the CDT. This summer we will start hiking on July 17th at Spring Creek Pass in Colorado (in the San Juan Mountains south of Gunnison) where we left off last summer and head north. We intend to hike to Togwotee Pass (in Wyoming south of Yellowstone at the north end of the Wind River Mountains) where we left off in 2008. This summer’s walk …

Well, we’ve come to the end of the San Juan section and the end of this year’s segment of the Continental Divide Trail.

The San Juans were certainly a highlight, and not only because the trail seldom dipped below 11,000 feet in the last week. The trail also took us through some rugged and beautiful terrain. Steep peaks, deep valleys, high plateaus, well defined ridgelines, wildflowers and WATER. Flowing creeks, high alpine lakes, snowpack, rain, hail and frost: we found water in all it’s natural forms. Of course, some of these forms of water depend on COLD, and we had that too.

The wildflowers were simply stunning, bold and beautiful, …

The night’s sleep on our sloping perch was not sound. What had looked like a flat bench in the fading light last evening proved to be lumpy and still falling away from the ridgeline enough that a slow slide pushed us both to one side of the tent.

A cold night brought ice on the inside of the tarp, again. Morning brought more early clouds. We walked back up to the ridgeline trail and followed it along the rolling grasslands east towards the pass, our finish line for this year.

The rugged panoramic scenes of the San Juans were fading behind us. We stopped often to turn around and just …

After going to bed with skies clear, except for a multitude of stars and the Milky Way, the rains began around 4am. Morning came with wet ground and still cloudy skies.

We startd the long climb up back to the divide, up Pole Creek. Pole creek follows a wide open valley, sparsely treed but with lots of grass, wildlfowers and willow brush. And cows, the first we’ve seen since leaving Wolf Creek Pass. We’re out of the Weminuche wilderness now.

We had breakfast on a high bluff with views up the broad valleys of both the west and middle forks of Pole Creek. Storm clouds were already brewing on the crest. …