Five days of backpacking food at left, five days of car camping food at right
Somehow, even though K. and I had managed to put everything except the food into the space under the cargo cover last year, my own gear filled the space all by itself this time -- an example of the law that stuff brought on a trip will always expand to fill the available space.
I did have five books with me, as I'd have no one to talk to.
I was headed first for the Flat Tops. I'd wanted to explore the San Juans, the massive range in southwestern Colorado, but the unusually heavy snows of late winter had resulted in a lot of avalanche damage to trails. By the reports, there were thirty-foot-high piles of snapped-off tree trunks on the trail I most wanted to do, and the others weren't much better. So I picked another place I'd never explored.
The Flat Tops has the distinction of prompting one Forest Service official named Arthur Carhart, who visited in 1919, to recommend to his supervisors that the area be preserved. His plea is now seen as the first instance of the US Government applying the idea of wilderness to public land, as a recognition that wildness itself is worth preserving.
The area is a labyrinth of steep-sided volcanic plateaus, glacially sculpted valleys, and over 100 lakes. It's less-visited than many other mountain ranges in Colorado, but I wanted to see why people who enjoy the area described it as beautiful.
When I got my first sight of the range, I had a moment of slight shock. I had the same feeling three years ago, when I first saw the Collegiate Peaks, the range I'd planned that year's big backpacking trip in: they're so high! I'm going to climb that? How??
How we climb mountains, of course, is that we first take a dirt road as far up into the mountains as we possibly can.
The first thing I noticed when I got out of the car was the mosquitoes. I was prepared for this, having read some trip reports. And now I understood, perhaps, one of the reasons why the Flat Tops region isn't visited very often.
The second thing I noticed were the flowers.
They carpeted the sunny hillsides with a density I'd rarely seen outside the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. It was beautiful. It made me feel better about Colorado, and life in general.
I became obsessed with wildflowers four years ago, after finally backpacking to the higher-elevation areas I'd avoided since moving to CO as being "too intimidating." It might have also helped that I'd made a botanist friend whose enthusiasm for flowers was infectious. Since then, I've only wanted to see the biggest and brightest and most prolific blooms, following the warming weather from Lost Creek to the top of the Rockies each summer. The flowers seemed like rare, fleeting gems, requiring impeccable timing, a long drive and hard hiking to catch, and even better luck to get a good photograph of.
Every year, I rued how little I actually got to see. If only they were more plentiful, more widely-distributed, stuck around longer, we could have our fill of this beauty each year rather than just a jealous taste.
Yet here they were, in profusion. My new car with its comfortable seat had rendered a four-hour drive something possible for my bad back, instead of just wishful thinking. It made all of Colorado closer, more attainable; it put the Flat Tops on my destination list. And the burying late-winter snows had pushed peak bloom into August -- August! -- in time for me, in my post-breakup lassitude and lack of planning, to see.
I climbed upward, clearly too out-of-shape for this, to the ridge line that became the Devi's Causeway. A backpacking couple came up behind me and stood admiring the view to the north, then headed down the trail.
I had planned to follow them, but looking at the sky, I saw nothing but fair-weather clouds. Usually, it storms in Colorado on summer afternoons, and you want to be off high points. But it honestly didn't look like it was going to storm.
Penstemon and the Chinese WallI turned left and began heading west, onto the Causeway. This part of the trail would take me over a narrow rock bridge and out over high-elevation tableland, exposed to the elements. But it had to be done at some point on my trip if I wanted to complete the loop. Better it be today, when the weather seemed to be holding, than on another day when it might not.
The Devil's Causeway is a fifty-foot walkway of rock whose sides drop away in sixty- to eighty-foot cliffs, followed by another 600-800 feet of sheer talus. It's three feet wide at the narrowest section. People cross it for thrills.
See a video:
Looking back:
I had a stranger take this picture of me.
I discovered some campsites not far from the Causeway and thought, if the weather's this nice, why not take the opportunity to have a high-elevation campsite with great views? The only problem was that it was only about two o'clock, so I'd need to occupy myself for the six hours until bedtime.
I walked out onto the high plateau to get some water. There were snowfields and small ponds in many locations. The grass was festooned with buttercups, bistort and sky pilot.
I walked a ways, then noticed that I felt like crap. Everything was horrible. I was exhausted, backpacking sucked, I was broken-up, my life was ruined. I was all alone and I didn't want to be. Tears came to my eyes. Slowly I talked myself up out of the crash by reminding myself that I always crash in the afternoon, that yes it was extremely sad I had a breakup and that was normal. I refilled my water bladder from a rock-bound stream of snowmelt that was so clear it could only be seen from certain angles, where the sunlight reflected off it.
After getting water, I occupied myself with reading and writing in my journal, and doing the laborious range of physical therapy exercises I am trying to be good about and do every day. And then I had the jalapeno bratwurst and green beans almondine that I had slipped, frozen, into my pack that morning. Both were now lukewarm and delicious and went down well with some lemonade.
See a video of the campsite:
It was hot. I had my rain gear on to keep the mosquitoes off me (as well as a head net) and couldn't sit in the sun without boiling. It was a relief when the sun went down. The weather still looked so good, I left the fly off the tent.
The views were remarkable -- I've scarcely had better on any trip. Before bed, I wandered around a bit taking photos of the sunset.
Devil's Causeway again
That night, I lay in my sleeping bag, my heart pounding. I'm almost always afraid at night when I backpack. Many nights, terrified would not be too strong a word. All I can think about is the possibility of being attacked by a bear or a mountain lion. Every tiny noise startles me awake. Usually I cope with this by wearing earplugs, a highly pragmatic solution -- I may not hear the bear coming, but I'll at least get some sleep in before the mauling wakes me. And so that's what I did, jamming the foam plugs into my ears.
I set my alarm for five so I could get up and photograph the sunrise light on the Devil's Causeway and on the Chinese Wall, the long band of cliff to the northwest of it. I lay there, all sound muffled, looking up at the canopy of stars overhead and the spooky, strobe-effect heat lightning flickering on the southeast horizon.
When I woke, it was 6:20. I'd slept through my alarm and the sunrise. Want to know what else I slept through?
Something had chewed a hole in my tent, right by my head, as well as chewing off completely one of the straps connecting the tent to the stakes by my feet. The floor of the tent near my head was wet. I soon realized that whatever it was had chewed a hole in my water bladder as well.
Something Goes Wrong on most of my backpacking trips -- it's such a theme that I now capitalize it -- but did it have to happen on the very first night? Thankfully, the tent still seemed functional. I pressed some gear repair tape over the hole in the bladder and hoped it wouldn't cause any problems for me.
Then I set off on what would be a six-mile walk above treeline, through field after field of buttercups. In the distance were other plateaus, other mountains left as the only remainder of the once-massive lava flows that had covered the area fifty-two million years ago.
The trail here was faint to nonexistent, and I kept losing it only to stumble on it again half an hour later. Walking off-trail was hard on my bad foot; wild grass looks smooth from a distance, but in reality it's all hummocks. Thankfully the map was not hard to follow and I knew basically where I was going.
And then I saw something in the distance.
It's a truism of backcountry travel that no matter how far you get from a road -- indeed, no matter how far you get from the trail, into untrammeled wilderness -- you will always, always find some bit of manmade trash. It's inescapable. And there, out on the vast expanse of trackless grass, was a very large piece of manmade trash.
It was clearly the heavier parts of what had been a small plane -- wheels, axle and a few associated bits. The wings and cockpit were nowhere to be found. I could only imagine that the pilot had crash-landed here, and the lighter parts of the plane had either eventually been carried off or simply blown off the mountain in a high wind.
While doing my research for this blog entry, I found this:
https://www.kktv.com/content/news/Colorado-Springs-pilot-talks-about-surviving-crash-410076855.html
As well as this, indicating the Forest Service had successfully removed the plane from the mountain: https://www.aspentimes.com/news/forest-service-carefully-pulls-wrecked-plane-from-flat-tops-wilderness/
...but not, clearly, all of the plane. I wonder why?
The trail was marked at great intervals with upright posts or with cairns. Some of these cairns and their bases were taller than I was. Majestic specimens of cairns.
A six-foot-high cairn
When I say "great intervals," I mean on the order of a mile or so apart. It could be extremely hard to spot the next one in the distance -- impossible, really. Take a look at this photo. See the cairns?
No, of course not.
I'll circle them for you. For a larger image, click once to go to slideshow view, then right-click on photo and select "Open image in new tab." Zoom at will.
The cairns
Anyway. One of the pleasant things about being at high altitude is that you get to see flowers you don't normally see, like this adorable purple fringe.
I was hiking along admiring such things as purple fringe when I tripped on a rock and fell straight forward, like someone taking a full-frontal Nestea Plunge. My chin was the first thing to hit, on a rock protruding from the trail. My jaw snapped together so hard I probably would have bitten my tongue off if it'd been in the way. A fierce headache arrived immediately. I sat and then carefully stood, touching my chin gingerly. No blood. I walked away grateful that my chin had hit instead of my nose or my glasses, and that I was still in possession of a tongue.
I began descending in elevation, finally coming into a forest and then down to the valley floor beneath the Chinese Wall, which I'd been hiking across all day. Reaching the northernmost point of my loop, I turned for the south. There were many more flowers. There were also several lakes along the trail through this section, and each was pretty.
Not long after taking this photo, I went to cross a stream by rock-hopping, and the very first rock I set my foot on tipped and sent me into the stream in a commotion of flailing and stumbling and splashing to the opposite shore. I managed to stay upright, but my shoes and socks were soaked, and I'd bruised my foot where it got wedged against a rock on the bottom of the stream.
I hiked on, squelching. The terrain was rugged and tiring, lots of ups and downs on very rocky trails. This isn't evident on the map; if a map has fifty-foot contour lines, a hill that's forty-nine feet or less won't necessarily show up in any way. On the map, that is. It'll definitely show up in how your body feels.
At least the scenery kept me distracted from my damp socks and aching feet.
At dinnertime I reached Causeway Lake and set up camp. I'd gone further than I meant to -- nearly fourteen miles -- but none of the other lakes I'd passed had seemed to be a good spot to photograph the morning light on the Chinese Wall. And that was a photo I really wanted.
I set up my shoes, socks and insoles to dry. I was using three sets of insoles. After all the doctor's visits, treatments and folk cures, the only thing I'd found to help my neuroma was simply extra cushioning. I had been wearing two pairs of insoles for a while now. Unfortunately, Altra's latest version of their backpacker-friendly Lone Peak shoes -- which I had picked up a day before my trip to replace my old too-small pair, this last-minute scramble courtesy of a shipment I ordered the week before that never came -- had less cushioning than the previous models, and I'd had to throw a third insole in. That's a lot of spongy material to soak up water.
But I'd found another lovely campsite, and it was a lovely night.
I set my alarm for five in the morning again so I could get my photos. This time, however, I woke to find the sky cloudy -- no morning light. I went back to sleep. After I awoke at nine, I packed up and was about to hit the trail, heading back up onto the flat tops of the Flat Tops, when I heard thunder.
We talk a lot about bears, mountain lions, and breaking an ankle in the wilderness, but the truth is that the most serious danger in the Colorado mountains is lightning. Colorado tends to rank in the top five states in terms of lightning deaths, year after year, and the last thing I wanted today to be was the tallest object around. So I sat down to wait.
Rain moves in from the south
It rarely rains all day in CO. The worst that will generally happen is that it will start at eleven and goes till six or eight in the evening; often, it simply sprinkles on and off for a bit then disappears. But it just kept raining. I wandered around, exploring the other sides of the lake and morosely examining old campsites as the thunder boomed above me, echoing eerily off the Chinese Wall.
And then it began to hail.
I started to walk back to my campsite, where there was an excellent large umbrella-like tree to shelter under (my pack was already hanging under its boughs), when the hail got bigger -- about the size of marbles. I gave up and simply backed into the nearest tree, its greenery in my face, like Homer backing into the bushes.
When the hail finally stopped, I looked up to see that it had coated all the flat steps on the cliffs to the south like snow after a fall dusting.
This bog orchid survived.
It continued to spit rain and growl thunder while I wandered around and waited, still hoping to hike. Finally, toward the end of the day, the clouds thinned enough that my body cast a faint shadow for a minute or so. But it was too late. I wouldn't be able to reach the next good place to camp before dark. The light faded.
A whole day gone and I hadn't hiked a mile -- at least, not with my pack. If only I'd gotten up with my alarm, I could have gotten somewhere. But here I was.
I took out my tent and set it up again. Before dark, I stood at the lake's edge and sang. Whatever songs I could think of: Dar Williams, Arlo Guthrie, classical motets. At first it was just for something to do, but I came to find it a comfort. I sang for about an hour, and then went to sleep.
The morning broke fresh and clear, with a rich golden light shining on the Chinese Wall. I packed up in between taking shots with my camera.
I was headed back up to the Devil's Causeway. Originally, I'd meant to do just a 25-mile loop. My foot had been hurting so much. I figured I could manage five miles a day for five days. But my foot had hurt so much less than expected -- less while hiking than it had been just doing nothing, at home -- that I had decided to tack on another section south of the Causeway, making one big figure-eight.
I hiked upward, encountering meadows filling with steam as the sun hit them, frost-covered plants, and drifts of hail several inches deep that had melted and re-frozen into slick ice patches.
Day-hikers were already exploring up on the Devil's Causeway.
One of the great things about backpacking is walking these long distances, then getting to a high point and looking back to see how far you've come. On the first day of my trip. I had walked from a campsite out of frame to the left all the way across the tops of those cliffs, and down the flank of the mountain out of view, then all the way back toward the camera, stopping at the lake in the picture.
Now I would make another loop to the south across the flat tops of the mountains, down and to the west past many more lakes, and finally turn north again to pass over the low point on the ridge in the below picture, finishing at the parking lot on the left side of the large lake:
It would take me another two days of hard hiking.
When I crossed the Devil's Causeway again, there was a group of young men sitting on it who took my picture for me.
My legs were beginning to get burned already and I didn't want to use up all my sunscreen trying to keep them covered. I considered putting my rain pants on, but as they were dark navy and the sun was already quite hot, I was dreading the amount of sweating I was going to be doing. Then I noticed that my pants were white on the inside.
So here I am, wearing my pants inside-out with the pockets flapping in the breeze.
I needed to hike fast. If it started to storm by eleven again, it would be difficult to get safely off the mountaintop and into the next valley in time.
Walking too fast to properly appreciate the fields of buttercups, I reached a junction where I was to continue south. But there was no trail to the south. For the next couple of hours I blundered onward, trying to make sense of the topography -- the many small dips and rises hid neatly between the fifty-foot contours on the map -- and just hoping I'd find the right spot to come down off the plateau and down to the next lake. With cliffs all around, the line the "trail" took might well be the only spot to do so. The trail, that is, that I couldn't see.
Time passed and the clouds darkened, building into thunderheads. I huffed and puffed, trying to cover as much ground as I could as fast as I could, hoping I was heading for the right place. I found the trail and it vanished into nothing again soon after. So I turned on my work phone, intending to use the GPS app I'd downloaded in case of emergency. (I have a personal flip phone only, and normally find a paper map completely adequate, but trip reports I'd read convinced me to bring this smart phone along -- the first time I'd done so on a trip.)
It couldn't find satellites.
Jeez Louise. When I'd tested the thing in the manmade canyon between condo buildings the other day, it had worked fine. Now here I was, with nothing but open sky in all directions, and it couldn't find any satellites?
I was a lone woman, dispirited, wandering across a mountaintop moor in her inside-out pants. Then I stumbled on a deep, worn-in trail, and followed it to a sign. A real wooden sign, with letters and numbers routered out of it by the Forest Service. It was a trail junction. I took the left fork and passed a gorgeous, glittering blue pond fed by a snow field -- the most beautiful pond I've never stopped by. I needed to get down off the mountain before the dark clouds to the left blew my way.
Coming down, I ran into someone.
It was a young male moose. He was very frightened, and ran off into the bushes.
It took forever to get to Deer Lake. While the clouds gathered, only a few drops fell at my location, and the day had become oppressively hot. I was exhausted. I told myself I'd take a break and eat lunch once I found the lake.
And here it is.
At the lake, I had to stay covered up because the mosquitoes were so bad. Though the sun was disappearing, I spread out my tent, fly and ground sheet to dry off the condensation from the night before. I ate, shoving food in under my head net. Soon I felt better.
It was a long hike to the next junction, over rugged country where the trail disappeared and reappeared with frequency. But it was at least beautiful.
Mountain lion or bobcat print?
I walked and walked and walked. As the light faded, I found a campsite above a meadow with a stream running through it.
It was a nice night, a quiet night. My last night of backpacking. I had looked forward so to getting away on this trip, but had found it hard to enjoy myself. I had been low down for some time -- since long before the breakup -- and perhaps it was too much to expect that the heaviness lift just because I was on vacation. Ah, well. If my heart felt as heavy as my footsteps, if I was unable to take my usual joy from backpacking... if it felt like ninety percent work this time, and only ten percent fun... it would be over tomorrow afternoon.
If I could make it back to the trailhead. I still had over ten miles to go.
When the sun rose and I was packing up, I found a wild strawberry. I hadn't seen any berries thus far, though it was past time for them. Another casualty of the high snow year. But here was one.
I left my rain pants on for the first hour. The grass was soaking with dew.
Harebells
Stepping out onto the trail, I noticed that my shadow had a halo. It was heiligenschein, an optical phenomenon caused by the dew.
More lovely harebells
As I brushed past flowers overhanging the trail, buttercup petals fell off and stuck to my boots like confetti.
A monkshood flower shows its delicate veins in the dim morning light
Soon the forest ended and meadows upon meadows of wildflowers began. I have never seen flowers so dense, or so many of certain kinds in one spot -- such as these mariposa lillies:
Mariposa lily
Blue flax
Mushrooms, too. Here's an edible porcini mushroom bigger than a dinner plate. It was, however, far past its prime and wouldn't have tasted very good, so I left it alone.
I enjoyed the endless wildflowers at first, but by ten o'clock I was growing weary. There came to be a sameness to it. I would turn a corner or come over a hill and there was yet another meadow glinting with red and yellow and blue. The sun was oppressively hot, again. It was "only" in the eighties, but with the strength of the sun at ten thousand feet, and hiking uphill and carrying twenty-five pounds, it was sweltering. I wished with all my being for the trail to enter the forest. Cool forest! With shady glens and cold, rushing streams. But every time it approached the trees, some new meadow would be revealed between them, and the trail proceeded on in full sun.
I trudged upward at a mile per hour. I was dehydrated. I was covered in mosquito bites; despite being constantly slathered in bug spray, I'd received over twenty bites a day. And I was now completely exhausted, physically and mentally. It was my lowest point on the trip. It wouldn't do to simply call it a day and camp here; I'd reserved a somewhat expensive Airbnb in the vacation town of Glenwood Springs for that night and the next, and I wanted to get my money's worth -- and also to avoid worrying people who expected me to check in with them.
Cresting a rise, I saw the pass in the ridge I would cross over, four miles off in the blued distance. Four more hours.
I have often, since coming west, experienced the sun as an assassin -- a force bent on trying to kill me. It started the summer I worked at Petrified Forest National Park, doing fieldwork for eight hours a day in the shadeless Painted Desert. Back home in New England, the sun had been a friend: warming, mostly gentle, welcome. Its rays felt like a kind of caress. But in the arid west, they felt like a blow. I was dehydrated constantly, even when not sweating; some days I lost all my moisture through my mouth, simply in the act of breathing.
I drank all day long that day, including a stop to make lemonade, and still at two o'clock I realized I hadn't had to go to the bathroom since I got up that morning.
I was sick of wildflowers. I didn't want to see another meadow. I wanted it to be over. I was done.
Field of purple, field of yellow
Elephant's heads. Never was there a more appropriate name for a flower.
Finally I came to a junction, and saw the first people I would speak to in over twenty-four hours. It was a group of women, day-hikers. They told me they'd just come from Keener lake, half a mile down a spur trail, and that it was worth it. "You're here," they said. "Why not go?"
I went.
Spilling into the lake from high above was a single threadlike waterfall. It immediately brought to mind the side trip K. and I had made to Silver Falls State Park in Oregon on our road trip a year ago, and I found tears in my eyes again.
It was impossible not to be reminded of her, of our adventures, at every turn; there was always a meadow or a campsite or a lake or a mountain that echoed somewhere we'd been. The Four Pass Loop. Waldo Lake. Newberry Monument. Medicine Bow. Dominguez Canyon. Dinosaur. Canyonlands. Crater Lake. Vedauwoo. Silver Falls. And I cried, remembering that particular day: it was a good day, where we both had fun and the weather was cool and right for hiking and we didn't fight. In fact, it had been nearly perfect.
But that was a year ago, and this wasn't Silver Falls. I was alone, and I was exhausted.
It felt good to cry.
As I approached the lake shore, motion caught my eye. I saw something I had never seen before: hundreds of fish were clustered at the shore, milling in the shallows.
I don't know why. They backed off as I approached, then returned.
I strolled around the lake, looking at the illegal campsites (no camping was allowed here). As I left, I placed two rocks on a log to illustrate my mood.
It was only a little further now. One more hour, perhaps. I pushed on through fields of yellow flowers so dense they looked like a dream, or a scene from the Wizard of Oz.
The flowers began to lessen in number and then I was at the pass, looking down on the reservoir and parking lot, two-plus miles from me still. I would reach my car sometime before four o'clock, I figured -- having done forty-two miles total -- and then I could rest.
Stay tuned for the second half of my summer vacation. For now, I leave you with this:
