My lovely company announced they were giving us the Friday before Labor Day weekend off, so I decided I would take a four-day, end-of-summer backpacking trip. I chose a 28-mile loop in Maroon Bells - Snowmass Wilderness that seemed rugged but doable. Since I didn't have much time to plan, I just skimmed a few maps, calculated some mileages, and threw my stuff together. Although I did take a moment to do a very silly thing.
I bring travel-sized tubes of sunscreen backpacking, and the one I had was almost out. I hate having to buy new little tubes all the time, it seems wasteful. So I tried to tape a large tube to the smaller tube and squirt the former into the latter. It worked, barely. Not enough to make me want to try it again.
I had just moved into a new place, and had been occupied with packing and unpacking the last few days, so it wasn't until after ten at night that I could start getting ready for my trip. That means it was about midnight by the time I was done cleaning the sunscreen off my hands, the counter, and the floor. I needed to be up in four hours. Four hours of sleep doesn't sound like a lot, but it's way more than zero, which is what I actually ended up getting. I don't know why. I'm sometimes excited or nervous before a trip and don't sleep well, but zero is definitely a record.
Still, I rose in the 4 am dark and began to drive. Going through Glenwood Canyon, where the Grizzly Creek fire had been burning over the past month, the air coming through my car's vents was nasty. It smelled like burnt peanut butter. At least it wasn't so smoky that I couldn't see the horizon, as it had been for much of the last few weeks. I had spent most of those weeks indoors, and my throat would burn after even a 20-minute walk outside the apartment.
By 8 am I was starting to fall asleep, so it was good I was finally coming to the dirt road that led to the trailhead. This turned out to be quite a trip. The road was very narrow and winding, and the sun was directly in my eyes as I curved up into the mountains. Anytime there was a shadowy section, I could not in any way see what I was driving into. A pothole? A ditch? Another car? Then the road curved again and I came to this, which -- thanks to the south-facing angle -- I was actually able to see.
It was a river. The road crossed a river. My Prius definitely hadn't signed up for this, but I gunned it forward and splashed through the torrent, sending a spray of white water flying around me. All right, I'm lying. You don't gun a Prius. But I drove through it and everything was fine and very normal.
I parked and began hiking. I was on the Avalanche Creek trail, which was new to me. The trail was rugged and overgrown, and after two tiring miles I came to a tributary creek, where the trail ended in a washed-out bridge.
Red sandstone cliffs high above
The washed-out bridge
Thankfully I didn't have to drive over this one, and I was able to climb down into the gully and out the other side. The day was quickly growing hot. Steamy summer weekends seem like a great time to leave the city for the mountains, but climbing thousands of vertical feet with a giant backpack generates a lot of heat as it is. I would have been sweating doing this climb in 30-degree weather. It was inching toward 90.
Makeshift cross and old avalanche chutes repopulated by aspen
I spotted a handmade cross stuck in a pile of river rocks and went down to take a photo. The stony "beach" of the river was littered with odd rocks of all shapes and colors, and I ended up spending about 45 minutes looking around for pretty ones. It's a weakness. There were many red sandstone rocks with white dots, indicative of the fact that some organic matter had been trapped in the original sediments, changing the chemistry of its surroundings. In this one, you can even see the organic matter at the center of the dot.
As I hiked onward I passed meadows and stands of aspen, then came to a distinctive burn area.
It was as if someone had inserted a piece of Mars into the Colorado forest. Bare, sterilized red soil stripped of nearly all life was interrupted here and there by trees or small stands that had somehow escaped the flames, and streams naked of vegetation wove through the area, carrying away the unsecured soil.
Few cairns had been erected and I had to search to find where the trail exited the area. (It's toward the southwest corner of the burn zone.) Eventually I passed into Duley Park, which was the only named meadow on my map. It was pretty enough.
Black bear claw marks on a tree -- either from climbing, or simply marking that he or she was there
By two o'clock I was beyond exhausted -- not just in the need for sleep, but in my muscles themselves. I felt in much worse shape than I expected to feel. And I was becoming very demoralized. I pulled out my map to see whether my current location would be a reasonable stretch of trail to camp on, given the number of miles I had to do the next day, and noticed something I hadn't noticed before.
I had thought the final day of my planned loop would be almost all downhill, half-bushwhacking on a very rough, steep trail. It wouldn't be that much fun, but I'd done such things before, and it would allow me to keep from having to double back. However, now that I was giving the map a better look than the rushed one I'd given it the night before, I noticed that there were actually about 2500 feet of steep, half-bushwacky elevation gain in that segment before I started going downhill. That last day was going to be hell.
I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to give up on my loop, but I already felt like crap and my muscles were only going to get more tired as the weekend went on. I took a mostly-overgrown side trail down to the creek and sat down on the stones to think. I was all alone; it looked like no hikers had used this side trail in at least two decades. I tried to refill myself with calories and electrolytes and chocolate; I leaned back on a boulder and read my book for a while. I noticed there was a bank of pearly everlasting behind me, the first surviving patch of flowers I had seen so far, which at least gave me a little smile. After an hour and a half I felt only marginally better, and made the tough decision to just find a campsite for the night.
In my search for someplace nice I ended up wandering ten or fifteen minutes back down the trail toward the car. Eventually, I found it: a nice flattish spot under some trees, a good distance from the "bustle" of the trail, with a view of a meadow and distant peaks. Down the hill was a beach area right on the creek, with a nice log to sit on. In terms of backpacking campsites, it was heavenly. I set up my hammock immediately and climbed into it with my book, letting myself relax in the cool shade and warm breeze. I had been miserable half an hour ago, and now I was in bliss.
You never think, when you're miserable, that you're going to be ecstatic a half-hour later.
The sun set at 4 pm. At least, it sank behind the ridge to the west of me. A bit disappointing, but I wandered down the trail to the next meadow, where I could watch the shadows creep up to the line of aspen. After that I had dinner, and then it wasn't so much longer until it was dark. I was about to get into my tent when I noticed a tree.
When people get concerned about me going into the woods alone, I expect they're usually worrying about other humans with ill intentions, or my getting lost or spraining an ankle, but these aren't the things I worry about. I worry about bears, mountain lions, and trees.
Bears and mountain lions don't actually attack very many people at all. But falling trees are an increasing danger for hikers, especially in Colorado, where so many trees are effectively dead on their feet, killed by beetles or wildfire. I always check around where I camp to make sure there aren't any trees that look like they could fall on me. Except this time I apparently hadn't checked so thoroughly, because now I saw a dead one that was leaning vaguely in the direction of my tent.
It wasn't a large tree, perhaps four inches in diameter, but I didn't like the look of it. Now, I have a solution for campsites I would really like to use but which host dangerous looking trees, and that is to push the questionable trees over.
I put my hands on this tree and gave it a shove. It rocked, just a tiny bit. Well, great. Now I definitely didn't want to just leave it and go to bed. The chances were small, but if something shifted, or a strong wind came up in the night, I could be a pancake by morning.
I pushed it again, and it moved just a little, no more. So I pulled back on it, and it came with me; I shoved again, and it shifted more than before. Something snapped down in the roots. This was the way. Over the next ten minutes I worked on rocking it back and forth, loosening it in the soil, snapping more roots. It wasn't easy work. I think I pulled a muscle in my back, a little. Trees are very heavy. The tree was always tilted away from me, so I wasn't concerned about it falling on me, but I was slightly concerned about poking myself in the eye with a branch as I rocked it. Mostly I managed to make a lot of noise in the dark and get a lot of pine needles down my clothes.
It loosened and loosened, and then I shoved it over and it fell! The moment of triumph. It did not in fact fall very near the tent, so maybe it was silly that I had even tried to push it over. But it was done.
I went to bed very warm and flush with my success, and had the best night of sleep I have ever had on any backpacking trip. Not a single worry about bears or mountain lions. I attribute this entirely to my pushing over the tree. I felt STRONG that night. I had the strength of a bear that had the strength of two bears! And I slept for 11 hours, woke, decided I was still sleepy, and slept for another 3 hours. That's almost two night's worth of sleep.
This is obviously the solution to my sleep problems on trips. I need to push over a tree, every night before bed. Every single night.
Tent, with fallen tree behind. Not the big one, the little one.
The view from my hammock
I woke for the second and final time at 10 am. The sun was full on my tent and I was burning up, in all my clothing and my 15 degree sleeping bag. By sleeping in so much I'd made it even more challenging to complete my planned loop, and that was okay. It was a kind of decision. I could see that what my body really wanted after all the packing and moving and unpacking was just to be able to relax. So I spent the day reading and writing in the hammock, and eating. It was lovely. So, so peaceful, so quiet, not a worry in my head.
The next day I slept in again, and then I became bored. I decided to take a day hike up to Avalanche Lake.
Though the trees weren't changing yet, the ground cover was.
A surprising number of plants turned a beautiful purple.
There were some thimbleberries remaining to be picked, and a few raspberries and currants too. I've never had thimbleberries before and they were very good. I ate as many as I could.
Thimbleberry
Rattlesnake plantain orchid
In some places, the aspen looked sickly, with crispy dry yellow leaves.
Beautiful fireweed
It was very hot. I was sweating like a dog as I climbed the final stretch to the lake, and there was hardly a cloud in sight. Finally the land leveled out.
Avalanche lake is truly beautiful. What's more, there were a ton of campsites and only a few people camping there -- on a holiday weekend. I didn't hang out for long because I wanted to get back to my hammock and read, but I did go wading.
Then I hiked back to my site. It had been a nice eight-mile day hike. The sun had already "set" by the time I got back at 3:40, and it was cold.
I debated hiking out to the trailhead then, and sleeping in the car so I could get an early start on traffic the next day. In the end, I dismissed the idea; I'd been getting such good sleep in my tent, and I wanted it to continue. So I slept to my heart's delight, and woke to the apocalypse.
The smoke that had nicely kept away for most of the trip, making only a faint haze that lent a little fuzziness to my photos, had now found me. At 9 am the sun bled a deep orange sunset light onto the landscape, and thick smoke hung over the valley. It was eerie. I know that Oregon and California have been dealing with worse than this for a while now, but it was new to me.
Weak light illuminates my meal spot
I normally would never have chosen to hike in air like this, but now I had to. I packed up and took a last few minutes to read in my hammock, enjoying the very fact that I could, and then I began hiking out.
My throat began to burn before I'd gone very far. The smoke was like a heavy fog hanging over the mountains; it looked like it was about to rain any minute. But it was hot, very hot. It was a relief when I made it to the car three hours later.
Unfortunately, I still had to drive home. It was the last day of a holiday weekend, and I knew traffic would be heavy, and had accepted this as the price of sleeping in. However, I didn't quite realize how bad it would be. It took me six hours to get home; it had taken me only 3.5 hours to drive to the trailhead at the beginning of the trip. I actually got in an hour of reading during the journey, traffic was going so slow. It made me wish I had just hiked to the car the night before and then driven out at 4 am.
I was in for a surprise when I got back. Weather reports were forecasting snow that night, and the following day as well. And as hot as it had been where I'd been backpacking, it had been even hotter in Denver; it had gotten up to 101 over the weekend. The forecast seemed crazy. But they were right.
We got a few inches here; a foot or more was projected for some locations in the mountains. Originally, I'd toyed with the idea of taking Tuesday off in order to have a longer trip, and now I was glad I hadn't. I wouldn't have seen the weather forecast change, and I'd have been in for a big surprise Monday night. My equipment will certainly keep me alive below freezing, but at the least, the hike out would have been a cold, wet one for my feet.
My throat still hurt quite a bit after I got home. It took two days to stop burning. I hope the snow has made the wildfires easier to fight and we won't have a summer like this again anytime soon!
