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Adventures of the Spirit Eagle - Colorado CDT

  by Jim & Ginny Owen  

August 5- Lake City - Bed and Breakfast - 8.4 miles - Total 53.3 miles

Ginny: A short day into Lake City. Last night it began to rain just as we finished up dinner. It turned into a real thunder boomer. One hit the ridge about 300 yards away. Scared me! It didn’t last long - but was intense while it lasted. The fact that we were so close to the ridge and above treeline didn’t help. We woke up to dense fog/cloud and decided to move on rather than cook breakfast in the cold and damp. I have no idea what the terrain was like at first. We climbed from our campsite at 12,500' up an open grassy ridge to about 13,100'. It wasn’t easy finding the posts in the fog. We were even more worried about losing each other. Ten yards was out of sight, so we hiked close together. We climbed for a couple of miles, then went around a glacial cirque, then out on to the open mesa. The fog lifted and we could see miles and miles of rolling grasslands. We noticed a herd of elk off in the distance, but they ran off at the sound of my voice. We finally had breakfast - a few cookies - at about 9:30 as we sat near a big pond and tried to figure out where the trail goes.

It was rather obscure through there. In the really high alpine environment, the trail disappears. When the posts are sparse, it can get difficult, even with good directions in the guidebook. (And the guidebook told us to take a bearing of 290· - which would have led us off in the wrong direction and up a steep hill besides. We followed the posts instead, and just hoped that the stock driveway and the trail were still the same through there. The old stock driveway has posts marking the sides as well as the middle of a wide corridor - sometimes it coincides with the CDT, sometimes not.)

The sun came out for a few minutes at about 11:00, just before we dropped off the edge of the mesa. Actually, we descended a barren rocky draw for a short way, then finished the descent through a lovely spruce forest. We reached the highway at Spring Creek Pass and immediately got a ride with a very nice family from Texas. Bernie Adair was an engineer with Hewlett Packard, out with his daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters. We decided to stay the night at a nice B&B, the Cinnamon Inn, so the afternoon was spent eating lunch, going to the post office, doing laundry, emptying our packs and reorganizing things, shipping back 12 lbs. of stuff (we aren’t eating as much as expected. We carried too much food for the first part of the trip. I hate forcing myself to eat just to lighten my load - and Jim won’t eat if he’s not hungry.) The owner of the B&B will drive us up the mountain in the morning, so we should be able to get a decent start in the morning. We’re both exhausted. I want a shower and bed, then maybe dinner later - if we get hungry again. Right now it doesn’t interest me much, but we’ll see how I feel after the shower. (Turned out the shower attachment didn’t work, so I reluctantly took a long soaking bath. I was so dirty, I hated to sit in a tub in my own dirt. Instead I took two baths - one to get the top layer off and another to feel clean.) Lake City is a nice small town - touristy but not too bad. The setting helps - nestled in the mountains the way it is. We had a few small rain showers as we wandered around but nothing heavy. Mostly it was just cloudy.

Jim: I re-learned a lesson today - don’t trust someone else’s directions. The "Official" guidebook directions would have put us someplace in Never-Never Land. If we’d blindly followed the guidebook, we’d still be out there on Snow Mesa trying to find the trail. Gotta know how to read a map - and use some common sense. There was a tremendous contrast in coming off theMesa after 2 days above treeline and descending into the trees again. Grey skies have become the norm - and a wet tent has become my constant companion - sunshine is the exception. We skipped breakfast, grabbed some cookies during a water break, and got to the road by noon - just in time to stick out my thumb and get a ride all the way into Lake City. Then we got to do the walking tour of Lake City for the rest of the day - lunch, post office, laundry, back to the post office, grocery, dinner, outfitters (for fuel), etc. We got in bed late - and, as usual, didn’t sleep well. We never sleep well in town - why do we bother?

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© Copyright 1997 Jim & Ginny Owen