Day 23 - little preview of hiking in Colorado (34.8 miles)

June 1, 2021

Miles: 34.8 miles

Step: 76,618

I had one of my bests nights sleep on trail but that’s coming after the previous night being the worst.

I allowed myself to sleep in until 6:30am. I had a good climb right out of the gate but was pretty easy with all the switchbacks and level trail. I actually had 15 miles of climbing to start off with but it was pretty gradual after the switchbacks. In all I had 3,000 feet of climbing.

After the switchbacks I started to enter a much more dense forest with pine and aspen trees, a lot like I’ll see in Colorado. Plus everything was so green and started to see stream pop up everywhere from the snow melt. I saw quite a few pockets of snow, never really had to hike through it, I was always able to hike around.

After 7 miles of hiking I entered the San Padro Wilderness and the trail got really nice all the way to San Gregorio Reservoir, a nice alpine lake where I filled up on water.

Right as I left the lake I came across some big blow down trees. I was worried I was in for a long day of the blow downs but didn’t last very long.

On the way up to the top I was hiking through beautiful green meadows with nice cold streams flowing through. At times the meadows were soaked and muddy so ended up getting my feet wet several times.

Along with the pocket of snow I could see pockets of hail that had fallen yesterday, still hadn’t melted yet and they were all about the size of a pea. I did run into a guy that was camping out in it last night and said he saw some the size of golf balls.

At the top of the mountain I had a quick break before the long decent, 4,000ft. Not too bad of a hike down, steep at times but made it to my lunch spot by 3pm where there was a couple taking a break. Spent my time talking with them while resting my feet.

Around 4:15pm I left my resting spot to hike another 10 miles before dinner. The first half was mostly downhill then the last 4 miles was straight up a peak which was pretty rough on me as I had already put in over 25 miles. Finally just on the other side of the mountain I found a pipe fed spring in a cow pasture where I got some water and ate dinner.

I still had 4 more miles to get to my camp spot for the night to get me closer to Ghost Ranch where I’ll be trying to get there by 8:45am to take the bus into Chama to resupply. Normally I would have made a resupply box to Ghost Ranch but they weren’t accepting any this hiking season. So the plan is to be hiking by 3:30am and hike the 15.5 miles to the bus stop. Most of it will be on roads but still will be tiring as I’m not getting to bed until 10pm.