Date: 7/15/20
Daily Miles: 18
Total Miles: 456
We had a nice time on our rest day in Frisco. A college friend of Ace’s camped nearby so they could get together. And good friends of ours, Brian and Pam, drove up from the Denver area to have lunch with us. We had a great time catching up with them.
This morning, we caught the 8:30 bus near our AirBnB and were back in the trail by 9:00am. Two notable things about where we started this morning…(1) Our Silverthorne Alternate ended here, so we are back on the regular CDT (2) The CDT is now concurrent with the Colorado Trail for the next few hundred miles.
It was pretty obvious today that we were on a different kind of trail. The trail was in great shape…the climb to the day’s high point was so gradual, sometimes it was hard to tell that you were even going up…and there were a lot of backpackers on the trail.
When we started out in the morning, we walked by multiple hikers who were stopped and who had all their gear laying out on the ground. There was a storm that came through last night, so we figured that the hikers were drying out gear that had gotten wet from the rain.
It was a beautiful day out today and as we got above tree line, the hills were full of wildflowers. There were a few grey clouds passing by in the afternoon, but we only got a few drops of sleet and later a few raindrops.
We saw quite a few Colorado Trail hikers (and even two bikers) today. We expected that there would be quite a few people hiking the CT, but it is still surprising when we pass by someone every half hour or so.
After our gentle climb to almost 12,300 feet, we had an equally gentle descent down to a dirt road. We had planned to just walk to where the forest started again, but when we got there, it looked like some CT hikers already had the same idea as us. So, we continued on the trail for another half mile or so, until we found a spot that seemed workable for camping. There are definitely more dead trees in the forest here than we would like, but that seems to be the norm around here.
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