CDT Day 16 – Altitude Woes

Date: 7/3/20

Daily Miles: 21

Total Miles: 288

Today was a rough day for SweetPea. She woke up in the morning with a mist of something sticky on her sleeping bag and the sides of her underquilt. Even though we were all sleeping under aspens (and presumably the sticky substance was from the trees), only SweetPea’s sleeping bag got sticky. Her bug netting is different than the other three and is more porous, so we figured that was why she got the worst of it. She just wiped things down with a wet wipe and hoped for the best.

The bulk of the morning was spent on a pretty reasonable uphill climb. We got right into the higher elevations and were soon at the highest elevation for this hike so far (over 11,500 feet). This elevation gain was pretty hard for SweetPea again. Instead of having heart burn, she just felt nauseous and completely lacking in energy. The uphills felt like torture as she crawled up at a snails pace with many breaks included. Not only was it torture for her, but certainly it wasn’t much fun for the other three to constantly be waiting for her. Hopefully things will improve soon.

There were some obvious differences we could tell between MT and CO after just one+ days of hiking in Colorado. First of all, Colorado is much drier. The dryness was apparent just looking at the soil…it was a lot harder than in MT. Also, the air just feels drier as well. Secondly, it is a lot hotter in CO. We have been used to temps in the 60s and 70s, but here the temps are more in the 80s. We definitely feel it when climbing in the afternoon. It is also taking some mental gymnastics to wrap our heads around the fact that we had been walking northbound and now we’re hiking southbound. It just seems to take a minute to orient ourselves now.

The scenery today was really nice…large mountains covered in trees with wide valleys. There were some very dark clouds that passed by in the late afternoon, but luckily we only got a few drops and even had a rainbow.

We got to camp around 6:45pm. There is a couple tenting in the area. We just asked them if it was ok for us to set up here and they said yes. They did warn us that they get up early – 4:20am! Yikes! We thought we got up early at 5:30am, but they get up really early! We’ll probably put in our ear plugs tonight so that hopefully we won’t hear too much of their packing up.