Date: 7/12/20
Daily Miles: 12
Total Miles: 429
We wanted to sleep in a bit today, but also didn’t want to walk in the heat, so we compromised by heading out at 8:30am. We stopped by Wendy’s for breakfast on the way out. The inside was closed, so we had to walk through the drive-thru and then ate our food sitting in the shade of the building.
We had several miles of uphill walking on paved roads to get to the trailhead. The road was rather busy as we headed out of town. The parking lot at the trailhead was also busy and just an indication of all the day hikers we would see on the trail today.
It was quite hot out, even at just 10:00am this morning. When we checked the weather in Silverthorne on our phones, it showed 68 degrees, even though it felt like it was in the mid-80’s.
The first half of the day was all a gradual climb to a pass. As we were getting close to the pass, rain clouds started to move in and we heard some thunder. We decided to take a break before we were out of the trees, in order to give the rain a chance to let loose or dissipate before we were above tree line and more exposed.
The rain clouds decided not to do anything, so after our break, we headed up the final mile to the pass. The trail was so gradual and nice today. The view from the top was beautiful and then we headed over the other side and down to the valley.
We ended up stopping early today, because it didn’t look like we would have an easy time of camping in the next few miles. It seemed like the slope of the mountain (quite steep) coming up was going to make it hard to find four hammock hangs near each other. There were also lots of dead and blown down Lodgepole Pine on the uphill side. So we decided to just stop for the day. We’ll still have a short day tomorrow into Copper Mountain.
It was nice to have a relaxing evening where we don’t feel rushed to get cleaned up, eat and go to sleep. We could just hang out chatting for a long time.
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