CDT Day 28 – Holy Cross Wilderness

Date: 7/16/20

Daily Miles: 19

Total Miles: 475

Last night turned out to be a pretty warm night. SweetPea has put up her tarp with the grey clouds during dinner, but the rain did not materialize. It was a quiet night, minus a bit of traffic noise from the nearby road.

The trail today was pretty mild in the morning. We seemed to be following the road we had slept near last night and even crossed it one time. It was surprisingly quiet on the trail this morning. We only saw two tents and no hikers.

We got to Tennessee Pass mid-morning and took a break. There were informational signs across the road which talked about the Army’s 10th Mountain Division that had trained in the area. We read the signs over and then enjoyed the nearby picnic table.

For folks heading into Leadville, Tennessee Pass is the most common access point. We decided to bypass it, since we are meeting friends at a trailhead 12 miles further done the trail tomorrow morning.

After the pass, we encountered a series of cabins (or more accurately the approach trails to the cabins) which were built in the area. Originally they were intended to allow people to cross country ski between Aspen and Vail. It seemed like a pretty cool idea. We saw photos of the cabins in a brochure at the pass and they looked really nice.

Our trail had us continuing gradually up to the Holy Cross Wilderness. The skies turned grey and we got a few sprinkles, but figured it wouldn’t amount to much. As we climbed up, the sprinkles turned to rain, so we put up a tarp to sit under for awhile. Once the rain stopped, we headed out, only to have it start raining on us again within a few minutes.

We decided to just keep walking, and the rain kept up for most of the rest of our time walking today. We passed a few tents as we descended down to our trailhead, where we planned to camp.

We made it to camp around 5:15pm, which was another early night for us. The last few days have been lower mile days because we are trying to coordinate meeting up with friends tomorrow morning. MountainMan and Ace have a friend coming from the Denver area to have breakfast with them. And we are meeting up with a friend from Peace Corps who lives in Leadville. We plan to just walk separately tomorrow and meet up at the end of the day.