Day 10: From Walmart to the top of the world

12.4 miles
Section 7

I set my alarm for before 6 AM so we’re up and dressed and walking in gentle morning Breckenridge by quarter to 7. We’re going to Daylight Donuts, which Power Thighs recommended. (I forget to write about it, but we saw Power Thighs and Hot Sauce on our first night in town. Just briefly, but I asked about the PCT some more and daydreamed about how awesome a trip like that would be. Hot Sauce said a snowstorm hit her in the first desert section, when she didn’t have a full tent. I realize we’ll likely never see these two again, as they are happy at 20 miles/day.)

Daylight Donuts is homey and delightful. The walls are a collage of out-of-state license plates, family photos, letters, and local news stories. There are free local papers on the tables, and the cover story features a huge photo of a wolf and an article about wolf reintroduction. We eat cheap, simple, delicious food and leave the café with mere minutes to catch our bus.

We take the free shuttle to Frisco (which is actually cuter than I expected) and visit Walmart. I need allergy meds and a lightweight survival tent. I find both. The survival tent weight less than half a pound and it’s made of ultralight space blanket material. It comes with a thin cord that lets you string it between 2 trees. In an emergency, if I’m separated from Granite and too far out to hike into town, this is a way to stay dry. A flimsy, cheap, very light way to stay dry enough to live a few nights, if I have to.

That was my big realization from the Crappiest Day: I’ve been oblivious. I’ve been way too passive about surviving out here.

I’ve been stupid.

I learned to backpack with Granite a few years ago and very early on we got into a habit of him figuring things out and me assuming he had it handled. But that doesn’t make sense on a trip like this.

In our planned setup, I carried cooking gear and he carried the tent. I have the crappy mini Sawyer, but we mostly use his Steripen and the Aqua Mira drops he carries for water purification. He has detailed topo maps and the full guidebook on his phone, and I have the more utilitarian data book on my Kindle and the GPS-oriented Guthooks app on my iPhone.

The result: if we are separated, I have no way to spend the night out alone.

I have no shelter. If I were to spend the night out alone on the Colorado Trail, my sleeping bag would likely get soaked because it rains every day or two. Which means I have to either keep hiking until it stops raining, or risk hypothermia.

Stupid.

So, we go to Walmart and I buy a tiny, simple, totally flimsy piece of waterproof fabric that I can string between 2 trees if we are separated. And maybe I’m still dumb about camping in a lot of ways, but at least I won’t die because of a choice someone else makes, or a simple mistake that leads to Granite and I being separated for a night.

After Walmart, we hop back on the free shuttle and ride it to Copper Mountain Ski Resort, which is a ghost town in July (or at least first thing in the morning in July). We find our trail, cinch our hip belts, and start heading up.

Today we are slack packing: we left almost all of our gear in Breckenridge and we’ll hike back over the mountain to get to our hostel tonight. Then we can take the shuttle tomorrow and continue on from Copper Mountain with our gear as normal.

This is a steep section, even doing it backwards from Copper to Breck. We have about 4 miles of climbing, starting at under 10,000 feet and climbing to about 12,500.  The bus drops us later than we normally start, so we step out onto the CT at 9:30 AM.

The first 3 miles are mostly forest, steep in sections but manageable. We lose ourselves in the breathing and the walking, pushing up to find the next step, occasionally catching a mountain view through the trees.

The last mile or so to the top is expansive views. We can see up the mountainside ahead of us, the stubble of green giving way to snowy patches and granite. The altitude makes it hard to breathe, and the colors seem too bright, almost technicolor. I wrap myself in my rain jacket and find my wool hat.

This is as high a mountain as I’ve ever climbed. It’s thrilling and somehow goofy feeling to sit on the summer eating a picnic. We chat with 2 guys, one older and one younger, the young one struggling with the altitude but refusing to give up. We watch a biker or two with ropey legs crest the mountain and start to descend.

We start to head down around 1 PM, not wanting to linger too long for fear of storms. We see lots of hikers on the way down and I wonder how many we’ll see on the trail in the coming days. They are mostly struggling under too-heavy packs.

The trail down is incredibly steep and technical, meaning loose rocks of various sizes and uneven footing.  No happy switchbacks. After a few hours, my feet are aching and I have a weird blister on the outside of my left foot and a hot spot on the inside of my right, all from bad footing.

Knowing I can charge my phone tonight, I put in my headphones and zone out to an audiobook. I ditch Furiously Happy and start Me Before You, which (rightly, I’d say) earned the wrath of countless disability rights activists but seemed like a promising candidate for low-commitment fiction that would distract me from work thoughts. It works pretty well for an hour or two, and we creep down the rough terrain.

We are passing by a stream of mountain bikers, each one exhausted and in various stages of joy, confusion, and despair. Apparently they are racing from Denver to Durango, and this is day 2 or 3 for them.

We arrive back at the road at 5:45 PM, making it the slowest hiking day we’ve had. We miss the free bus to Breckenridge and decide to call an uber.

While we are waiting, a lanky thru-hiker hurries over from where he was waiting across the street for a bus. His name is Ray, and he knows me from the Facebook group for CT thru hikers. He’s 46 and a PR guy for the Naval Academy. He invites me and Granite to visit him anytime we are in Colorado Springs, and then the uber arrives and we take him to town. He doesn’t know where to stay so we point him to the Fireside. He walked 23 miles today and he’s almost incoherent.

We go back to the Canteen for dinner and it’s lovely and delicious. I drink an alcoholic root beer and eat French fries. We have a new itinerary, with more daily miles, more zero days in town, and a 14,000+ foot mountain. So a lot to look forward to.

We go back to the hostel and jump in the communal hot tub, each of us wearing a pair of men’s swimming trunks and nothing else. Then I spend a ton of time organizing my pack for the next leg. We turn out the lights and it’s pitch dark. I sleep restlessly.