A Modest Folly: Leadville to Salida via Leadville and Buena Vista Part 1 (Saturday July 3

I get out of Leadville later than desired, but do make it way back up into altitude before dark and set up a nice camp. I'm a little bit excited as Mt. Massive and then Mt. Elbert are on the the Bagging List. I have a nice solo evening. It can take a day or two to feel like you're really back on the trail. It's an odd feeling. Sort of an odd tiredness due to having to deal with humans and our humanness. I wake up on Sunday and get through the pass. It's quite refreshing, being surrounded by mountains again, and it’s a wonderful sensation that you get heading deeper into the wilderness. Today I plan to get near Turquoise Lake and do some relaxing and fishing.

It was an odd day. I met Swap, a CDT hiker, and some weird dude from Denver with a dubious career choice of being a Personal Developer. I don't understand how anyone could think that a person who’s chosen Developing Others could be a qualified guide to Life, but I guess some folks are just that perplexed. I get to the trail head that connects to the CT near Turquoise Lake and rush through all the people and cars. I want to get a few miles in and get away from all these bodies and perfumes. It smells like French harem out here. It was feasible for me to really push and get to the Massive Trailhead, but decide to just have a short day tomorrow. I want to be well rested for the climb. I pass a really good creek, go a little bit further and find a good place to set up camp for the night. It's early yet, only about 3 in the afternoon, but this way I can go fishing and enjoy the 4th.

I peruse my maps and find a shortcut to Turquoise Lake. It's an old Snowmobile trail that hasn't really seen much use. I tramp down towards a dirt road hoping I can find a shortcut through the trees and down to the lake. I am fortunate to see another fine example of a Venus' Slipper Flower, a sure sign that there's not a lot of traffic on this route. I get to the road and cut back to find the creek as I was sure it would lead to the lake, and it certainly does. Turquoise Lake is big. There are plenty of people out today, but not a crazy amount. Lots of people fishing. After some trying of different flies, I finally caught a nice big Rainbow. I wrapped it up in a wet bandana and carried it back to the creek by my camp where I kept it in the ice cold water to stay alive for a little longer. I got my camp set up for dinner and got a fire going. I went back to the creek to clean my catch. There is something truly amazing about catching your own dinner. It's a lot different than fishing for pure fun, as you have to consider what you'll do if you don't actually catch anything. It makes you appreciate the food chain of which we're all a part. This process of killing something to eat reinforces in me an appreciation of Life. It also makes you appreciate Death who can come knocking at any time. But I digress. I made dinner and slept like a baby that night.

The next morning, an odd thing happened. I woke up slowly as I didn't have too far to go. I just needed to get to the Mt. Massive Trailhead which wasn't that far away. I crawled out of my tent to fetch my food bag, and then, I'll be damned, I somehow got lost. What a curious sensation and such a boneheaded thing to do! I turned around and saw nothing of familiarity, just a giant rock that I kept coming back around to. All I did know was that I could not see my tent and was not really sure how I got to where I was. I am not kidding when I say that I could not be more than 100 yards from my campsite, but had no recollection of what direction it was in. I stopped and stood still. Not stopping is the error that many people make when they are lost. They panic and start wandering around and this usually just makes the situation a lot worse. I think, upon hindsight, that I wandered by this same rock a couple of times before I realized that I was doing something wrong. Anyway, I listened and noticed that I could hear the creek running, knew that I was on the North side of the trail, and knew that the creek intersected the trail. I walked toward the creek, went down to the trail and then back to camp. I was suprised at exactly how lost I'd been! I must have wandered about a quarter mile off. Stunning. I managed to find my food bag (right where I left it), had some breakfast and mozied on.

I got to the Mt. Massive Trailhead in good time. I went beyond it not too far (it starts off from the CT anyway) about 200 yards and looked for a decent place to camp. I found an old cabin that was really not a cabin anymore at all, just a few logs that made a sort of boundary. It was quite close to the creek so I pitched the tent in the decaying structure and made ready for a nice relaxing afternoon and early night. I chatted for a bit with a few other hikers who were at the creek, filled my water bag, washed out my shirt and socks and went back to my campsite. I hung my shirt out to dry in the sun along with my socks, put a rock on each one so the wind wouldn't blow them away and decided that it was as good a day as any to change the undees out for the fresh set. I got my drawers up just in time as a mom and her kid came plodding down the trail. One of these days, I'll get busted.

Moments later I hear a dog down by the creek, realize it's Boggy ("Boggy stay!" being spoken made it obvious) and I went down to see Bridget, Boggy and her friend. We parted ways as they were camping up along the side of the hill beyond the creek a bit. From time to time Boggy would come visit to make sure I was doing all right. I was doing just fine. I sat down to a nice meal of quesadillas, sausage, and potatoes and did my reading of Tom Jones and writing for the day. Tomorrow is the day of climbing up Mt. Massive, and that seems like a great thing to do on my birthday.

I got started up Massive pretty early. Beating the weather seems like a good idea to me. I got up there a whole lot faster than I thought I would. It's fun in this environment, meeting other people. Most of us are quite different, but I like knowing that others feel the same way I do about our mountains. They might be lawyers, bankers, or scum-of-the-earth politicians, but if they don't come out here to enjoy these things then there aren't very many options of keeping them wild without some kind of drastic measure. Essays and protests are futile. It take the use of one’s senses to come to one’s Senses.

I get up to the last false summit of the mountain and there's a whole crew of teenage boys and their worn out camp leader up there. They'd sent a couple of other kids over to the real summit to see if it was the real summit. "Of course it was," I said. "It's higher, isn't it? I'll see you over there." There was still some quality snow pack up along the ridge, but nothing as bad as Pike's a few weeks prior or the Sangres before that. The skies were a beautiful cascading blue, changing tone from the horizon to straight overhead with no smog as far as the eye could see in any direction. This was a vastly different experience of a mountain than Pikes. That mountain has been ruined. And for what? A lousy doughnut shop owned (or at least operated) by Aramark, a Fortune 500 company who clearly has our collective best interests in mind.

So I sit on top of the big hill for a while and have my cigarette and get one of the boys to take a picture of me. It's great seeing kids out in all this. Sure, they all have their cell phones and so forth but even then they are all really enjoying that they are right there, sitting on top of the mountain with each other, all of them having made the long walk together. I bask in the sun in the crisp air and head back down as seating gets scarce as I want to make room for the new arrivals. The weather is beautiful and I want to get as many wildflower pictures as I can on the way down.

There were so many flowers! I took pictures of every different one I could find, even though many of them weren't "model-worthy", but these things are each and all beautiful to me. These brave little nuggets of life among the rocks, the rocks splattered with lichens and mosses (also brave). Such a great, relaxing and simple system.

I get down to camp and break it all down to move on to the Mt. Elbert trailhead which is several miles down trail. The idea is to get to camp, get a good night's rest and hike up Elbert tomorrow. Today was so exhilarating and so much fun, and I want to do it all over again.

I find a nice campsite along a stream a mile down from the Elbert trailhead. The map seems to tell me that after the point where I'm at now it just gets steeper and I don't want to have to hike beyond the trailhead tonight. I'm near a good stream and would love to do some fishing before it gets too late. Besides, there’s no reason to carry a good catch too far if I don’t need to.

I go fishing for a little while and catch three browns (brown trout). I put 'em all back as they are sort of small and I have plenty of food anyway, I suppose. Browns are very skittish and very hard to see as they are the color of the creek bed. They panic at every little anything and flit back to where they were hiding if they’d been tempted out for some little morsel. They seem to prefer the reeds and stuff along the banks. I go back to camp, make my little fire and build a bench out of a log and a few rocks. I do my writing business and am anxious to get back to the Old Man in the House in Tom Jones.

I woke up early again, packed my day-pack and set off for Mt. Elbert. This day was much foggier so I hightailed it to the trail junction. I was actually a little further away than I thought I'd be, but oh well. The fog was a little daunting, to be honest, and I passed a good number of people on the way up as all of us were wanting to get to the top of this, the highest mountain in Colorado (but also one of the easiest to climb). I took a smoke break at tree line and pondered the fog issue. True, it wasn't dark out so I had good reason to believe that the weather was not all clouds on the other side, but I didn't know how dense it was or what might be happening on the other side. It was really neat, though. I promise myself I'll turn back at the least hint of lightning and I really do mean it. I have no problem camping out again for a day to do it again tomorrow.

A couple of people are coming down the trail and I ask them if the weather's okay, and they say it's beautiful on the other side of the fog and that they'd gone up in the middle of the night to be on top before the sunrise. I bid farewell to the Gray Jays and get going and after I wade through the fog it really is simply beautiful. It's a grand thing, being in between the clouds and being able to see it all for so many miles in either direction. I look over at Massive and there's a huge cloud system over it, making me really glad I didn't try to do that one today. In fact, there were clouds everywhere, scattered all about, but none here. Pretty lucky.

Three false summits (at least!)! They say it's two, but I call it three. I got to the top of this fun little climb and it's rather spacious. I chat with others, take their pictures for them and just loiter up here and enjoy the lack of oxygen to the brain. It's just fun like I've never really had before, at least not like this.

I notice the clouds coming up from the other side of the mountain and starting to form around me and so I decide it's a good time to take off. Sadly, there weren't a lot of opportunities for flower photos on Elbert, and there were a few I was really hoping to see again. I will, I will. By the time I got to the primary decent from the top ridge the clouds were coming in pretty quickly and I decided to make some safe haste. I cursed my need to go to the bathroom and took advantage of the last rock big enough to hide a person before getting down to tree line.

Of course, there were plenty of people still going up as I was going down. It's too bad, I know, that so many of these people are on vacation, one of the few times in a year that they get to leave their jobs and doldrums and do something like this, and that it is frustrating to think of getting pushed off by the rain after huffing and puffing as far as they'd come. A few people asked me if they should keep going, and what do you tell someone asking a question like this?

The rain was really starting to come down now and thunder was starting to roll through the rocks and up my legs with all of it's booming and awesomeness. It's not getting killed by lighting that scares me near as much as the prospect of surviving it. I'm moving as fast as I can without running or risking a bent ankle or falling down even though one of my poles' locking mechanism is all of a sudden (of course) acting up. So now I'm carrying a dead pole and using the other to stabilize myself and trying to not get too wet as I am now within a few hundred yards of tree line. I'm gaining on a couple of girls and catch up to them just before we all get to tree line. I stop for a second to pull my rain jacket out of my napsack and catch some psychological relief as I at least feel safer among the pine tree lightning rods. I'm hoping to hike all the way to Twin Lakes today whether it keeps raining or not. I mean, that's just how it works. I introduce myself to the girls and they introduce themselves and we chat for a minute or so. Lindsay and Brooke. They're on a road trip through Colorado on the way to California.

We start leisurely down the trail, me to my campsite and they to their truck, and they ask if I'd like to go into Leadville to watch the world cup game. It turns out that today is the Germany/Spain match. I'm not a hiking purist and like to consider myself more of an adventurer and flexible enough to know a good time when I see it. I pack up my camp in the rain and meet them along the road and off we go, me sitting in the bed of the pickup as the rain slackens and we motor into Leadville.

Ah, Leadville. We went to Tennessee Pass Cafe (something like that) which I'd been by before, naturally, as Leadville's main drag is only about 5 blocks long on one street. We sat at the counter and had some food (A Reuben, if you must know). I'd noticed on the way into town that it wasn't that far to Buena Vista and they were talking about going there today anyway. Don't ask me why, but I wasn't looking forward to doing the Collegiate Peaks. Sure, there's some mountains I want to climb there but I just can't shake that they're all named after these fancy Ivy League schools for what amounts to no good reason as far as I can tell. If they had Mt. Community College I'd at least feel that there was an even shake going on, but no there's not (and no, Mt. Missouri is not named after the University, but the river or something else like that. I mean, I didn't look it up, but I have no problem stating this as fact.) I tell them I'll give them gas money if they want to give me a lift to Buena, and they say sure, to just buy them a beer and it's all square. The game was awesome (Spain won, some of you may recall) and eventually we sped off toward Buena Vista, the destination being the Cottonwood Hot Springs. I'm looking really forward to this.

We get to Cottonwood Hot Springs in the late afternoon and the lady at the counter gave me a free towel and let me charge my phone while I was there. These Hot Springs are quite a deal for the money. It's something like $15 for access the whole day, and it's a nice relaxing atmosphere. It's not a bunch of yuppies, or hippies, or nudists, or churchgroups. Just a small handful of people enjoying this water that comes bubbling (well, it’s not really boiling at this point, but it is gurgling and so forth) out of the earth that has not been chlorinated and is naturally unsulphured. Eventually we take off and head into Buena Vista for more food. We end up at a Mexican joint and get our meals to go and eat in the parking lot. My shorts are wet as I didn't have swim trunks, and I'm really hoping they dry before it gets dark.

It was getting late and the girls needed to hit the road so they took me up to the trailhead where we'd say our goodbyes. I thanked them for everything and was profoundly happy to have met some genuinely nice people. It can happen. I got all my stuff out of the truck, exchanged email addresses and then took a group photo as I waved goodbye to them and watched them roll out of the little parking lot and into the final moments of dusk. What a great day: Mountain climbing, hitching rides, soccer games, hot springs and good food.

I wondered what I was forgetting and looked down to see that I was wearing my camp sandals. I'd left my hiking boots in the truck. Dammit.

On the way up from Leadville

Over the ridge the next morning

From the same point, different direction

Dinner

I've still not bothered to find out what this really mean, but I think I understand it

View UP from my campsite

Me being ornery around children on top of Mt. Massive. For some reason, all the kids liked me. I think it's because I made the adults nervous and told the kids funny stories.