Leadville to Salida via Leadville and Buena Vista Part 2 (Wednesday July 7th - Saturday July 10th)

Okay, so I admit I panicked for a second.  I mean, I’m about 8 - 12 miles (I don’t really recall) from Buena Vista and it’s a few minutes from being dark and, as fate would have it, it’s starting to rain again.  I quickly pitch my tent before the rain decides to really start coming down.  There is a privy/toilet thing in the parking lot so I go sit under that for some shelter while I just think about things.  I’m stunned that I didn’t get a phone number.  I always try to trade phone numbers with people so that we can all be in touch just in case something untoward happens.  Something exactly like this.  No cell reception anyway, and I know that they’re heading off in the direction of Boulder, they’d said, and I expect they’ll be there later tonight anyway.  I just have to accept that I’ve made a boneheaded move and have to just relax, stay calm, and not make another one.  The humor here is that I’d skipped ahead a little bit to make sure that I can get into Salida by Saturday to get my mail drop instead of needing to spend an extra day (and more money) there.  Money, that’s the thing that kills me most here.  I know right now that those boots are gone and that I’m not going to get them back tomorrow and that I’ll have to somehow get into town to buy some new ones.  What can I say?  Idiotic, yes, but it was certainly a day I wouldn’t trade for anything.  Such is how it goes.  I was hopeful that they’d notice at some point that the things were in the back of the truck and flip back around to get them back to me, but I knew for certain that they were underneath a tarp where their shoes were and it was highly unlikely that they’d want to put them on.

So I got a decent night’s sleep and woke up the next morning bright and early.  I was hoping to catch a hitch, but needed to be prepared to hike all the way into town with a full pack on my back and my camp sandals on my feet.  

I must’ve walked a full 4 miles before I got a ride into town.  There really wasn’t much traffic, for which I do applaud the area.  I knew the outfitter I wanted to get to and where it was located, so that wasn’t a problem.  The fella who gave me a ride was an old lumberjack/mountaineer who lived up in the mountains and was driving down into town for some work.  A really neat guy who still sounded like he was from Vermont or New Hampshire even though he’d been out here for decades.  He climbs in the Alpine Style (I’m not going to go into it, but look it up if you’re not familiar with it even though it has no bearing upon the story except that it makes him cool) and was a man I felt to be just fascinating.  Living a simple-in-principle life doing what he loved and lived for.  He dropped me off at the main corner in town.  I thanked him and made my way up to the outfitter.  I’m really glad that these towns are small.

I understood the outfitter to open at 9 o’clock but got there around 8, just to be sure that that was the right time (sometimes information changes) and to also ensure that this wasn’t some weird kind of day off.  I hid my pack behind a bench behind the shop and walked back down the road to The Evergreen Diner I’d noticed was open and had a big mess of Biscuits and Gravy ($2.99 before 8.30 I think… Something like that) with some coffee and sat outside (it’s only polite to sit outside when you’ve been living mostly outdoors for weeks.  Really, there’s not point in making a point of one’s stench.  Even though I do have to say that I somehow didn’t smell awful, and I figured out why later…) and wrote in my journal some more before 9.  The Evergreen is a weird place, and it’s exactly my kind of place.  One adult working and about 5 young teenagers running the joint. I think some of them might even be called ‘Tweens, to use the new term.  

I got back to the outfitter just before 9 and got a new pair of trail runners to replace the boots.  I wanted to be back on the trail by noon to make some distance and make up for a lost morning of hiking, but also felt that since I was in town I should make the best of it.  I went to the library to do some internetting and then found some postcards and a coffee shop to do some writing before getting a hitch out.  I tell you what, but the coffee in Buena is quite good and they even have their own roaster in town.  A nice town indeed.  I dropped the postcards off in the mail box and walked back to the corner I’d been so kindly dropped off at several hours prior and stuck a thumb out, prepared again to walk the whole way back if need be.  As it happened, the first car picked me up.

Another interesting and kind stranger.  This one was an older guy who was a self-proclaimed gem hunter.  He wasn’t rich or anything, at least not materially, but he sure enjoyed his life living out of his jeep-type-thing with his dog Switch.  We chatted a bit before he dropped me off at the trailhead.  I bid him and the dog adieu and made one final and timely use of the toilet facilities before hitting the trail, phenomenally, by noon.  Even I was impressed.

This day was very cloudy and rainy.  What that means, to those of you who don’t like to read, or more likely, find my writing stifling, is that there is just no way to take as many pictures as you’d like.  For one thing, it’s raining, and secondly photos of things that are pretty are much improved by having light to bring out the colors.  It’s a shame, too, because this day there were flowers just about everywhere.  Much of the trail at this point turned into road where religious freaks have decided to build structure in the mountains in an effort to, oddly, enjoy them.  I can’t decide if these are good intentions or lusting after money.  Either way, I wish I’d live long enough to see the day they all erode back into the dust and rocks.

I finally made it out of the maze of roads that went by Princeton Hot Springs and found the right direction to the trail (an actual trail, I’d like to say).  I sat down at the trailhead to get an idea of how far I wanted to go, and for me this is determined by water sources.  There was one more about a mile up, and then some sporadic possibilities a few miles further along.  An older couple who were waiting for their daughter or someone to meet up with them came around and we chitchatted for a bit.  Oddly, they’d met the weird guy from Seattle with the two dogs.  They concurred that he’s an odd fellow indeed and they felt that he was asking them, in a curious and roundabout way, to board the two dogs for him.  What a nut.

I made my way further and passed a stream not long after and decided to keep on going as it was still sort of early and the weather was breaking nicely and the sun was beginning to lay low in the sky.  Not long after this, it got cloudy again.  What I was really trying to do was climb Mt. Shavano the next day, and to do that I had to get a lot closer than I was now.  Tomorrow would be Friday, and the day after that I wanted to be in Salida by noon to get my mail drop.  Fortunately, my  delay in Buena had been a blessing as I was really loving my new shoes and they were causing me no problems at all.  I liked them much more than my boots and found myself fortunate to make the switch.

I continued on.  It got later and later, to the degree that I thought I might have to stop and dig my headlamp out to keep pressing on safely, and I was fortunate at this point that there was no rain or abject weather.  I finally made it to a creek just as dusk was over, and I stumbled into what would have been the perfect campsite for a nice quiet evening.  It was still a perfect campsite, but there were lots of people there.  

But they were grand folks.  They were a Scout Troop from Dayton, Ohio who were out for a good time.  I introduced myself to them, and asked them if there was a place nearby where I could make camp, and they said there was a good site or two up the hill where the other adults were and that I should make myself at home.  I set my pack down, pulled the raincover from over the top to access my tent and other stuff and looked for my headlamp that, amazingly, was not there.  I was stunned.  I couldn’t believe it.  I thought it might be in the storage net in my tent, so I borrowed a headlamp from a troop leader and pitched my tent and it wasn’t there, either.  I went through my sleeping bag and it wasn’t there.  It wasn’t in any  of the pockets in my pack; it was just gone.  I thanked the guy for the lamp, told him I’d run into a blunder, but that I’d be fine.  I picked my pack up to carry it up to my tent as I did so my headlamp fell out.  Unbelievable.  Somehow it had slipped out of the pocket I always kept it in and fell into a gap where my pack cover was bunched underneath the pack.  Well, it’s a goofy sort of a thing to do in front of a bunch of other people, but I really like that headlamp.  I declined the option to tell them about leaving my shoes in someone’s truck

I made a quick dinner and got the water I’d need from the creek for the next day and hit the sack.  Tom Jones just keeps getting better and better.

I got up the next morning and packed all my gear up as quietly as I could so as to let the others slumber as late as they wished.  I knew they were only going about 5 miles that day and were planning to hike up Shavano the next day.  I was trying to get there today and had about 7 or 8 miles to go before I’d even be at the trailhead.  I had my breakfast and got moving.

I got to the trailhead, secured my pack to a tree, got my daypack ready and got going.  The ascent up the trail to tree line is a lot of fun.  It’s also sort of confusing.  You have to go through some really strange wooded areas and the trail sort of disappears half the time.  But that’s what maps are for, and I, for the most part, knew not to go in the majority of possible directions.  Creeks are awesome for establishing location.  I felt like it took forever to get to treeline, and that after I’d got there that it wasn’t that far to the peak.  I’m guessing that treeline goes up in altitude as you go further south in latitude, but I’d like to look that one up before stating it as fact.  

I was pretty tired from hiking so far in the morning just to get there, especially after the silly day beforehand which turned out to be a big-mile day of around 23 miles or so, I think.  But I was determined and the weather was favorable so far.  A few clouds, but none of them too dark or ominous.  It was just before treeline that I met the biggest moron I was to meet in my life in the outdoors, and quite possibly anywhere.

It was an older guy in his 50s, I’d say, who was a tad flabby, but I’m certainly not being judgmental about  his age or his condition.  In fact, I like to see people who are older out doing stuff that’s physical, and I also like to see the not-in-shape people not sitting on couches eating potato chips all day.  But this is merely a physical description.  It was after he opened his mouth that it all went downhill, even though I suspect myself of casting an aspersion or two considering his use of a GPS device.  The top of the mountain is the highest part.  Every time.  

He and I chatted a little bit and I told him I was going to get to the top of it if the weather held out and that I hoped to be there by 2 o’clock which was in a couple of hours from now.  This was not unreasonable considering that I was almost at treeline anyway.  He told me that such a time was impossible and then proceeded to tell me that he was with his son who was a terrible mountain climber and was having a hard time because he was fat and out of shape.  He then went on to tell me about himself.  He’d moved his entire family to Quebec to study French in a native environment, which is sort of like moving to the depths of Wales to study English (no offense to the Welsh or the Quebecois, but they know what I mean, here.  I don’t think the way I talk is suitable for someone trying to learn how to make themselves clear in the English language, and I know this because I’m so frequently having to repeat myself and enunciate in a counter-intuative way.  I’m just saying, is all).  He then bragged about how he’d moved the family to South Africa to study (I kid you not) race relations or diplomacy or something akin to the idea of working for BP to study marine ecology.  I imagined to myself that he left South Africa after he was run off of his plantation, diplomat though he was.  Sometime during this oratory of diminished ability, his poor, overweight, depressed son arrived which was timely as his father was becoming impatient at the prospect of my leaving before he was able to further berate and humiliate his son in front of a stranger, a thing which he had rehearsed many times and spewed before me in a caustic spray of misused academic jargon and the occasional francophonic tidbit.  If any human being deserves immediate death, it is this man, and poetry declares it will be done in some ingenious method by his son as he seeks to be free of this horrible paternal bond.  Best of luck to you, my friend, and godspeed.

Again, I digress. 

I continued on up the mountain.  I met a couple of people coming down as I was going up, and saw a few people who I think might’ve made a wrong turn as they were going in the wrong way and kept looking back in a way which seemed to indicate bewilderment as to why most people were not going in their direction.  Shavano is a fun climb, and only moderately difficult.  It’s a lot of loose shale, but a beautiful geologic formation in an equally beautiful range of mountains.  The botanical life was different than it had been and there were new flowering species (new to me, of course) that I hadn’t seen yet.  It was getting a little overcast, so I kept up the hill as photos were not going to turn out anyway.  I got up to the ridge and proceeded to climb.  I really enjoy climbing over rocks.  I just think it’s fun.  No good reason for it, it’s just fun.  Shavano is kind of like a giant pile of rubble.  As I study geology and look back on it I think I understand why, but that’s for a different time for me to get into.  After scrambling and keeping a close eye on the clouds as they build up and creep closer I finally made it to the top.  Another beautiful experience.  Those rascally marmots were everywhere, and even on the hight point of the mountain was a lovely deposit of marmot scat.  I find it funny.

I sat up there for a while, wondering if I should walk over to Taubegauche (another 14er connected by a ridge to Shavano), but decided that it would be pushing my luck to do so.  It was sprinkling on me now and it was very cold, and I just didn’t want to chance it.  Besides, I already somehow knew that I’d be coming back here at some point.

I made my descent and got lucky again with the weather.  The sun broke through the clouds in time for me to take some more pictures of stuff.  I saw a mountain goat doing nothing on the snow pack that was in the couloir, and I just proceeded to have a nice leisurely stroll through all the rocks.  I managed to find my way back through the maze to my gear and ran into a familiar face from my ascent.  His name was Elijah, a fellow Missourian.  We hung out for a bit and chatted and I decided to set up camp just down from him a ways.  He told me about a hostel in Salida I should go to, and also told me about a hiker box full of cokes and stuff down where the trailhead hit the highway.  I thanked him, wished him well, and told him to expect to see me in Salida.

I woke up the next morning nice and early as I had to get 7 miles to the highway and then hitch into Salida about 15 miles (?) and then get across town to the P.O. before noon.  I got to the trailhead around 10.30 and it took forever to get a hitch.

I finally got a ride from someone with a rental car who was more or less lost.  He asked me if I knew where I was going, and I said I was certain that it was on this highway in Salida, not any other highway.  He seemed like a nice enough guy, though, just a little off.  Nothing threatening or anything.  I can’t even remember what we talked about, but I do know that I listened more than talked.  I don’t really understand what it is about me that gets people to just start confessing the strangest things about themselves to a total stranger, but it happens a lot.

Anyway, he drops me off on the sort of lame side of town where all the cheap motels are and I get out my  town map and figure out how to get to the post office.  I am now in Salida.

The clouds descend upon me yet again after leaving B.V.  Here I have about 7 miles to go today.

A break in the clouds as dusk draws nigh

Still a ways to go...

On my way to Shavano Trailhead a pair of elk scared wits out of me by tramping through this grove of aspen.

Looking down into the couloir as I ascend Shavano.  Kind of hard to tell how steep it is.

Look up at the summit as the clouds roll in.

Here I'm on the final ascent.  You can see the dip here where you walk up and then take a right to go up Shavano.  The peak you see here (I'm unsure of the name and don't have my maps with me) actually looks fun as you can ridge walk a lot of this area.

From the Summit

That's Mt. Taubegauche from the summit of Shavano.  It looks a lot closer than it really is (remember, you have to come back, typically) and the clouds were enough to put me off going there.

Mt. Antero from Shavano

On top of Shavano, a Marmot toilet.

Possibly the prankster

Purple Fringe (Purple Pincushions)

Alpine Thistle (Frosty Ball - seriously)  These things are huge and I'm glad I never fell on one.