By 8am, I walked logging roads of the Colorado Trail. The logging operations were happening — a semi-truck parade rolled up the dirt road, excavators with claws organized the piles, wheel loaders with chains dragged materials out from deeper in the forest. The operations were adjacent to the official CDT and CT — the trail was the logging road. These were the first people I had seen in two days, but they were shelled behind plexiglass enclosures, running multiple-ton mechanical dinosaurs to cut down the forest.
| 🗓️ Date | June 7th |
| ⇢ Mileage | 29.1 |
| 📍 Trip Mileage | 967.1 |
| ⛅️ Weather | Sunny morning; clouds rolled in before noon; bitter, wet, rainy afternoon below freezing |
| 🏞️ Trail Conditions | Clear trail with intermittent snow patches |
I continued through the logging operations and soon hit Highway 114, an uneventful road between the towns of Gunnison and Saguache. A town stop was unnecessary. Climbing along dirt roads brought me back to 11,000 feet quickly. My time below 10,000 feet was short lived.
The remainder of the hiking consisted of much up and down. By 11am, the preamble of thunder alluded to what was to come, the 12pm to 2pm window was an epic chorus, and the applaud of hail and rain rooted for an encore from 2pm to 6pm. Well, that encore came from 8pm to 10pm, as I ate dinner in my tent.
Precipitation fiddles the line between solid and liquid near 11,000 feet and close to freezing air temperatures. Considerably — maybe five precent deviation in altitude — above and below this elevation marker, the state of the water is defined; there is no dance between rain and hail. I prefer hail. Though it can sting at times depending upon size and wind, at least I do not wet out.
Late in the day, I got socked in at high elevation. I was soaked through and through at this point. The wind atop the grim, grassy, muddy mountain breathed ghosts of wispy clouds across the trail corridor. The wind numbed my hands to an unusable state while simultaneously providing a moderate drying effect for my pants, backpack, and top. I was not about to stay up high for the night — the wet ground, wind, cold, and potential for condensation drove me down the mountain.
Below the clouds and next to a stream, I pitched camp. Camp location was far from ideal. I knew two things: it would be cold and it would be wet in the morning.
Signing off,
Zeppelin / fReaK (ON a leash)
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