Grand Lake to Highway 14: July 29th - August 3rd, 2025
* Bonus Day: Rocky Mountain marathon! The alarm goes off at 3:30 AM because the goal today is to cover about 26 miles of trail, 27 including the bit through town. But all the overnight kit stays home at the KOA cabin; this is our chance to hike the whole RMNP section in one day, getting by without securing any permits. Fueled by pâtisseries and cans of cold brew, we crossed the campground in the dark morning and whispered out of instinct, not wanting to be the roosters that brought on daytime. The highway sits empty, the emulated-old-timey covered boardwalks don't creak and groan under the weight of passing tourists. Manage to find the trailhead and start the slow and steady ascent along North Inlet Creek. The dawn gathering weakly behind low, grey clouds backlights the charred spears of tree trunks; nearly the whole valley burned in 2020. Car-sized boulders stand naked and exposed, all the lichen and moss burned away, leaving only white granite as a testament to what it took to withstand the flames. Past the tumbling roar of Cascade Falls less trees have burned, although many wait their turn as beetlekill, and we finally spot some Colorado moose! Three mosey near the creek, what looks to be two juveniles and a bull. They raise their heads and flick their ears and clearly know we're around, as we slowly pass at a distance, making sure not to come between the presumed dad and kids, coming up with our best moose sweet talk. More waterfalls gracefully spill down the steep drainage as we swiftly go uphill; Susan even jumps a little bit to demonstrate to another hiker how light her pack is. The trail has good tread, no downed trees, a reasonable grade, and we make it ten miles before taking our first break. National park trails seem to have two modes: showcase and utterly neglected. Unfortunately we need to take a second break shortly after because the canned coffee is causing a number of unpleasant noises and sensations in my belly and I have to find somewhere to dig a hole. But while wandering far off to spare any other hikers that might come by I come across a mule deer buck, velvet still covering the antlers that make his big ears seem more proportional. The trail switchbacks above treeline, through meadows and then to tundra; the deep glacial valley and steep rocky summits that loomed so tall this morning shrink under the elevated perspective. We slightly surprise two elk grazing near a stream - they look up suddenly as Susan deliberately talks louder. But then go back to grazing. Both are males, and neither care much about us, each adorned with a delicately branching crown of beauty and danger. One in particular sports an enormous set of antlers, almost the size of his body over again, and you can see the weight as he slowly raises his head and swings it side to side, fighting inertia. He stands on 3 legs and uses the antlers to scratch his balls. Finally we're up on Bighorn Flats, the top of the plateau whose eastern flank terminates abruptly in the jagged summits and cirques of some of the park's best-known peaks. I take a side quest up Hallet Peak, while Susan continues on to check out the grave of Tyndall Glacier. The mountain is about 300 feet higher than I really kinda wanted, but at the top I can finally get an eyeful of Longs Peak. It is *The Mountain* of the park, Colorado's northernmost 14'er, towering over the rest of the summits in stern, marshal authority, flat-topped as a soldier, unforgiving flanks of sheer rock a testament to how it survived as the ice field around it melted away. Soon after I reach the top of Hallet another man comes up as well; later I'll find out that's Jeff. I start down and pass a few day-hikers coming up from Bear Lake: a woman in black who asks me if I am a "pro", and follows up with nervous questions about the weather, and a family of 3 whose dad has a look on his face like he doesn't know why the hell he's up here. Yet Dad leads them on, even when the adolescent daughter takes a look at the last 200 feet of boulders to the summit and exclaims "Awww hell no!" They're wearing cotton hoodies and casual hiking clothes and it's cold and grey and windy and a little humid, not thunderbolt-stormy, but not a friendly day in the mountains. I continue down and reconvene with a patient Susan, who tells me about how that woman in black had run towards her, waving her arms and shouting "Jeff! JEFF!", and Susan had to explain that she wasn't Jeff - Jeff had come past and was the guy on the mountain up there. Ah, family vacation. The sheer sides of Notchtop Mountain illustrate the 1,000-foot-deep grooves long-deceased glaciers gnawed out of the rock. Amble on down the other side of Bighorn Flats, past the lonely ridge of Snowdrift Peak, down to the valley of Tonahutu Creek. A brief strip of living trees marks our return from the alpine zone, and then the burn scar resumes, having wrapped all the way around the fractal arms of earth that divide the basins. Granite Falls is on full display, and you can watch the entire course of water twist and tumble down, unobscured by foliage or under-growth. The sky spits a little rain. A long, long trail down takes us to another creek which we follow back to the trailhead off the main park road. By now the sun is shining so we smell nice and sweaty in time to try to hitchhike 4 miles back to the KOA. 27 miles, out to and back from the heart of the park, wildlife and wildflowers along the way, and it's not even 6 PM. It's like we've been training or something. After a little while a white Hyundai electric pulls a "U" to pick us up; the couple live in Grand Lake and work remote and know exactly the Conoco where we ask to be dropped off. We don't have anything at the cabin except hiking food, and I'll be damned if I eat that when I have indoor housing. So stock up on gas station food, at least the gas station food we don't normally eat every day, for breakfast, then walk a little ways to the Wild Bear restaurant/tavern. It's pretty standard national park gateway town American food but a Philly cheesesteak does hit the spot after hiking that much. Susan's portabella burger is literally drenched in cheese. Walk back to the KOA and by bedtime we both wish we'd had a little more food, yet the pile of bars on the table has no appeal. Sleep is more important.
Leaving the KOA when it's still dark
Exposed boulders
* Day 0: Zero day in Grand Lake. Get to sleep in until 8. Susan grabs coffee from the front office and it vastly improves our Little Debbie pastry breakfast. Chores and cleaning and more laundry - might as well keep these clothes clean while we can, Susan washes our rain jackets and sleeping bag liners - and then another round of errands in town, not least because we're both pretty hungry. I talk Susan into second coffee, and we check out the next section and forecast over well-crafted cortados. Coffee staves off hunger a bit, but Cy's Deli across the street is the next stop - an artichoke sandwich with chicken and rice soup. Now we can make it to the other side of town, where the gear shop has a brand-new shiny backpack waiting for me, with all the parts properly aligned. Thanks, Osprey! We pick up some other sundries, and Susan even finds a pair of wool underwear. Walk out of town, picking up more groceries along the way, and stop for some disappointing chilequiles; it's not a good sign when the kid taking your order asks a bunch of questions not relevant to the item you ordered. Then you end up with tortilla chips instead of hash browns. Can't seem to escape from downtown Grand Lake to the KOA without spending 300 dollars. Spend the rest of the day eating and doing chores and planning and trying to be the right level of sociable with other KOA campers. In and out of the office using their microwave all day, cooking pot pies and chili dogs and nachos. Caught up on some things and behind on others. Rain comes through Grand Lake hard and we're so happy we snagged the cabin for all 3 nights. 4 walls and a roof.
Yep, looks like Ben & Susan's cabin
* Day 1: First step this morning is to walk back to Rocky Mountain National Park - nobody is enthused to give us a ride through the entrance, probably suspicious we're trying to cheat the system. Nope, just pedestrians. A car pulls off near the entrance sign and gets our hopes up but speeds away after snapping a photo. After we make it inside the park, though, hitching goes quick and a guy heading out for some fishing picks us up. He's a local, and drives between Grand Lake and Estes Park all the time, so he seems to know exactly where we're trying to get started today. Except we still end up at the wrong trailhead, apparently a different trail that leads up Bowen Gulch. But Susan confirms on the map that this will meet up with the CDT eventually, and promises to be a very pretty alternate, and we hate imposing on people who have already helped us out for absolutely nothing, so decide to roll with it and hike on up to and past Parika Lake. An extra mile and a few hundred extra feet uphill, it should be fine! Pass out of the national park and into the Never Summer Wilderness; a dramatic name, but the wildflowers and marmots and butterflies and haze covering the RMNP peaks behind us all disagree. It's one of those "big climb up and over a pass" kind of days, and soon the forest opens to reveal more of the mountains that surround us, rough and rocky but not quite as sheer as their park-worthy neighbors to the east. By the time they we reach Parika Lake the views are fantastic but the clouds already bunch up grey and thick. It's barely even 1 PM but the storms today woke up early, rumblings out of bed over the pass ahead of us. We decide it's a bad idea to hike through the highest and most exposed part of the day when a thunderstorm races for the same area, and hunker down with our rain gear on under some scrubby limber pine. Shortly after small hail starts to pelt down and we feel pretty justified in waiting. But that subsides and the thunder grows more distant, so it's time to start hiking even if the rain still drizzles. Go up and around Fairview Mountain, spend an eternity wrapping around a basin to reconnect with the official CDT, ditch the rain gear under the blazing sun that finds us through a blue hole in the storms. Susan sees an eagle try to take down an elk, grabbing the antlers and wrenching its head down with the force of a lightning bolt - hopefully this isn't an omen where we're the elk and the eagle is the sky. Clouds move back in and rain resumes as the trail merges into a scrappy and rutted dirt-bike path. Rain drizzles steadily for hours, never reaching the thundering crescendo we've come to expect from Colorado, but pattering on in a consistent pattern much different than the afternoon storms we've become accustomed to. Eventually make it far enough down the dirt-bike of road to find a rare campsite sheltered by a still-living tree. A few miles short of the original goal - didn't end up making it any shorter on ourselves today. The rain dissipates with the setting sun and gives way to a cold evening with the kind of humid air that penetrates your skin and steals the warmth straight from your core. Ended up with a big day today, and another one tomorrow.
Starting selfie outside RMNP!
Sitting, hiding from the hail
* Day 2: Load up on water at camp, because our next source isn't until going up and over a mountain. Today we strike off west through the Rabbit Ears range, following the Divide horizontally before it sharply turns back north; who designed this silly continent? At any rate, not leaving Colorado anytime soon. Susan starts hiking with her puffy on because the morning is so cold and humid, borderline frosty, and she doesn't want to wait around being cold while I'm still fussing with my new backpack, tugging on straps and fine-tuning the fit. All morning Parkview Mountain dominates the view in front of us; we're going up and over it today, hitting 12,000 feet for the last time on the trail. Hit two kinds of trail magic - a bucket full of chocolate peanut butter cups at the junction with the highway, and a smattering of wild raspberries just coming ripe along the trail. From the highway the real uphill begins, as we start to wind up the east side of the broad peak. Everything still looks sunny and happy until we come around a higher ridge and get a good view to the south and east - that part of the sky holds a lot more anger. Within 20 minutes I've gone from optimism that we'll make the summit in good weather to casting nervous upward glances every time a distant roll of thunder rolls to my ears. There's an old lookout at the top, so as long as we can get there before things get too bad we can at least get a little shelter. The wind sharpens, gusting cold. Walk walk walk walk don't look up walk faster walk. Despite the atmospheric sabre-rattling still make it to the lookout before the storm breaks on us... But watching the valleys below gave us an idea of what we'd be in for. The streaked and tired white wooden siding and roof still sat on a robust stone foundation, and only one window was broken. Inside is dim and stuffy with assorted feces scattered on the floor, but there's no holes; we know from experience it could be worse. Scrawled on every available space are signatures and messages from thru-hikers past, like crawling inside the type of frayed and tattered musty register more typically found on summits, tucked inside an old PVC pipe. We weren't sure how long to wait around, whether to prepare for a long sit on the floor or rush to lower ground. But it didn't take long for a couple of chubby chipmunks to notice us propped against the wall and start scheming how to get the goodies out of our crinkly plastic wrappers, or at least the salt off our pole handles, poking out from holes in the rock wall and crawling over and under Susan. A marmot appears inside the lookout shack, bloated and scruffy and looking a little crazed from eating too much trash - sorry, little fella. So we think we'll just skedaddle but while I'm prepping for the incoming rain it finds us first. I smack my head on the low door of the lookout. And then the rain turns to hail. And then comes down heavier, so we hide out in the shack, vigilant for rodents as pieces of ice clatter off the metal roof. Susan gets a little cell signal, checks the radar, and it looks like we'll get a break around 4 PM. When the rain lessens we head off down the peak, armored in slick jackets and pants and backpack covers, but the dark grey clouds stick around to threaten and spit and throw the occasional hail that bounces off the rain gear. Down an empty brown ridge off the west side of Parkview, and Susan and I snap at each other a little because we're cold and tired and still have a long way to go even though it's already after 4. Down around Haystack Peak the sun comes back out as a blue hole passes above us, and we find more raspberries ripening in the intense sun that shines down through the black skeletons of trees that burned in the massive fires of 2020. That helps improve the mood. The blowdowns and rough trail, not totally recovered from the fire, help suppress the mood. The trail drags on as we wind slowly down and clouds regather and keep spitting and drizzling and generally keeping us uncomfortable. My feet have been cold and wet for hours and now tenderly feel each rock in the trail. The storms lately are more pernicious, rising up earlier in the day and lingering into the evening instead of neatly blowing through. Dinner at a little creek and then on to the camping; at least the rain stops enough to let us get the tent up dry. A little pity on us rolling in to sleep with the sun already setting.
Still coming up Parkview
Coming over downed trees
* Day 3: Wake up to skies already grey and cloudy. But by some miracle my sleeping bag is actually dryer than it was when I went to sleep; the morning air doesn't cling with chilling vapor. Guess it's good we didn't camp next to a creek for once. But as soon as the tent is down rain drizzles down, at not even 7 AM - and today was supposed to have a better forecast. Thunder rumbles over some distant ridge, and we hear a crack snap and crash - not from lightning, but a tree that's decided it needs to be a lot closer to the ground. I can confirm that when a tree falls in the woods it does make a sound. A brief spot of sunshine as we head up another ridge tricks me into thinking maybe the storms already headed on for the day; the thunder and dense clouds quickly return to disabuse me of such silly fantasies. Spend the morning rolling up steep hills and dropping a little then going back up. Also crawling over downed trees - Susan counts at least 60. The weather shifts modes as much as the trail, rain blowing around dark skies subsiding to patchy sunshine and then right back - at one point we have our full rain gear on for about 5 whole minutes before the sun comes out to cook us. 2, 3, 4 bouts of rain pass; thankfully we never have to really commit to being above treeline, always staying close enough to some stunted krummholz to have an option to dive into. Low and lazy clouds drag their misty grey heels along the hills and valleys just a few miles away. Take our first real break in a valley after 8 miles, but then storm 5 chases us off. Up from the valley, more steep slogs, and finally come upon our salvation - the trail connects to a forest service road that cruises at moderate grades, free of matchstick blowdowns and dense wet undergrowth. Best of all, it's mostly downhill! At our campsite by 5:45 PM, the earliest day yet. Yet on the way down we caught some views of an absolutely massive thunderhead, the kind of weather system that roils in blue and white soaring layers, dwarfing the mountains that seemed like the ultimate biggest things around just a few hours ago. Trail Angel Jim left a sign and cairns to a stream, and we're so grateful there's no truck parked on the pullout off the main road because it's such an easy tent site. Get the tent up, consider starting dinner right away, and then grape-size hail shuts down that idea. Wait for the following rain to pass before dinner. Overnight storm 7 comes by and douses the tent. Seven storm Saturday. At least only one tree fell over.
...these things can really slow you down
* Day 4: Road walking all day today, which is honestly OK after the pulling three 4,000+ foot days in a row. Awake to clear skies for the first time in several days, just utterly blank and blue and endless above the forest canopy. The shady forest road leads through tall spruces and stands of aspen. Pretty soon the dirt road empties out into dry plains dotted with sage and monument plants that have turned crunchy and brown. When we started this hike the monuments were still sprouting, unfurling spiral bundles of leaves that shined with glossy green wonder at the sun falling upon them. Behold the passage of time. See a truck and trailer that might belong to Jim, who will supposedly also give out cookies an water to hikers, but we're both too nervous about being shot to go knock on a stranger's camper that they use to live on public land. Pass the trailhead and connect into Colorado Highway 14. Here the CDT stands particularly unfinished, stymied by land disputes through the Rabbit Ears Range, and we have 9 miles of walking along a narrow shoulder while cars fly by at 60 miles per hour. Probably more dangerous than mountain storms. Put out our thumbs at every passing car but it's an awkward road and the traffic is too fast. Not very hopeful. A grey Toyota pulls a U in front of us, but then still drives past - what a tease. But then a few minutes later that same car pulls over in front of us and offers a ride! Norm is a retired public defender who's lived in Steamboat Springs for 40 years and picks up a lot of hikers. His son graduated from Montana State University - Go Cats! - and he didn't escape Bozeman without a love for outdoor adventure, so now Norm helps outdoorsy folks tumbling along the pavement. He gives us a whole tour of Steamboat, pointing out restaurants (there's a lot) and how the town has changed since the 70's. Sure he didn't make a lot of money as a public defender in rural Colorado, but he couldn't believe someone would pay *him* to live out here. You can tell he's not a big fan of the garish "starter castles" that sprawl across the former ranching fields, but also he loves his little town. Drops us off right at our hotel and just a little past 1 PM we're checked in! Had mentally prepared for a much much longer day. But by 3 PM we're showered and enjoying chicken and waffles. Make a trip to the store and spend what used to be our whole weekly grocery budget on food for the next three days. Our room is equipped with a full kitchen so we're gonna live it up! Finally see a Colorado bear - a good-size black bear jogging through the parking lot of a different hotel, ignoring us with armfuls of groceries and heading straight for the dumpster instead. I guess there's easier targets. Find Bob's Burgers on the TV. I would have had a better attitude during the last section of hiking if you had told me this is how it would end. There's probably a lesson in that somewhere. Or maybe I just really enjoy showers and food.
It is good to see y'all's smiles ^^
ReplyDeleteP.s. More marmots plz <3
Susan can fill in as a marmot in a pinch. She likes sunny rocks
Delete