CDT Day 41 (6/28/23)
Miles 935.3 (Red line 1129.3)- 970.6 (Red line 1166.5) (35.3 miles)
Verbatim
I’m journaling from day 42 at High Mountain Pies in Leadville because the mosquitoes were just so bad last night. This corner of town in Leadville smells like sewage, and I don’t know why. Oh well. The owner was really nice to show me a place to sit well before opening. So, here I am.
Yesterday was a big day! I slept well and had such a beautiful campsite that I didn’t want to get up. I started waking at 7:10am and made a quick run up the mountain. Hope Pass was beautiful, but only as you looked back towards the Collegiate Wilderness. The Twin Lakes area/valley was quite boring in comparison. I headed down the trail and into Twin Lakes.
Twin Lakes was nice, although I had an awkward first encounter at a farm store. I think she wanted me to buy something. But there was nothing for a grunge thruhiker to buy! It was all funny bougie stuff for tourists. I just wanted to look at the pretty wood work and pictures. She had a nice shaded lawn out front the store too…
I walked to the general store and met Warrior and Slytherin. We chatted for a few minutes and then they were off! I ate a pizza and a breakfast burrito. Then Pepé showed up! He made it over Lake Ann Pass! I asked him how he did it and he said, “I jumped”. The fool jumped off a cornice. “It was the only way down, no?” he said… He was there a few hours after I was. Pepé and I hiked out together and drenched our thirst in the first stream that we saw. It was hot! I walked out with no water. Pepé said the stream was 1.5 miles out. It was 2.5 instead. He apologized profusely for that mistake as we dipped our shirts in the water to cool off. But it’s fine, you can go a long way without water.
We saw a lot of Colorado Trail hikers. They’re cute. Haha! Pepé and I also got some soda trail magic from a trail crew that was building a bridge. I got a Fanta orange, cool from the moutain stream. The cans were in a fish net bag drifting in the water and tied to the bridge. The trail foreman, “Trippy Hippy” gave them to us. He was very kind. The trail crew was all people in their 60’s and 70’s it seemed. I thought about that as I walked on. People retired(?) or with time, but old for doing hard manual labor.
Pepé and I raced on and ended up meeting two women from Twin Lakes on a trail run. Megan and Jenna had just bathed in a river and encouraged us to do the same (I just got my pizza and it looks so good!). Pepé and I jumped in the ice cold water (I have now eaten the whole large pizza. It was 10/10). After our wash we chatted with Megan and Jenna for a half hour. Pepé, whose real name is Pierre I learned, is an ultra marathon runner. Megan is training for the Leadville 100. Crazy!
We rolled on! Up the hill and eight more miles caught us up to Warrior and Slytherin. Pepé and Slytherin spoke French together. It was nice to have so many hikers in one place on trail. I walked about eight more miles and up two more climbs. Towards the end I was exhausted. I tried to walk high to get out of the mosquitoes and make the morning into Leadville a simple 10 by 10 (ten miles by 10am). I came onto a ridge at 11,500ft and dropped camp. The mosquitoes were there waiting for me. I went behind and under a pine for some shelter and warmth. Within one minute there must have been 100 mosquitoes around me. I dragged my cowboy camp out into the middle of the pass where the wind blew fiercest and suffered the cold in exchange for the mosquito deterrent. It didn’t help much, however. There was still a cloud. They started dropping with the cold. Several dropped into my couscous as it hydrated. I ate Raisin Bran circled up in a ball under my bag. It was hell.
At like 9:30pm, while I was cowering from the mosquitoes in my bag, a troop, and I mean troop, of hikers came by. It was the weirdest thing. They were marching and almost none of them acknowledge my presence (I was literally next to the trail). I thought they were a horse troop they were so loud.
Post Note
I was tarp camping. I learned a lot more about my self, the passage of time while liminal between wakefulness and sleep and under duress by mosquitoes, and many new skills about camping in the wild because I brought a tarp instead of a tent. 3/10 would recommend bringing a tarp on the CDT.
Ultra light hiking/camping gear is really expensive. I’d bought a $700 tent in 2019 and didn’t want to repeat that purchase just yet. The summer previous, while on the Oregon Coast Trail, the zipper in my tent had broken, rendering the bug netting sown into the tent meaningless. If mosquitoes can just come in the front door, why have all this extra netting as weight? So, I cut it all out. I should have just fixed the zipper, but I’m stupid and lazy like that. Fixing or replacing a zipper seemed hard so I just cut out the netting instead. The tent was actually better at keeping out water as a tarp than as a tent because I could stretch it in new ways, pitch it more effectively without the limitations of its stretch-less bug netting, and the water on the tarp wouldn’t trickle down the connected bug netting and into my ground sheet anymore. So, I had a tent which had turned tarp. I was learning, slowly learning, the way to manage spring snowmelt levels of Colorado mosquitoes with just a small down quilt and head net. Here’s a list of some of the competing factors working for or against my good night’s sleep.
Mosquitoes stay active until they get cold, at which point they relax under pine boughs until suffused once again with morning warmth. If I want to be free of mosquitoes as early as possible, lets say by 11:30pm, then I should sleep in the coldest and windiest place I can find. Problem is then, of course, that I’m cold.
Setting up my tarp acts as a heat trap. The pyramid of the tarp holds in the hot condensed air arising from my body. The mosquitoes love this! They’re mostly happy to cling to the roof of the tarp as the night gets colder since it facilitates the same processes, but with the added benefit of rising heat from my body, as cowering under a pine bough would. So, setting up the tarp is both good and bad. It keeps the mosquitoes around longer, but gives them something to do (hang upside-down in the warmth) other than relentlessly maraud any opening in my defenses. I have grayed evening photos of dozens of little black specks on the underside of my tarp.
Covering oneself fully with quilt, clothing, and head-net provides maximum physical protection against mosquitoes. However, one must remain very very still. Any slight adjustment might cause the quilt to lift and expose my leg or the head-net to drop against my face and provide a point of contact for a proboscis. Once my protective seal was broken, figuring out the new positioning of my body and clothing would take another four or five minutes of trial and error. During which time I’m being bitten. Of course, staying still when sleeping on dirt littered with small rocks, roots, and undulations makes for very uncomfortable sleep. By the time I’d found the appropriate defensive covering my body would be screaming to move again.
The solution therefore, which I never really realized because I was so tired, was to just keep hiking until 11:30pm. But, I like to go to sleep early. I don’t like hiking in the dark.