Start to Tenessee Pass: mile 0~ 140
Our packs laden with skis, we spent the entirety of the first day on foot. The backpacks were heavy since we had all of our cold weather clothing and four days of food stowed away in them. It was a warm sunny Saturday and the Waterton Canyon road was busy with day hikers and cyclists, many of them bemused at the sight we offered. “Is there snow up there?,” “Where are you going skiing?,” “Those look like big packs,” along with many a confused look would be the normal start of any interaction for the next two days. It felt ridiculous to us too, carrying our skis through the desert foothills, but we received a lot of positivity when we told people what we were trying to do, and we kept moving forward confident that there would eventually be snow.
We had a lot of excitement that first day. Besides all the people we ran into in Waterton Canyon, we were also charged by a bighorn sheep! Or based on the behavior of the people around us, perhaps he just happened to be running in our general direction…
Since most of our conversation the week prior had been purely logistic, Mark and I were relieved able to catch up and talk about anything and everything! We ended up talking to one another almost non-stop for that whole first day. When we got to camp that first night, we decided to enjoy the warm weather to sleep under the stars. At 1 am, however, we woke up to rain drops. We set up our tent before we got soaked, but it was an unsettling experience. When we did set out to start our day the next morning, we also discovered a hole in our pad inflatable sleeping pad! Mark patiently looked and listened for the leak, and thankfully with a little repair tape we didn’t have problems with it for the rest of the trip.
The rain had subsided by the time we woke up in the morning, and we left camp dry. After a few hours of hiking, I started experiencing tendentious in my right foot that would persist to some degree for the rest of the trip. I took some ibuprofen and we kept moving, but I had to take more frequent breaks to rest my foot. I was frustrated since I had imagined us crushing miles while the navigation and hiking was easy, but Mark patiently reminded me that we would just have to take the time we took. Despite my angst and foot pain, we kept moving, and by the end of the day we were in the Lost Creek wilderness. It was day two and we were excited to dawn skis as we moved across the just-snowy-enough-to-need-skis trail! We were still able to find a snow free spot to camp and decided to risk not setting up our tent one more time in these last days of nice weather before the oncoming storm.
By day 3, we were on our skis for more than half the day and were seeing fresh snow come down by the time we were at camp! We headed out of the lost creek wilderness towards Kenosha pass where we would pick up our resupply on Day 4, April 12th. I cached our resupply at Kenosha, and we were excited to find our animal proof bucket still stowed away where I had left it.
After leaving Kenosha pass with a fresh resupply a little before noon, we headed up and over Georgia pass. It was windy and stormy and our first high pass to navigate on trail. We ended up dealing with howling winds and blowing snow while we hiked over six foot wind drifts above tree line. By the time we made it over the pass it was 7 pm and we decided to ski down into the trees to make camp off trail. We were so cold that instead of looking for a running water source, we decided to get into our bags and melt snow on our stove. While the warmth and comfort of camp was welcome, we ended up staying up past 11 pm in order to melt enough snow for ourselves. Even in our bags, it took a long time to warm up, and we never let ourselves get that cold again. Ironically, skiing down the fresh snow into camp that night was some of the best skiing we had all trip, but we hardly enjoyed it for our concern with making camp and warming ourselves up.
After breaking camp below Georgia pass, we headed back onto trail trail and into Breckenridge where we had left our next resupply with a friend. It was intermittently snowy and windy all day, and after the long night we just had, we were looking forward to spending an evening inside. We took a slight alternate from the official trail at the end of our day so we could get to our friend’s house in summit cove. We walked into his garage around 6:30 pm and dried out our gear and repacked our resupply while we waited for Bart and Lisa to come home. Bart had spent the day at A-Basin in an endurance race where he and his ski partner skied 62 laps on the Pallavinci lift. He was full of excitement when he got home and were all excited to share stories and enjoy the hospitality before heading to bed. We knew when we planned our resupplies that it would be great to see friends along the way, but it wasn’t until we were sitting in their home that we really appreciated how important these resupplies would be for our mental state and motivation. Beyond the mental boost, it was nice to take care of our physical needs too. Bart even lent Mark a pair of pants for the rest of the trip since the day prior his had totally ripped through the crotch, and me a pair of sunglasses since mine were getting scratched to the point of frustration.
The next morning, Bart drove us back to the trail where we were tossed back into the wind and snow. We hiked up and over the Ten mile range near Breckenridge ski resort and skied down the “Y” chute to the base of Copper mountain where we enjoyed an early camp for the night. The next day we enjoyed the opportunity to eat breakfast at Copper before we headed up towards Searle pass. While we were connected to the wifi, Mark discovered his credit card info had been stolen, and we ended up spending a few hours making sure the fraudulent charges were taken care of and his cards cancelled before we headed back out onto the trail. Once we did make it onto the trail, we found the fresh snow being slowly warmed into a sticky clumpy mess that adhered to the bottom of our skis. The clump turned our usual skinning pace into an exhausting slug as we struggled to pick up the weight of the sticky snow with each step.
After a much longer slug than we had expected, we found ourselves disappointed when Janet’s cabin, located near Searle pass was unoccupied. We had planned to bum water from the hut goers (we saw the hut was booked online) as we had done previously when winter camping near huts. With no water for the next ten miles, we resolved ourselves and hiked up over Searle and Kokomo passes towards Camp Hale. When we finally made it to water we drank as much of the cold runoff as we could and then kept moving a few more miles to make camp.
