Tenessee pass to Monarch pass: mile 140~ 250
We left our camp site near Camp Hale to head towards Ski Cooper on Tennessee pass. My manager had let me stash a resupply in our locker room there, and we enjoyed hot food for lunch on the ski area’s closing weekend. After repacking and lounging for a few minutes, we headed back out.
Back on trail, we headed through the trees to where the trail crossed near another hut. We had much more success collecting water from Uncle Bud’s hut, where the weekend visitors were full of positivity and encouragement for us. They even gave us a few snacks! Food always taste better when it comes from somewhere besides your own food bag. We camped near by enjoying in the luxury of room temperature water from the hut. The water we collected from streams was usually so cold that it would start to freeze over before we could drink it.
We set out early the next day with a big agenda to make it through the Holy Cross and Mt Massive wilderness areas to make it all the way to hwy 82. We had decided to take advantage of the many resupply locations on the first half of the trail to keep our food weight low, but that meant pushing ourselves to make it to Twin Lakes to meet our friends by the night of the 17th. We put in 24.5 miles: our longest day on skis up unto that point in the trip to make it. Alex and Jordan greeted us with pizza, big smiles, and lots of positivity. We were so happy to see them and felt truly rejuvenated by their friendly faces. It was a long day to get there, but it felt good to push ourselves through challenging snow conditions and route finding to make it there!
After leaving Twin Lakes, we were excited to traverse the Collegiate range, but because of the recent storm and obvious wind loading on Hope pass, we decided to forgo the first part of the West route and navigate the traverse according to our own avalanche risk tolerance. We traversed around Hope pass via the East route and intersected the trail on the other side via County rd 390. After just a few hundred yards on the trail we again chose to ignore the official route in favor of lower risk avalanche terrain up the Clohesy drainage. We camped at the base of this drainage and then traveled up and over it into the Pear Lake/ North Texas creek drainage early the next morning. After that, we were able to roughly follow the collegiate West route to our resupply at Monarch pass.
It had been windy all day and as we crossed over a steep slope near the top of Cottonwood pass, I broke down in tears in frustration at the wind. When we made it to the top of the ridge at Cottonwood, Mark and I laid down and cried together for a few minutes before skiing down to where we intended to camp. We camped below Cottonwood pass on night two of this stretch, and after the long day, found some more excitement when we installed a window into our tent at dinner time. Mark was cooking (from our sleeping bags as we always do) when the fuel line came unscrewed from the regulator on our remote canister stove. The stove was running so it ignited the fuel now spewing out of the regulator attached to the fuel canister. Mark pushed the stove, flaming canister and pot of boiling water away from the tent while I dove out of the other side of the tent, barefoot, into the snow. I buried the flaming canister and stove in snow and the flame quickly went out. Thankfully, nothing else caught on fire, but the flames did melt a hole in our tent. We made sure one another were okay, ate some snacks and assessed the damage. Once we realized that our stove had simply come unscrewed, we screwed it back together, tightly, and cooked dinner. Upset by the events, we arranged to hike out to a ride the next day. When we woke up the next morning, however, we decided not to hike out, since we only had a few days left of calm weather before the next storm. We decided the approximately 1.5 square foot hole in our tent would not be an issue for the next few days and this would be our best opportunity to travel through this stretch of trail.
We were happy to still be on trail as we skied over beautiful passes and found some surprisingly good turns! When we made it to our friends house near Salida, we were glad we had stayed on trail, but anxious to repair our tent. A local company in Salida, Oveja Negra, kindly gave us some material to make the repair, and I used our friend Sarah’s sewing machine to install the new side walling in our tent. A lot of the fabric had been affected by the heat from the window installation process, so I had to cut out an even larger portion of the tent to repair it. It was a nerve racking job, but very successful. Besides, a colorful patch adds character! While we were staying with Mac and Sarah, we also bought new skins for our skis, which Mark cut to size. And Mark hemmed the pants he had borrowed from Bart to fit a little less like MC Hammer pants. We were once again thankful to be in the company of our friends and to be able to mend our gear. Mac also lent Mark an avalanche probe after his had slipped out of his bag when we were hitching a ride into town. The day off for repairs also conveniently coincided with red flag wind warnings, which we were happy to be waiting out inside. Lots of good food, a few updates to our equipment and a few good nights of rest had us feeling ready and and excited to get back on trail.
