The Walk from Crested Butte, day 8

Fryingpan River to Carter Lake

A new candidate for most miserable day of hiking. 

The day started off ok with a 3-mile walk down the Fryingpan road to the Montgomery Flats trailhead that leads up into the Holy Cross Wilderness. A camper that I chatted with the morning picked me up for the last mile. Unfortunately, my water bottle slipped out of its holster in his car and I didn’t notice until I was well up the trail and needed a drink. I have a 2-liter bladder, so I can manage, but this is the second time I’ve lost a bottle out of that holster. Time to replace it with one that is more secure.

The Last Chance trail heading north is in good shape, cruising through a succession of meadows and forest glades. Saw two bears in two meadows along the way. I think that every meadow has its own bear, a very sensible arrangement.

There is a bear in this video at the far end of the meadow but you will have to go fullscreen to see it.

As soon as I turned on to the Tellurium Trail heading east things got worse and kept getting worser. 

 At the trail junction I was 5 miles from Savage Lakes at 1pm and thought I would be there at 4, and might even make it over the ridge separating the Fryingpan and Eagle drainages. But the trail was mostly nonexistent and went through a series of PUDs sidehilling through a dense forest filled with deadfall.  I stuck with the trail, thinking it might get better but it did not.

Rain made the lack of a trail much worse. The storm announced its approach from the south with loud and frequent thunder. It turned into a blowout downpour when the count between flash and thunder got to 8. Downpours are hardly uncommon in these mountains in August and I ducked under a large red fir waiting for the worst to pass.

I kept counting the lightning-thunder intervals–8, then 6, then 5…then 5, then 5, then 5….

The storm had stalled out. Although it was 4 pm, it was so dark I seriously considered getting my headlamp out. It was obvious that I could not wait out the storm and so I commenced thrashing through the brush and scrambling over deadfalls again.

There is no raingear that will keep you dry in conditions like that and my shorty poncho was less than ideal to begin with. The rain did not let up and I was well-soaked before long.

Rather than make the 5 miles to Savage Lake by 4pm, I only managed to get 3 miles to Carter Lake by 7. It was still raining hard, but I had one major bit of luck: a sheltered, well-drained campsite appeared, reasonably close to the creek but high enough above it to not worry about flash flooding.

I pitched my tent in the rain, stripped off my wet clothes and put on a dry base layer only to realize that I was almost out of water. I took off my warm clothes and ran naked down to the creek to fill up, wiping myself dry with a bandana once I got back in the tent.

Although warm and dry I was kept uneasy by the sound of rockslides above as the rain continued heavy until midnight. That’s not a sound you want to hear at night.