By Michael Lanza
Warm, summer-like temperatures and mostly sunny skies greet us as we start hiking up the Williams Creek Trail in southwestern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Even in mid-September, the southern Rocky Mountains sun remains intense here, at over 9,000 feet. Its surprising warmth (compared to the northern Rockies) reminds me of days on the John Muir Trail or in Yosemite in August. But ominous clouds trot across the sky, some of them ripening to the color of a plum ready for picking, and the forecast calls for possible thunderstorms today and tomorrow.
In other words, it’s a pretty typical summer day in the Colorado Rockies.
We chat briefly with two guys hunting elk—the only people we’ll see all day. Otherwise, we have the very quiet forest, creek canyons, and meadows to ourselves on our long climb of almost 3,000 feet in over eight miles to sprawling meadows along the Middle Fork Piedra River. We find a patch of open ground and pitch our tent a short walk from the “river”—here just a lively little creek inches deep at the end of summer.
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My wife, Penny, and I have come to Colorado’s San Juan Mountains to backpack a four-day loop of just over 30 miles, including a section of the Continental Divide Trail in the Weminuche Wilderness, along which we’ll often be hiking and camping at just under or over 12,000 feet. And at this time of year, although summer continues to hang on in the southern Rockies, we will see very few other backpackers, and most of them solitary CDT thru-hikers hurrying southbound to finish before the mountain winter sets in.
The temperature drops quickly—a reminder that it is, after all, September—as the sun gives us a nice light show in the final minutes of our first day out here. At some point in the dark, early-morning hours of our literally frosty, starry night, I awaken, pull on a fleece hoodie, and burrow deeply inside my sleeping bag, happy that I brought a very warm 15-degree bag. In the morning, we find ice crystals in our water bottles.
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The Continental Divide Trail in the Weminuche Wilderness
On our second morning, we hit the trail while the valley bottom remains in the long shadow of a ridge and Penny and I both remain in warm layers. But before long, we reach the welcome sunshine in the vast meadows at the head of this valley. We stride across the Middle Fork Piedra River with a single rock hop—and find no visible trail on the other side. It has disappeared.
Fortunately, I have our route on a GPS app, so we follow its invisible course until relocating a visible path zigzagging uphill in the thin conifer forest growing at around 11,000 feet—something you don’t really see in the northern Rockies. At the CDT junction, we find a small and rather hidden sign nailed to a tree that reads “Indian Creek Trail” (the intermittent path we just hiked up). Nothing indicating that we’ve reached one of the country’s three major long trails. But the CDT is a mostly good trail here, obvious and only occasionally overgrown by a small conifer’s branches crowding over it.
Hiking uphill at over 11,000 feet slows us down and feels hard to people who live much lower than this. The trail gains the ridge crest, which we follow while buffeted by strong gusts, with views of grassy meadows, green valleys, and mountain ridges on both sides.
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When a thunderstorm strikes abruptly—our only warnings of its fast approach were two peels of thunder, minutes apart, the second startling us and sounding like a missile detonating just overhead—we’re ready in our rain shells, with rain covers on our packs. Pelted by rain and hail, we walk around the headwall of a small cirque, below bands of cliffs and above lush greenery that cascades down the valley below us.
At the other side of the cirque, we see tiny Cherokee Lake, like an inviting eye at 11,600 feet below heavily eroded and fluted, mud-brown cliffs. After just a few minutes of considering our options, the prospect of continuing in this weather holds no appeal and we walk off the trail down to an obviously previously used campsite, large enough for one tent, maybe 300 feet from the lake.
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We pitch our tent in the storm, keeping the interior dry, get our gear inside, and hunker down to wait for the waves of showers to pass. Then we emerge to sunshine and enjoy a period of calm by the lake, having dinner and admiring the lake’s mirror image of the cliffs and the few, scrawny conifers along one shore. But after the sun turns in for the night, the wind kicks up again. Gusts perhaps as high as 40 miles per hour buffet the tent all night.
On the CDT this afternoon, Penny had said to me, “I can’t believe, on this trail, we’ve seen no one.” Indeed, we saw no other people all day, only one tent in the upper meadows of the Middle Fork Piedra River, its occupants apparently still inside when we passed by in early morning. Of course, it is the middle of the week in the middle of September, with some nights dropping below freezing in the mountains. That tends to dissuade a lot of backpackers.
During the night, well after the half-moon set, I step outside to the sight of a black sky alive with stars and the faint skein of the Milky Way.
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Our Only Company: CDT Thru-Hikers
The chilly, early-morning wind continues blowing hard as we hit the trail on our third morning, again suited up for warmth. After a short uphill slog that impresses us with how hard it feels at this elevation, we stroll around the edge of a green, grassy meadow littered with rocks, perhaps a mile long and a half-mile across. We see elk scat everywhere along the trail, as we did in last night’s camp. Unfortunately, we are, of course, too late in summer for Colorado’s famous blooms of mountain wildflowers.
The Continental Divide Trail may mean different things to different people, but it’s nothing if not a highlights tour of the Rockies, including here in Colorado. We cross meadows that almost look as if they were designed by a landscape architect; traverse narrow footpaths across the face of rock walls; and pass through notches in ridges to an entirely new, sweeping canvas of mountains, meadows, cliffs, and now and then, even up this high, a lake or two.
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The Rockies show many different faces over their span of North America—differing from Colorado to Wyoming’s Wind River Range and Tetons, Idaho’s Sawtooths and White Clouds, and Montana’s Glacier National Park, to name just a handful of places. But in Colorado, the Rockies look like the child who grew up to be the biggest person in a family of big people.
These mountains dwarf all others in the continental U.S. (with the exception of the High Sierra, which also have a definitive look all their own; and you can point to Mount Rainier, of course, but most of the Cascade Range doesn’t exceed 9,000 feet). They project immensity and boundlessness, defying any hopes for seeing more than a tiny corner of them from any high point even on the CDT in the Colorado Rockies. Their highest elevations on trails reduce you to panting if you try to drink water while walking at an easy pace even on flat ground. They make your legs feel like you’ve already hiked 33 miles that day rather than just three.
As we walk downhill toward a pass on the CDT, in search of a campsite for our last night, a backpacker motors up the trail in our direction—by her strong pace, lean frame, and light pack, obviously a thru-hiker, and a rare CDT southbounder. As she gets within conversation distance, she smiles and says, “wow, people!” I laugh and tell her she’s the first person we’ve seen in two days. In her twenties, I’m guessing, she’s from Estonia and, indeed, thru-hiking the CDT. She hiked the PCT a few years ago, so she’s got chops. She’s only covered 20 miles so far today, a light day compared to her usual 25, due to a sore foot. We chat a bit and wish her well. Looks like she’s got everything under control.
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