The Front Range – Steamboat Springs to Leadville: Days 78-89

HD: Ah, Colorado. Where to begin…

The land of giant climbs and tight weather windows. With the amount of daylight shrinking by 3 minutes every day, we have to use every minute to make progress. We can usually overcome one of the two main obstacles to meet our daily mileage goals – poor trail conditions or weather – but there were several times in this 10 day stretch where we dealt with both in the same day.

It’s getting colder. We had our first below freezing nights since the first week of our hike. This makes it more difficult to start fast in the morning, and it makes the evening hiking window more painful towards the end.

We hiked east for two days out of Steamboat Springs to meet up with the northern part of Colorado’s Front Range. We then turned south and walked down the range, which includes Rocky Mountain National Park, through the towns of Grand Lake, Silverthorne, and Frisco, before jogging west and entering the Sawatch mountains near Leadville (home to half of the tallest mountains in the Continental U.S.).

Grand lake was a cute town. Unfortunately, I was food poisoned at breakfast by some bad lettuce. The next two days on trail were pretty rough. We pushed through it and remained on schedule, though, until a late afternoon storm caught us at Rogers Pass before summiting James Peak. We emergency camped for a couple of hours and then made the wise decision to hike down to the Winter Park ski resort in the dark for a meal and a bed.

We are fortunate at the shorter distance between towns in Colorado, but damn the price to pay on the trail is too high. Speaking of prices, eating out in Colorado requires taking out a small loan. It is the most expensive food I have ever seen – and that includes DC and California.

We hiked alone for this section, only rarely seeing other thru-hikers or anyone else for that matter. Folks are spread out all over the towns and multiple trail paths offered in northern Colorado. The bright shining star was the town of Leadville, in the center of the state. The last two days of trail into Leadville were awesome, and they couldn’t have come at a better time. 

We ran into a couple of bull moose at dusk one evening. Moose count is 8 for the trip – all memorable. But the wildlife show stealers were the Pica. They guard every high mountain rock pile, and send their little warning chirps when we are spotted. On our last (and highest) evening of hiking before Leadville, these usually shy creatures were bolder, chirping and running at us before stopping a few feet away to stare.

We walked into Leadville at 3 pm on a Saturday after I was able to listen to most of the LSU game on the radio on the way down. We went straight to the Melazana store, where you must make an appointment to purchase one of their famous micro grid fleece hoodies. The next available appointment was for April 2025 (quite the business model!), but CDT thru-hikers are allowed to purchase one item each with proof that you were in fact a thru hiker (a picture of us at the northern terminus in Canada). 

My buddy Jon drove down from Denver to hang out the first night and he brought with him our resupply box and several other important items (heavier sleeping bags, new trekking poles) as we gear up for the next leg of the trip.

From Leadville, we will head south through Twin Lakes and into the giant Collegiate Peaks. Salida is our next resupply town. This begins a critical final two weeks as we dodge weather to make it out of Colorado before the first real snow. It’s too early to think about New Mexico, but I think about New Mexico about once an hour. Just get us out of these huge mountains!

MC: the state of Colorado has been harder than we anticipated. We knew it was going to be challenging because the elevation grade for the state is the highest out of all the ones we walk through, but we were still optimistic that at least the trail conditions would be better due to the increase in population density of the towns near the trail. So far, this has proven to be true once, and it was when we walked through Copper Mountain Ski Resort, that we had the best trail conditions of the entire trip, but other than that one day, it has been a struggle. We are no longer hiking 1000’ climbs, we are hiking 2000’ climbs in one go, and it’s exhausting. We were mentally and physically drained from the hike up to the ridge line, and were then greeted with 60mph winds for a 4 mile stretch of ridge line hiking. It is hard to describe how awful it is to walk in those wind conditions, but I’ll give a few examples: my nose was running all morning and the wind would catch the snot and blow it up into my sunglasses lenses; I now have a cut on my upper lip from the wind; Hannon was in the lead and could not physically turn around to check on me due to fear of falling; I had to take a knee when I needed a break because I was about to fall over from the wind. This section is the first time we day dreamed about not hiking anymore, it was also the longest stretch we hiked without taking a day off…probably a correlation somewhere in there.

We decided to double zero in Leadville, CO, the highest incorporated town in America, and we rented a tiny house to stay in. It’s been a relaxing time off. We have a small kitchen that allows us to cook our own meals, and we have a TV with a Roku device, allowing us to signup for NFL Sunday Ticket and watch football games all day on Sunday. We have caught up with a few of our friends and went out for Mexican food for dinner with them (thanks, Neda!).

We only have about two weeks left in Colorado, and we will start our journey towards Salida on Tuesday. We are hoping some motivation returns to our souls, because we still have a lot of hiking left. Days off are probably the best answer.