After an uneventful travel day, we are home. Zhen picked us up at the airport and gave us a ride home. He had pizza ordered so we were able to eat something right when we got home.
I plotted our path over the last ten days. Seems we covered one small area pretty well.
Slower day today. I don’t think I took a single picture. Several people left today so we went down from two condos to one. Now the big task is using up all the food. There’s a lot of leftover food and the last two meals, dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow that are designated “leftovers”.
Deb and I took a walk this morning near the condo. We are within walking distance of one of the gondola lifts and we could hear activity over there behind all the trees. Walking over there we saw a big mountain biking event going on. Downhill mountain bike racing. Ride the lift up, bike down. Lots of serious bikers here and booths with all the related gear. It felt like we were at an outdoor trade show.
We took a three-mile walk along the nearby bike trail a little later in the day also. We didn’t drive anywhere, just took it easy. Made use of the hot tub again, and played some games on the balcony overlooking the pool. Quite the life.
For dinner we took out nearly everything that was remotely dinner-related and laid it out on the counter. I grilled some asparagus and all the leftover fruit went into a fruit salad. We did some good damage on the leftovers and the fridge looked a little emptier.
We packed most of our stuff for an early departure tomorrow towards Denver.
Today is hike day. This is sort-of the climax of this weekend. Aunt Nancy requested that her ashes be spread on the trail to Herman Gulch as this is one of her favorite trails in the Rocky Mountains. So we all decided to leave at 6:30am to give us enough time to get on the trail and especially to make sure we had enough parking. Herman Gulch is a popular trail, so popular that it has its own exit off of Interstate 70 (or so it seems), and the parking area fills up fast on the weekends.
When I got up, Deb told me that she would not be joining us. She did not sleep well last night and doing a trail as strenuous as this one was just not going to happen.
We didn’t quite make it out by 6:30 as planned. It was more like almost 7:30. Large groups are hard to get going, particularly early in the morning. When we arrived at the parking area, it was already rather full. We managed to get what appeared to be the last few spaces.
We piled out of the vehicles and gathered at the sign for the obligatory photo.
Herman Gulch trail is a strenuous trail, 3.5 miles long one-way, with a 1,671 foot altitude gain. The trail starts out steep, levels out for a ways, and ends up even steeper. It’s a beautiful hike, however, and I can see why Aunt Nancy loved it. It checks many of the boxes. A hike in the woods: Check. Meadows with wildflowers: check. A babbling stream: check. Commanding vistas, a lake at the end: check, check. Big elevation gain: well, maybe not so much.
The group separated rapidly into the faster ones (the younger set, who disappeared almost immediately up the trail) and several smaller groups of the rest of us, who ascended the trail at different rates. For my part, some of the enjoyable moments on the trail were the rest breaks, where I could turn around and see the views opening up beside and behind me. The rest breaks occurred more and more often as we ascended, so those views were enjoyed a lot.
The lake at the end was a treat. Lots of rocks around the water and places to lay down and rest and enjoy the mountains towering above us.
We spent a couple of hours up there by the lake. It took a while, but everyone that started out at the trailhead made it to the top. Quite an accomplishment as some were suffering the effects of elevation just a day or two before.
The weather cooperated by not following the pattern of rain in the afternoon. It was a chilly start to the day, at 43 degrees, so the hike was started with several layers on. The layers came off while hiking, then back on at the top as the wind was blowing and the air was chilly. The rains came much later in the afternoon, making this a perfect day for this kind of hike.
After dinner we all gathered downstairs for a group picture. Since some of the group will start traveling home early tomorrow morning, it was our last chance to get everybody in.
Another unstructured day here at the family gathering. Those who were hit by elevation adjustment are mostly online now. I managed to get some additional sleep last night so I may be headed in the right direction as well.
We were not sure how much time we had as the forecast called for rain in the afternoon. So shortening the hike by a couple miles would help in this department.
The trail is a steep scramble through the woods, so it will be good practice for tomorrow’s hike up Herman’s Gulch. We were partway up one of the steepest sections when it began to rain. We huddled under a couple of pine trees to put on any rain gear that we had along and to decide what to do from here. Rain makes the rocks slippery and this trail is almost entirely rocks. While we were deliberating, the rain turned to sleet and came down harder. That kind-of clinched the decision and we started heading back down.
A short spur in the trail led to a small waterfall and we took this spur as the rain had subsided. Shortly thereafter, the sun came out and we sat out on the rocks and ate lunch. Beautiful falls, beautiful setting for lunch.
After lunch, it clouded over and began to rain. It poured rain for most of our trip home. We took a relaxing dip in the hot tub and then took it easy for the remainder of the afternoon.
After dinner we had a memorial service for Aunt Nancy. We all gathered in the big common area downstairs in this building and Calvin led in a remembrance.
The service centered around Aunt Nancy as a garden walker. Calvin used the story of creation, how God created millions of trees, including the one tree that He commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of. Aunt Nancy loved walking through the garden of His creation, enjoying every one of those trees.
Afterwards we all discussed what time to leave on the hike tomorrow and then we all trooped upstairs and had ice cream and some raspberries that came from Aunt Nancy.
We are handling meals for this segment of the trip by assigning three or four people to a meal, and these people are then responsible for preparation and clean-up for their assigned meal. As it worked out, we had enough people so that each group had only one meal for the entire time.
Our meal was this morning’s breakfast. Since I was the one who set up the shared spreadsheet which tracked who did what and when, I assigned our meal to be the first breakfast. That way we were done right away and would not have to think about it for the remainder of the time.
We did some of the preparation the night before. In the midst of the chaos of everyone coming in and finding places for all their stuff, we were frying up two pounds of bacon. Made for a rather busy kitchen.
Today was an unstructured day, as many had just arrived and needed to acclimate to the elevation. A couple of the group were already feeling the effects, with one having rather severe headaches and skipping breakfast. Several of us decided to rent electric bikes and do some of the bike trails in the area. So we all trooped into Breckenridge and descended on a bike shop. 14 of us, all at once. There was one guy in the bike shop and he was just sending out a group of 6 on bikes. That took a while. Then he had to get us all ready to go. The process took over an hour. He could have used some help but when Terry offered to help get some of the bikes ready, that seemed to really wig him out. He had to do everything in a set order, by himself. It was rather painful to watch.
The ride, however, was fantastic. 33 miles total. We rode from Breckenridge 8 miles into Fresco where some of us found a park and had lunch. By this time the group had separated into two groups, with one group rallying around one member, who was feeling dizzy from the elevation and actually spilled a few times. The rest of us continued to Copper Mountain, another 8 miles.
When we got back, a few of us took a dip in the hot tub for a while, then joined everyone else for a Lasagna dinner. Dinner is always great when someone else prepares it.
After dinner we all sat down and watched a slide show of all the participating families. Some of these cousins I haven’t seen in decades and some of their kids I have never met so it was good to reconnect. Then it was more pictures from Aunt Nancy’s vast collection. Aunt Nancy was a wonderful, colorful lady and some of the unique and humorous stories about her are already starting to come out.
I made it partway through these pictures, then had to go to bed. Lack of sleep and the lingering effects of a cold had drained me to the point of exhaustion.
I was awake this morning at 1:30am. Sleep fled for the remainder of the night and I finally got out of bed at 5am, tired and sore from tossing and turning. It’s been this way for the past three days now. Couple hours of sleep, then nothing. So I’m running quite a sleep deficit. It doesn’t help that I also seem to have caught a head cold. Not real severe, but just enough to stop up the sinuses and cause an occasional raspy cough. The bed at the place we were staying really didn’t help either. It was quite soft, probably made of something like memory foam, so you would sink deeply into it. It felt like I was sleeping on pudding. It was a nice place and we enjoyed it a lot, but the beds could certainly use an upgrade.
Time to leave this area and move on to the next phase of our trip: the memorial gathering for Aunt Nancy. We certainly have covered a lot of ground over the last four days. I mapped our travels and we have covered the area around Alma pretty thoroughly. It helped greatly that we had a 4-wheel-drive Jeep. Many of the roads would be impassable by ordinary passenger cars.
Several people were disperse-camping along this road. Looked like some great campsites with fantastic scenery and really being away from it all. We wondered a little bit what they did while camping until we saw a guy down in the creek, panning for gold. I didn’t know they still did that, but, apparently it’s still a thing.
We stopped for a little while in the town of Como. Established during the gold rush of 1859, Como became the place where several railroads came together, including the narrow-gauge railroad that became Boreas Pass. With the decline of mining came the decline of these towns, and Como became almost a ghost town. It still has a little bit of that feel today, although people still do live here and you can still stay at the Como Hotel and see the railroad roundhouse and the depot.
We have now entered an entirely different vibe on this side of the mountain. We have spent the last several days exploring beautiful wilderness areas, sometimes not seeing another person for long periods of time. Now we are in the region of ski resorts, large high-rise condominiums, pricey shoppes, and lots of people. Even in the off-season and in the rain, Breckenridge was rather busy.
We have two top-floor condominiums in Keystone for our family gathering, for a total of 26 people. When we arrived, several family members were already there, trying to find space for all the groceries for 26 people for the next four days. In the midst of this all, one of the family prepared a meal of sloppy joes and fruit and we prepared for breakfast, as we are on deck for tomorrow morning.
There are a lot of mountain passes around here. The one we approached yesterday, Mosquito Pass, was once a busy connector between Alma and Leadville. Today we aimed for Weston Pass, another connector between nearby Fairplay and Leadville.
This was once a busy toll road, made busy by the silver strike in Leadville in 1877. Stagecoaches, cargo wagons, and other means of transportation came over that pass in such numbers that traffic jams were a common occurrence, and bloody stagecoach accidents were all too common. Having been on Mosquito Pass and not even making it to the top, it’s amazing that a single stagecoach made it over the pass at all. Much of the trip is driving over basketball-sized rocks (and larger).
Today’s pass was a little tamer. And we made it all the way over. It took us a while, as we stopped a couple times to hike the trails in the area, but it was a delightful journey with some amazing scenery.
First stop was the Rich Creek Trailhead, on the way up to Weston Pass. This provided a pleasant walk in the woods next to Rich Creek and gave us a chance to stretch our legs after being in the Jeep for 25 minutes.
A little farther up the road is the Weston Campground and the Ridgeview Trail starts from there and climbs steadily for 500 feet until it ends at an overlook. We initially took a wrong turn and added a little over a half mile to the hike because of a missing sign.
But the overlook was worth it. Although the tall trees obscured some of the view, we could see down the Weston Pass Road in both directions. And the breezes at the top were deliciously cool after hiking in partial sun for the better part of an hour.
I launched my drone to get some aerial photos. After taking a drone selfie and a couple pictures above the trees, I suddenly lost control of the drone. The controller went dead. Nothing I could do would wake it back up. The drone eventually activated its return-to-home mode and came flying back. Trouble was, I had launched it under a tall tree and flown it out from under the tree before gaining altitude. Now it came back to its home position and started to descend. It stopped when it detecting something beneath it and just hovered there, 12 feet above ground and next to some small pine tree branches. Its little silicon brain did not know what to do. All I could do was just watch. It then descended very slowly until one of the propellers hit a pine branch, severing it and sending the drone off in an unexpected direction. It hit another branch and then another in a crazy fall that eventually ended upright on the ground. No damage, other than severed pine branches scattered about, but I no longer have an eye in the sky.
Back at the trailhead, we ate lunch in the campground, then continued up the road towards Weston Pass. This section of road got rather technical, with rocks and potholes jarring the passengers of the Jeep. We were once again grateful that we had insisted on a Jeep. It got us to some amazing areas. The narrow valleys between the ridges were breathtaking.
We stopped at the summit of Weston Pass, elevation 11,921 feet. More amazing views of the road we had just traveled. We admired the view for a bit before pressing on.
Unfortunately, there is only so much time in a day and we were running a bit short. We walked around a little bit in Leadville, then headed back. We chose to take the northern route up through Breckenridge. The pass was amazingly beautiful, but the passengers, particularly those in the back seat, had been jostled around quite a bit of the day and needed a break.
Tomorrow, we will probably do another pass on the way to the family get-together in Keystone. These have been a blast.
At 4am I began hearing a loud scuffing and scraping noise. We had all the bedroom windows open so I figured it must be coming from outside. Sounded like a large plastic container on the gravel driveway. The trash container. We had noted the bear-resistant trash container when we got here and hadn’t thought about it much further. Well, now it’s probably resisting a bear.
I got up and looked out the window but could see nothing in the inky darkness. I went to the front door and walked quietly onto the upper level front deck. At nine feet above the ground, I felt pretty safe. In the starlight I could make out the Jeep and something a bit blacker than the blackness next to it, and perhaps some other blacker object by a nearby tree. The sounds had stopped by this point. I turned on the porch light but succeeded only in blinding myself.
Later, when I got up, I could see the trash container on its side in the driveway with the lid still closed. The bear had to find its meal somewhere else.
Looks like today will be just like yesterday with lows in the 40’s and highs around 70, and probably rain in the afternoon. So we planned the hiking for this morning and perhaps some more driving this afternoon.
The hike for this morning was on the Pika Trail, a loop trail that rises above the tree-line for a bit and offers great views of Pennsylvania Mountain and some other more distant peaks. Aside from the 260-foot elevation gain, which we’re still getting used to, it’s a relatively easy trail. And the views were great, kind of what you expect out here.
From here it was nine miles to Mosquito Pass. Piece of cake, right? The first six miles were easy. Just a washboard dirt road with rocks and some large craters filled with water from last night’s rain. Then it turned and climbed steeply up the side of a ridge and the road surface became nothing but large rocks.
So our Jeep was earning its keep. We ground up the hill in low gear, with Terry having to step out a couple times as a spotter so we could avoid damaging the vehicle.
On the way up we let a pickup pass and we talked to the driver briefly. He told us he comes up a couple times a year to spend some time by the lake just up from where we were. He called it “special”. We saw where he turned off the main road and followed up a much narrow two-track for perhaps a half mile until we came upon Oliver Twist Lake. This is obviously a popular spot for those that can make it here. Several stone fire rings could be seen around the lake, and two other vehicles were already here, with a couple guys fishing.
This would be a great place to have lunch. We parked in a level space next to the lake and enjoyed lunch in the cool air. At 12,100 feet in elevation, there was still some snow on the ridges quite close to us.
We walked around the meadow for a bit, climbing a small rise overlooking the lake. At an exclamation from Jill, we looked over towards a stand of huckleberry oak bushes along the lake. A lone moose was there, grazing on the bushes, probably around a hundred feet from where we were standing. This was an unexpected treat. He seemed unconcerned, looking at us for a bit, then returning to his grazing. I managed to get a few good pictures of him.
Just like yesterday, the clouds began to gather and we felt a few spatters of rain. We were still over a mile from the summit of Mosquito Pass, but we thought this was a great destination. We were told the road from here was even worse, so we turned around and headed back down. The road was equally challenging on the way down but at least we knew what to expect.
High elevation had its effect on several of us. From lack of sleep due to difficulty breathing to headaches to nosebleeds to huffing and puffing after climbing a single flight of stairs, we were feeling it in some ways. So we decided to take it a little easier today to help acclimate and let the Jeep do most of the climbing.
First destination was near the end of a forest service road right near our cabin. The guidebook here at the cabin called this “Witch’s Tree”, something known only to the locals. And less than a mile down a forest service road and a short hike brought us to the place, a dead tree on which was hung a dozen or more animal skulls. It’s known only to the locals, probably because only the locals really care to go there.
First point of interest was the cemetery, the likes of which I have never seen. Instead of a platted, grassy area with neatly arranged tombstones, this one was two-track roads carved through the forest and graves placed wherever there was room. The forest and graves exist in the same space.
This cemetery is still in use today and we found headstones with dates as late as 2023.
At another stop along the road we could see one of many mines where ore was dug out of the ground in the search for gold. The Hungry Five Mine clings high on the canyon wall above, and the Paris Mill, which received the ore via cables suspended between the two, sits right along the roadway. The Mine can barely be seen from the road and even with a telephoto lens it was rather far away so I launched my eye-in-the-sky to take a few close-up photos of it.
The road continued past this point and climbed steeply up the side of one of the fourteeners, Mount Bross and we drove it for a little ways, eventually reaching an elevation of 12116 feet. Such magnificent views from here.
We ate lunch in another stand of bristlecone pine trees, overlooking the town of Alma far below and the entire surrounding valley. What a great place for a lunch.
Back down the road, we continued on Buckskin Road to its end at Kite Lake. The lake is surrounded by three other fourteeners and a popular activity is to camp here and hike all three of them. We didn’t do that. Everyone coming off of those mountains was under 30, and the few of us 60-something low-landers were definitely out of place here. We were just amazed to see passenger cars including a Honda Fit in the parking lot. I would think roads as terrible as the one leading up here would have done them in.
Back down the mountain and into the town of Fairplay to get a few more groceries and gas. Unfortunately two accidents on both sides of town diverted traffic through downtown, resulting in massive gridlock which delayed us for a while.
Just after dinner, it began to rain and poured buckets. The entire day was mostly sunny and pleasant, with high-elevation temperatures reaching the upper 60’s. A rather abrupt change from 92 yesterday. Very enjoyable day.
