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Collegiates West Loop

21 Saturday Jun 2014

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Colorado Trail

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

AT, Buena Vista, BV, CDT, Clear Creek, Collegiates, Collegiates West Loop, Colorado Divide Trail, Colorado Trail, Coney Island, CT, DIA, high school reunion, Hope Pass, La Plata, Mike O'Neill, PCT, Robert Graham

mt-princeton-coloradoI leave for the airport in another hour or two.  I will pick Mike up this morning from under the Southwest Air Arrivals sign at DIA.  His Southwest Flight 4316 from Austin arrives at 10:15am and he should be standing there by 11am.

I’ll bring along a photo album of my 500 mile Colorado Trail hike with Rob from three summers prior for Mike to peruse on the drive to Buena Vista.  We’ll take Hwy 285 which I find more scenic than I-70.  The two routes are equidistant.  I plan to begin telling tales of the danger and pain that Mike can expect over the next week of backpacking.  For instance, I’ll inform him, “Trailheads invariably reside along creek beds so that, regardless of direction, you begin hiking uphill.  Your calves go numb after a half hour and never really thaw out the rest of the day.  Whatever remains of your burning thighs is completely shredded on the subsequent thirty minute downhill.  All you will think about for the next eleven hours is dinner to refuel your unsustainable calorie burn.”  Mike will no doubt attempt to change the subject but I’ll maintain this dialog the entire three hour drive to BV.  I’ll watch for the color to drain from his face when he spots the massive 14ers that will dominate our windshield coming down out of the canyon into BV.  I’ll tell him these are the foothills to where we’ll be backpacking on the Continental Divide Trail further west.  If Mike begins to feign altitude sickness, I’ll change the topic to dinner.  “Want to do Sushi tonight?  There’s a place on East Main Street called Asian Palate.  They pour a wicked Saketini.”

Unicoi GapI would of course only treat a good friend so poorly.  I met Mike in 1976.  Both our families recently relocated to Texas for jobs.  Mine from Iowa.  Mike’s dad worked for IBM and they moved down from Poughkeepsie.  Nearly everyone’s parents worked for IBM in our high school as IBM was turning off the lights in their New York factories and joining the sunbelt, tech crowd in Austin.  We first met on the football team.  Then basketball.  Then track.  We both realized we weren’t big enough for Texas football and joined the cross country team our sophomore year.  Running turned out to be our sport as we lead our team to State our senior year.  Making state in Texas is like making global in smaller states.

Mike went on to UT but later joined me at Texas State to run Cross Country for a year.  I believe he double-majored in either accounting or finance and information systems.  Mike, Rob and I got into triathlons after college for maybe a year or two and trained together.  Mike soon married, had kids and moved to Atlanta for a job.  We went twenty years without seeing each other until my firm acquired an Atlanta cyber security company and I began to travel there.

We hook up with Rob (trail name La Plata until he completes the CDT) in BV.  La Plata has solo through-hiked both the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and the Appalachian Trail (AT).  He section-hiked the Colorado Trail (CT) with me over a six month period in 2011.  This new 80 mile section of the CT that we intend to backpack coincides with the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) along the western side of the Collegiates, so La Plata is killing two birds with one stone.  He’ll hike the section south of Monarch Pass earlier today while Mike and I are driving.

CT and CDTRob moved to Texas his junior year, meeting Mike and me during our sophomore year – on the cross country team.  Both of Rob’s parents were IBMers.  Ironically, I’m the only one of us three to work for IBM now.  Perhaps not so ironic.  La Plata was an intense hiker even back then.  We nick-named him Trail Master during one of our storied camping trips to Pedernales Falls.  La Plata obtained his EE from UT and worked a few years for Lockheed before going back for a masters in education in physical fitness.  He married, moved around a bit – Seattle, then Portland – before settling in Colorado.  We’ve been hiking together since.  We always would say, “We need Mike to join us.”

Mike and I will find La Plata somewhere in BV.  We’ll shuffle his car to the trailhead atop Cottonwood Pass and descend back down to BV for dinner.  Mike and I will have lunched earlier on the road trip in Baily at Coney Island.  La Plata has a stealth camp setup near the Arkansas River where we plan to ensconce for the night.  Sunday, we’ll head for the Twin Lakes trailhead to launch an epic backpacking excursion.

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Looking Back on the Colorado Trail

16 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Storytelling

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Collegiates, Colorado Trail, Mesa State, Mt. Elbert, Mt. Massive, pocket shots, Robert Graham, Round Rock, Starbucks VIA Ready Brew, Tumbleweed

High PointA full two weeks after completing the Colorado Trail, I’m ready to look back.  It’s late Sunday afternoon and I have a rack of lamb butterflied and marinating.  I’m having my ass handed to me in fantasy football by Henry, a high school senior.  And the Cowboys and Patriots are playing a close game in the 4th quarter tied at 13 each.  Tumbleweed told me I’d go through some emotions after we finished the trail.  I guess he’s right.

Tumbleweed is none other than Robert Graham – a friend since high school where we ran Track and Cross Country together at Round Rock High School.  He lives now in Grand Junction, Colorado running the recreational sports program at Mesa State.  He was going to hike the CT this year with or without me, but he invited me to join him on the initial segments which start near Denver.  This was early spring, April 2nd to be exact.  The foothills of the Front Range presented us with ideal running conditions through deep, shady forests over soft dirt trails padded with pine needles.  We estimate we ran as much as half the distance on the first CT section of 5 segments.  The CT is organized in 5 sections of 5 segments each, except for the last section having 8 segments.  The 2nd section was mostly under snow which limited our running opportunities.  The 3rd section was the Sawatch Range which contains the Collegiate Peaks – so named because many of the peaks are named after universities like Princeton, Yale and Harvard – and was awesome for trail running.

I love trail running and those first outings were so epic that I kept showing up for subsequent hikes.  I quickly changed my commitment from the first two hikes to joining Rob until we reached Copper.  I didn’t think I could afford the time to continue beyond that, but then Karen told me to keep going.  What a good wife.  She knew I was enjoying myself.  And of course, by the time I climbed the highest and second highest peaks in Colorado in the middle of the Collegiates – I was committed to finishing the whole enchilada.  Completion required 6 months – from April 2nd to October 2nd.  We hooked up on 13 weekends consisting of 25 days of hiking; we covered 486 miles and counting the three 14,000 foot peaks we climbed, nearly 100,000 vertical feet.

Previous to this summer, I was not a very experienced hiker or camper.  Nothing like a little repetition.  I bought a one man tent and can now set it up (and dismantle it) in the dark in a few minutes.  I first went snow shoeing just this year in January.  I now consider myself highly experienced at the sport.  I even took my family snow shoeing in Breckenridge over spring break.  Related to this I have become comfortable with trekking poles.  With the right snow, I’ve learned the poles are sufficient without the snow shoes.  But in deep snow, the poles are absolutely required for safety.  They help to extract yourself after post-holing – which is when a leg sinks deeply into weak snow.  This is common around buried trees.  Still, I got to the point that I prefer to not carry trekking poles on long hikes.  While they increase your balance and strength on snow, they become an annoying burden on long hikes.  It helps though that all new models are now collapsible for portability.  I am confident reading trail signs including trail blazes and can skip across streams without breaking stride.  I even performed a yogi bear by hitching a ride and changed my shirt at the table of a restaurant – I’ve become true trail trash.

The one man tent, snow shoes and trekking poles were all new gear for me.  I also bought a new sleeping bag near the end of the trail as the temperature was dropping and I wanted better light weight gear for back packing.  Speaking of which, I bought a kick-ass back pack.  That thing is like an RV if not a house.  We back packed enough that I became very familiar with all its pockets and features.  Probably my favorite gear was my head lamp which my brother-in-law gave me last Christmas.  Those things are handy.  I can’t say I liked any of the trail food.  Even the pocket shots – while extremely convenient booze – taste pretty bad.  I think the only trail/camping food that I was seriously pleased with would be the Starbucks Via Ready coffee.  Those are a keeper.

I did discover some good eateries.  I’m not going to re-list them all, I did a good job of reviewing and linking them in my blogs.  A typical hike would burn several thousand calories, so food tended to taste pretty damned good at the end of the day.  Still, some restaurants really were superb.  As far as that goes, I enjoyed learning all the back roads and less-traveled highways.  I discovered Colorado with a view from the top and it was a kick.  Immediately after completing the trail I recall thinking just how much I love Colorado.  Actually, and admittedly I might have been a bit manic if not delusional, but I was totally in love with my life at the end.  Being able to do something like this is special and I’m extremely fortunate to have the health and the family support to be able to have done it.  I know that.  Life is good.  With that said, the picture above is me at both a low point and a high point.  Not counting some of the peaks we climbed, this is the highest official point of the CT – I believe at 13,200 feet.  But I was suffering from dehydration and subsequent altitude sickness.  I am laying down in this pic because I seriously could not stand anymore.  There were many moments like that.  This was not easy but I remember the challenges as much as the views, as much as the discovery of new towns and restaurants.  I’m not coming close to properly describing what an experience this was, but oh well.  The Cowboys just lost and it’s time to sear that lamb and roast a Sunday dinner.

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