Part Seventy

​     October 23rd - 28th               Mosquito Pass, CO                        (Go to Pt 1)

Click on map for a larger image

Unlike the previous day, the weather had turned cold and overcast and I was buffeted by strong wind gusts as I crossed over Guanella Pass.  I made my solitary camp that evening along Burning Bear Creek feeling like the loneliest soul on earth, so thank you for the Hobbit book and the escapism it provided.

The following morning a cold, grey wind kept me tent bound for at least an hour before I finally got up the nards to go out and face it.  Once I got moving along the trail it wasn’t all that bad but it had been a rancorous way to start to the day.  From my camp I followed a trail up Burning Bear Creek, over a ridge and down to the South Platte River which took me into the early afternoon.

I sat down in the meadow for my noon break, watching snow plumes stream across the crest of the Continental Divide.  While high winds scoured away the snow above tree line, I munched my lunch totally content to be down in the valley and out of the maelstrom going on higher up.  After lunch, I hiked out of the South Platte River valley along a trail that climbed up into the Beaver Creek valley where I ended my day just west of Drake Lake.

Since Georgetown, my route had been covered by the detailed, 24000 series maps I was carrying, allowing me to find the trails.  At this junction with Beaver Creek, however, the only trail shown led up to a higher lake and ended.  There were no more trails leading through the lower mountains and enough snow was drifted into the woods to make cross-country travel impractical.

This I found out the next morning when I bushwhacked over into the Guernsey Creek valley and got trapped into post-holing through shin deep snow lying over downed timber.  After an hour or so of slipping around on logs, fallen branches, and snowed-over rocks, I concluded that cross-country travel through the forest in these conditions was too slow and unnecessarily risky.  At Guernsey Creek I descended out into the vast, snow-free meadows of South Park.

Out in the Park, State Highway 285 ran southwest to Fairplay but I was able to keep off the road by staying up in the pastures where the ground was already dormant and easy to hike.  Fences had to be crossed but they drooped with neglect and were not posted anywhere that I saw.

I made camp that afternoon along the Tarryall Creek just north of the lonely encampment of Como and the following day I ended up along the road bank to Fairplay.  I walked into town around 3:00 or so in the afternoon and from a pay phone on main street I called my folks to check-in.

My Dad had been concerned about the weather so I was glad to report the past few days as being pleasant but I still wanted to make sure he was sending my skis out to Leadville because one of these mornings I was bound to wake up to a whole lot of snow and be stranded without them. We had talked about sending my skis out to Leadville when I was in Georgetown and after a short pause my Dad said, “I’ll be sure they get there.”

I camped along the creek just north of town and the next morning I continued along a gravel road that followed another drainage going by the name of Beaver Creek.  Hiking under the warm, mid-day sun I made my way up into the Beaver Creek Meadows, finding a spot to pitch camp before late afternoon shade spread a winter chill across the valley.  The number of hours I hiked during the day had become markedly fewer with less daylight to work with and cold, morning temperatures making early starts too hard to initiate without a really good reason to do so.

Subsequently, however, the following morning did give me a pretty good reason for pushing an early start because my camp was less than 20 miles out from Leadville. I figured that if I left early enough I could make it to town before dark.
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Packing in the frigid, pre-sun dawn, I hiked down from where I’d camped in the meadows to the tiny, mining outpost of Alma and there connected with a gravel road running up along Mosquito Creek.  Higher up in the Mosquito Creek valley the gravel road devolved into a rocky, boney, 4WD track that led over Mosquito Pass.

Reaching the top of the pass early afternoon, I stopped for lunch a short ways down the western side.  It was a magnificent day and from my viewpoint I could look straight across to where the Continental Divide J-hooked from west to south into the Sawatch Range, then further south to where the Continental Divide rose up into the 13,000 and 14,000 foot peaks of the Collegiate Range

Looking out at this string of mountains towering above the Arkansas River Valley was definitely a ‘Hoooly Shit!’ moment.

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Go to Part 71

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The CDTC was founded in 2012 by volunteers and recreationists hoping to provide a unified voice for the CDT. Working hand-in-hand with the U.S. Forest Service and other federal land management agencies, the CDTC is a non-profit partner supporting stewardship of the CDT. The mission of the CDTC is to complete, promote and protect the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail, a world-class national resource. For more information, please visit continentaldividetrail.org.

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