Part Seventy Five

     November 19th & 20th            Saguache Basin, CO                  (Go to Pt 1)

So, it wasn’t until after a prolonged stay in Salida, the first half of which was truly miserable, that I finally felt well enough to pull my supplies together and leave town on the next leg of my journey.  Thankfully, the next leg to Del Norte would take less than a week and nothing about the terrain looked to be difficult, at least according to the maps.

The first thing was to catch a ride out of Salida back to Poncho Springs which, ironically, happened just minutes after I stuck out my thumb.  I mean, where the heck was this prompt, curbside service when I was trying to get to Salida?  A short ways past Poncho Springs the guy let me out at a gravel road running up along Little Cochetopa Creek.

While I’d been laid over in Salida, a high pressure system had settled-in and the weather was stellar.  Deep, blue skies and warm sunshine made my transition back into the mountains easier and, although my gait was rusty and the pack burdensome for only five days’ worth of supplies, the gravel road and ambling terrain made it easy to find my rhythm again.

Around mid-day I employed some good-old-fashion ‘dumb luck’, and took a chance on a jeep track that brought me to a trail which ambled over a ridge to O’Havor Lake, exactly where I had wanted to end up camping for the night.

Click on the map for a larger image

After getting the tent pitched, I fetched my camera to take a picture, the tent being my new, favorite photography subject, but as I went to take the shot I did a double-take and looked at the camera again.  Film.  I only had four exposures left on the roll in my camera and after that I had no more film; my mind suddenly seized on the oversight.

As the shutterbug and photography expert in our family, my Mom almost always included slide film with my resupply packages but, for whatever reason, there hadn’t been any film in the supply box this last time around.  That being the case, I had planned on picking-up film at the grocery store but the grocery store only sold print film, which meant I was going to have to find a drugstore or someplace else that carried slide film and, in the end… forgot.

With only four exposures left to cover a week’s worth of travel, I actually started hoping I wouldn’t see the kind of dramatic scenery in the days ahead that would beg for a fresh roll of film.  “Well, shit.” I muttered, stashing the camera away.

From O’Havor Lake the following morning, I spent several hours hiking a monotonous, gravel road to where it crossed over the Continental Divide at Marshall Pass.  I stopped for lunch at the pass and basked in the sun. Temperatures were mild and while there were traces of snow on the shaded slopes, real snowfall had yet to find these mountains.

After lunch, I left the gravel road to follow a jeep track running through the forest along the Continental Divide, as far as Windy Peak.  At this juncture, the Continental Divide continued west then south to sweep around the Saguache River Basin in an arching, horseshoe bend of maybe 40 miles.

I had decided to shortcut this sweeping bend by taking a more direct route across the basin to the other side.  Standing at the crest of Windy Peak I caught a view looking out, across the basin to the faraway mountains where I planned to rejoin the Divide.  Not only did those mountains appear to be a long ways off but, from what I could see, they also looked formidable as hell.

There was no trail coming down off of Windy Peak but the map showed a 4WD road coming up Middle Creek from the Saguache Basin, so I descended the south slope of Windy Peak in open forest until I reached the Middle Creek drainage.  Down along the creek bottom a fisherman’s type trail continued down to Indian Creek where evidence of a 4WD track began to appear.

Click on the map for a larger image

I made camp at Indian Creek where Radio could only find static to broadcast.  That was alright, Radio was turning out to be an annoying companion, anyways.  I rarely got a choice in what station we listened to and Radio, being mostly an AM guy, was constantly trying to sell me shit.  Radio was also a lot more rural Christian than I was and his pontifications got to be a bit much.

Instead, having already dispensed with the first book of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fellowship of the Ring, I was now deeply immersed in the second one, The Two Towers, and the struggles of those little Hobbits had, by now, become intertwined with my own struggle.
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When those poor fellows tried battling through harsh, winter elements to reach the mountain pass of Caradhras, only to come up short, I empathized and knew exactly what they were going through.  In fact, the same was true for many of the hardships the Hobbits had to endure; I knew just what they were up against.

Likewise, as I traveled through the mountains during the day, day after day, I felt akin to a Hobbit out on some perilous journey, never knowing what was coming next, never knowing how or where the day would end.
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I would read this book before going to sleep at night and then have these wild dreams that would cross the Hobbit world over into the frequent ‘walking the Divide’ dreams I had.  The story was growing a life of its own, beyond the pages of the book, and, in retrospect, maybe a western novel would have been a better choice of reading material.

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Go to Part 76

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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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