It’s tough leaving town, especially when your hotel room is so cheap. We escaped the vortex and woke up pretty early to get breakfast and go to the grocery store.
I’ve been craving McDonalds breakfast for a while now and that was the first stop of the morning. I got about twice as much as I normally would before heading to the grocery store. I missed the bus to Safeway the day before so I went to the fancy grocery store in town. It was expensive, but it worked.
Soon after we were hitchhiking back to Berthoud Pass. Since everyone stays at the same place in town, there were quite a few of us looking to get a ride. The first took 3 people and I got another ride about 15 minutes later. The guy had no idea about the CDT and said he doesn’t usually pick up hitchhikers, but we looked fine.
Today we were going to start what is known as the Pfiffner Traverse. Basically, instead of following the CDT directly, you follow the mountain ridges. When the CDT dives down, we stayed high.
For the most part, we followed the CDT today, except for about 5 or 6 miles in the middle. To get from one peak to another, the trail used forest roads and went way down in a valley. We followed the ridge line.
This involved going up and down between the mountains, summit 3 more thirteeners in the process. It was usually a pretty mellow saddle, but there was a pretty rocky section before the final mountain that actually required a little scrambling.
The rock was good and the exposure was low so a somewhat scary looking climb ended up being a lot of fun.
The final mountain we were climbing was James Peak, which I climbed 3 years earlier on our road trip from New York to Seattle. Today the weather was much better and we could see down into Winter Park where we had just stayed.
After the peak, the trail just followed the ridge line north. This makes camping difficult since it’s so exposed and there really isn’t any water up that high.
For the night, we decided to drop down off the trail to King Lake. It’s half frozen still, but it got us off the ridge and gave us access to water.
Tomorrow we’ll split off the trail again and continue the traverse. Lucky for us, if the weather gets bad we have a few options for dropping down into the valley. The whole traverse is a huge undertaking and actually takes us beyond our next resupply point. We’re mostly just looking to skip some of the more boring parts of the next section as it drops down to the city of Grand Lake.