Project Eveningland

7/31/2023 Monday

It wouldn’t have mattered if I had wanted to get up at 3AM this morning to avoid weather. The rains came and went right through the night and morning. By 8AM it was still cloudy and gray and spritzing. I waited an extra hour to leave, to honor my promise from yesterday not to leave the tent until the sun shone directly on it. Ahead lay 22 miles of above-treeline walking, to include at least one night of above-treeline sleeping (tonight). I plan to do only 10-12 miles today because I’m just beat.

There were a number of small groups tenting in the area. Seemed like lots of folks waited around for the weather to clear. I set about a long ascending walk to an emerald saddle, one of seemingly countless journeys into and out of mountain valleys, each out of sight until the last moment. It’s gotta be the most challenging segment of the CT, or in the top three for sure.

But the sights! How best to describe the experience? People say it is really tough to capture the scale and grandeur through photographs. The first thing you have to understand is that most of the time you can see tens and tens of miles, but no humanmade structures are in view. It is life on another scale. Far from the trailheads (or, at least, the trailheads which do not require 4×4) you are mostly alone up there. When I see other hikers behind me catching up, I know it’ll be 2-3 hours before they reach me, assuming they reach me. The temperature moves with the winds. Hot or cold are always within reach.

It is a hostile environment. The exposure is unrelenting—it’s either sun or rain. The nice kind of clouds, the ones that give shade but not rain, come and go too fast even to notice. I have been applying sunscreen lip balm all day. At night I coat my lips in one “intensive healing” formulation or another. It’s not enough. There’re few good places to stop and sit, and one is disinclined to take generous breaks when the good-weather window has been so narrow.

The real winners up here are the marmots. They’re these grumpy little groundhogs that live in rocky dens amid the most stunning natural surroundings that you—and certainly they—could imagine. To lie on the rocks and sun oneself looks marvelous, especially when you have the option to dart back into the rocks when the storms come.

At about noon, the clouds that had been gathering started to look heavier, darker, with less and less blue sky between. Not much thunder though. I decided to press for a spot about ten miles out, basing an expectation of campsites on a comment in FarOut (the navigation app). There was never any possibility of a good tree-protected campsite today. I needed low mileage after that 19-mile craziness yesterday. I camped in Maggie Gulch, though I’ve never seen a landscape which I less wanted to call a “gulch.” It is a ravine, a canyon, at minimum a gorge!

My site is 12,700 feet above sea level which, granted, is not the lowest elevation I could have achieved, but that was what I had in me. And the views from here! The vertical walls of the enormous mountains on the opposite side look impossible. Seams of gravel and loose rock sweep from the tops down to the valley floor below. Thin white lines mark waterfalls against the dark rock. I can hear the water from far away. I can also hear thunder rumbling gently north of here.

And then came terrifying storms with hail and lightning, though the latter never seemed too close. I picked as good a spot as I could. The white of the hail made the short tundra greenery look fresh around the tent, almost like a grocery display. There is absolutely nothing I can do. It stormed well into the next morning.

I am strongly considering taking the train or other means from Silverton to Durango after the next section, and leaving the last 75 miles of the trail for another occasion when I am in better condition to enjoy it.