August 12-17, 2002 – 35 miles

This was my yearly backpacking trip with my backpacking group.  This year the participants were:  myself, Carl Hutzler, Brad Clements, and his son Christopher.  David Hansen couldn’t make it this year because his daughter recently died. 

We camped the first night at a campground.  On Tuesday, the hike was brutal.  We hiked through a canyon that had been burned out and had thousands of downed trees.  It was very hard to climb over hundreds of the trees with a heavy pack on.  We camped at a lake and enjoyed the rest, tossing boulders into the lake.  On Wednesday we hiked up to Crescent Lake.  After we camped, I hiked around and explored.  On Thursday we hiked up to the continental divide.  We met “Goat man,” a guy who was spending a month in the mountains with his goats.  The Continental Divide was windy and cold.  I didn’t take my coat up with me, left it at base camp.  The hike back down was neat.  We ran into a herd of big horn sheep.  I was able to creep up on them very close.  We passed by some incredible blue lakes.  I then hiked fast ahead of the other guys and arrived back to camp a half hour before the others.  The route down involved lots of boulder hopping. 

On Friday we broke camp and hiked down Roaring Fork canyon.  Brad’s son wanted to hike all the way out and go home, but the rest of us wanted to spend one more night.  We stopped in the early afternoon and spent the rest of the day building a dam in the river.  It was amazing.  We raised the water level several feet and I had a great time in the river moving huge boulders.  On Saturday morning we hiked out.  I went fast ahead of the rest and reached the car about 20 minutes ahead of the others.  We did our usual pizza pig-out in a small town.