Day 74: Greenhorn Mountain

Because I stayed up later the night before, I slept in until 5. And I was a bit groggy and cold, so I didn’t really start hiking until 6:30. The sun was up but I rarely saw it, as the first bit of trail was on the wrong side of the mountain and tree-lined, and also there were clouds early on.

The hardest hill of the day was the first one, about 3 miles in. At its steepest near the top, it was registering an average of nearly 900 feet per mile for a quarter mile. It took nearly as long to climb as it took to get to it from starting.

On the other side, there was a long, slow descent along the ridge to Black Mountain. I stopped along here and had a long snack break, though the only water I had was in my breakfast drink. I had another 4 miles to go before the next water source.

I met a northbounder right at the bottom of the Black Mountain climb. He told me it wasn’t as bad as it looked on Guthook and it was graded nicely. He was absolutely right. Compared to the first hill, this one took no time at all. From the top, it was a relatively easy (if rock-strewn) 3 mile descent to Dana Spring, a cattle trough near the trail. The nobo told me he’d pulled a dead prairie dog from the spring that morning, so I filtered what I gathered. I took a solid 4 liters plus some more because the next on-trail water was 19 miles away, almost at MacDonald Pass, and there was no way I was making it that far on this day, given the 9 miles I had already done.

The next several miles were just roadwalk through private lands. I stopped for lunch on the side of the road in a stand of skinny, scrubby pines. It was a quick lunch, but still it was surprising that no vehicles passed on such a well-maintained road.

A mile and a half later I took a detour off the CDT. It seemed like there would be water in a creek that followed this side road. And there was. I filled my water bag completely again from this ditch right where it entered a culvert under the road and made a bottle of Gatorade to climb back out of the gulch with. I soaked my shirt before I started, but the climb turned out to be pretty easy.

I passed through a herd of cows in the road, a familiar experience by now. The now nearly full grown calves were all terrified of me, unlike their mothers, who seemed wary but not particularly put out. One calf started running away from the herd as I walked by, eventually cornering himself at a barbed wire fence, then sprinting away back the way he came. It was pretty cute, if a bit stupid.

Back on the road that was the official CDT, I left the public lands (controlled by the BLM) to enter the public lands (controlled by the USDA). I think the difference is the latter is trying harder to keep cattle out of the Greenhorn Mountain area to protect the meadows.

Right at the base of the climb, I stopped and crawled under a tree to make dinner, hoping it would offer some protection from the rain that seemed to be approaching. Soon, there was thunder happening right above me, so I quickly through up my tent in that tiny little space and mostly got everything underneath it before the rain made it through the trees. I had some issues with the hardness and tilt of the ground and had to restake several times, but this mostly just meant I got my back wet.

So I cooked and ate dinner inside my tent out of the rain, managing to keep everything except the rainfly of my tent almost entirely dry. (To be clear, I was sitting in the tent, the stove was in the vestibule carefully arranged to be far from any tent fabric. This is not advisable behavior with anything but a JetBoil, which completely contains the flame.) Then, I packed up my tent in such a way that the wet parts only touched themselves and hiked out completely dry. The extra time spent managing the tent meant my usual hour-long dinner took an hour and a half, but that meant I still had a half hour to get to an actual comfortable campsite.

So I started climbing the mountain through all these beautiful meadows with amazing views. But the sun disappeared almost as soon as it came out. Another storm cloud was headed in. Luckily, the meadow in the saddle near the top was perfectly level and I arrived at it just before 7 when I intended to stop anyway.

Strangely, it was at this moment I noticed my lower back was wet. I figured it was just where part of my pack had got rained on while I was setting up my tent earlier, but when I opened it, everything inside was wet. My water bag must have come unscrewed slightly and leaked because the bag it sits in was soaked through and everything below it was wet in spite of all that effort I had gone through to keep it dry. Who would have thought? It figures.

It wasn’t so bad. Everything below it was in its own waterproof bag. The only causalty besides my lower back was my down puff, which had some wet spots since my clothes bag was not sealed up and has a hole besides. And even that wasn’t so bad since it wasn’t cold enough to need to wear it.

So I made camp in the levelest part of the saddle and got everything under the fly and inside just as the next storm cloud came by. Only the edge of this one rained on me, but I was all set up by the time it did, snug as a bug. It was gone in a minute and it took the heavy wind with it. Sleepy time came right on time.

Trail miles: 19.1

Distance to MacDonald Pass: 13.7 miles

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