I ended up going down to breakfast first, somewhere around 6:30, but Ted was there shortly after eating next to me. It was what I had come to expect from that sort of hotel breakfast-wise during pandemic times given my experience the previous year. Despite the stack of waffles depicted on the room key, they just had packaged pastries, bagels and cream cheese, yogurt, apples, and coffee. Not much that would stick with you.
I went back to the room to work on the blog a little bit, but after uploading a couple of posts, I decided it was time to walk over to Lowe’s to get what I needed to repair my sunglasses and Packa.
It was a longer walk than it needed to be because of the way pedestrian crossings were laid out on the roads. I stopped for a more substantial breakfast on the way, including a bottle of Gatorade and a bottle of Sprite Ginger, which tastes very different from ginger ale if you were wondering. Getting what I needed at Lowe’s was fairly painless, and I tried to find a shorter route to walk back to the hotel. When I was getting close, I saw Ted on the road walking with his pack. He said he was on his way to REI. I still had the repairs to do before I went there myself, so I tried to arrange a meeting.
It was more than an hour before I checked out of the room, and even more when I couldn’t find my sun hat and went back to search the room more thoroughly. I found 75 cents on the dresser but no hat. I hoped it was buried deep in my pack somewhere and hiked out to REI myself. Since it had taken me so long, I texted Ted to go on without me. Maybe we would meet again further down the trail.
At REI, I swapped out my broken trowel and slow filtration system and got some more stove fuel. I should have taken apart my pack looking for the hat, but I didn’t think of it. Instead, I was thinking of sending in an online order to Jimmy John’s for pickup on the other side of the parking lot.
I went to pick up the sandwich and ate it while waiting for the bus at the adjacent bus stop. I accidentally got on the wrong bus that seemed like it was going the right way at first then turned the wrong way and ended up a couple of blocks further away from where I was headed than where I got on by the time I realized it and got off. The bus that pulled in right behind it was the right bus, but it had to go down all the roads I had just gone down and even return to the stop I had originally started at before it got where I was going. After all that, I had lost most of an hour on busses and could certainly have reached the bus station on foot a lot faster.
I switched to the bus to Frisco and arrived at the Frisco Walmart some ten minutes later. I did all my food resupply there and at the nearby Safeway. While packing all that food in my pack, I took the time to search it thoroughly and found no hat. I guess I must have left it behind on one of the busses headed into Silverthorne the previous day or maybe in the lobby of the wrong hotel. Anyway, I now had a mission to acquire a new hat.
Walmart had lots of hats, but they were all caps of one sort or another. I decided to try the mountain sports store in the next shopping center over behind the Walmart one, but they also had only caps (and one straw cowboy hat). Looking at another outdoor clothing store online, I saw photos of all kinds of cool sun hats, but it was in downtown Frisco and I had five minutes to catch the bus. So I ran back to g the Walmart to get my pack from where I had hidden it and ran back with it to the bus station with 1 minute to spare on the bus I needed. At 3PM, I was riding into the city center.
The bus dropped me a block from the store I was interested in. They had none of the hats from the photo. The handful of sun hats they had were way too small for me. They did have plenty of ball caps and trucker caps and visors though. I checked the clothing store across the street and they had nothing at all like a hat with a visor. So I went back to the first store and got a visor. I could make do with that.
With some 15 minutes to spare until the arrival of the next bus to Copper Mountain, I had time to head down to the public restrooms at the Old Town Hall, get a square of Red Velvet fudge and a root beer from the sweets shop, and still have to sit for 15 minutes with some high schoolers because the bus was late.
One of those high schoolers joined me on the bus. Apparently she lived where I was hiking out from. I asked her about the gig where she was going to play guitar. She was headed to a jazz concert at a resort in the complete opposite direction we were riding and believed she could get there in an hour even after a stop at home. I’m guessing she had a ride because the busses only left Copper Mountain every thirty minutes during peak hours, and my experience with riding these busses for the past three hours said there was no way they would get her there in half an hour.
Anyway, I called home during this trip and some fifteen minutes later, I was in Copper Mountain. Still on the phone, I found my way back to the trail where it worked its way across the bottom of the ski slopes and under the tracks for one of those single-rider car personal roller coaster things you only ever see at ski slopes and in backyards of roller coaster building nuts. I finally got off the phone, put airplane mode on, pulled out my trekking poles, smeared on some sunscreen, and started hiking in earnest.
Other than one random mountain biker, I had the section of trail to myself. It worked its way around the mountain away from the ski slopes first and into a canyon where it followed a creek uphill for several miles. It was all uphill for me all evening, but very gradual. I took only one break when it got too dark to trust my low light vision and my new headphones started crapping out (for reasons related to the cord being too short). I was so most where I wanted to be by then.
I stopped for the night down the hill from the trail in the last patch of trees before Searle Pass. There was a narrow sliver of land behind a tree that was nearly flat and just wide enough for the footprint of my inner tent. Once in my tent, I put on a bunch of extra layers and then cooked supper on the vestibule. It was some time around 10pm when I went to sleep.
Trail miles: 7.0
Distance to Twin Lakes: 56 miles
