I woke at 5 again. I heard Pilgrim cooking breakfast as I was preparing for the day in my tent. The cold wind, which had been absent the night before, was whipping our tents. It made packing our tents up like a solo game of parachute. The wind would be a theme of the day.
I came out to finish packing up around 6. The sun was up, but not over the mountain, and there was only a little bit of sunlight visible on the far side of the creek. I kept my coat on against the cold wind as I hiked out at 6:15, again beating Pilgrim out of camp.
He caught up to me and passed me at the bottom of the two mile descent along the creek that started the day. I was taking a long break. Among other things, I packed my coat up. The sun was up and hot, and I had a five mile climb ahead. At the steepest parts, I would be sweating right through my shorts, resulting in some painful chafing that called for a break. Maybe I should not have left the Chamois Butt’r behind in Pagosa.
I had a nice three-way leapfrog when a certain Mosey joined the game that morning. He passed me while breaking on that first climb and said that I had walked right past his tent the night before. I swear I didn’t even notice. Anyway, yet another white-bearded guy who probably hikes faster than me.
I caught up to him wetting himself in a falls on the steepest part of the climb. He passed me soon after. And then the break to deal with the chafing. But he and Pilgrim stopped in a creek to get water or something a mile from there, so I passed Pilgrim and chased Mosey to the pass at the top of the long climb, and then finally caught him at the bottom of the descent by cutting some switchbacks. At this point, he was looking for a place to have lunch, so I went on ahead.
I was looking too. The sun was high overhead and the trees were either full round to the ground or too small to cast a shadow. The rocks were all at the wrong angle. Basically, there was no shade anywhere. So I stopped at a random rock and ate in the direct sun. The powerful cold wind kept the sun from roasting me alive. Pilgrim passed while I was eating and it would be a while before I caught him again.
Mosey chased me through the next section and caught up to me when I was looking for a place to get water. He said there was a stream not too far ahead, so I let him go and caught up to him there. He was zipping on his pant legs to deal with the overgrown bushes lining the trail. I stopped to get some water. Not carrying any pants, there was nothing I could do except let the bushes scratch me.
After another hour or two of climbing and descending through bushes and rocks, I caught up to Mosey again, sitting next to a creek. He had taken a wrong turn and did a bonus half mile of hiking. He told me I had just passed a moose in the meadow, but when I climbed the hill above him and looked where he said the moose was supposed to be, the moose was gone.
Another long climb followed, and Mosey wasn’t too far behind me most of the way. From the top of the pass I spotted Pilgrim sitting trailside below. I guessed he was dealing with blisters again, and asked him as much as I passed. He said that he had just done some surgery on them but had some miles left in him. He proved it by trailing me down the hill and passing me soon after I stopped to make supper an hour later. If he kept going until 8, he put in well over twenty miles on that blister. I didn’t see Mosey again, though he had intended to stop further than where I planned to stop.
I shivered right through my coat while eating supper from the cold winds coming down the valley into the woods to where I stopped. For the first time, smoke from wildfires hung low in the air making everything smell like fire. I met a sobo climbing up the valley after dinner, and he said a ranger told him the smoke was blowing in from a fire in New Mexico. No idea why there wasn’t smoke up to this point though. Maybe the intense winds have stoked it up recently, or maybe it’s just the geography.
When I got to the place I had originally intended to camp, I still had plenty of daylight, and it didn’t seem like there would be anywhere near the lake that wasn’t pummeled by the wind, so I went ahead and descended along Nebo Creek. It was a steep, rocky, slow descent, and my sock so bunched up under my right foot that it totally scrubbed a layer of skin off the bottom by the time I reached the junction that led to a campsite.
I changed socks and shoes almost as soon as I stopped for the night, and then went down to the creek to get water before it was too dark to find. I just got everything set up and in my tent before I needed a headlamp. The campsite wasn’t really level or completely protected from wind, but it seemed like there was a lot less than there had been the whole afternoon, when it had sometimes whipped back and forth throwing me from side to side across the trail. It would be a pretty warm night’s sleep.
Trail miles: 19.8
Distance to Silverton: 15 miles
