SUMMARY:\u00a0 We were very determined to get in lots of miles today, and at first all went pretty well. We were in snowshoes right from the get-go, and were doing well at spotting cairns. But the snow here is so soft that even with snowshoes, we were sinking in and postholing, which made for some slow going. Then around 11:00am, we found ourselves at the edge of a big dropoff looking at a lake far below, and realized, “Oh no, we missed a turn. We are supposed to be on top of that mountain behind the lake!”<\/p>\n
So we backtracked a bit, climbed straight up the snowy slope, and got back on the trail. But our whole hard morning’s work\u20145 miles. Pathetic. Only have 1 1\/4 days of food left. We will never make it.<\/p>\n
So we decided to bail out by going down the Navajo River canyon. It took us 5 hours to get to the bottom, due to avoiding cliffs and dealing with snow. We hope to cross the river in the morning when it is less roary.<\/p>\n
DETAILS:\u00a0 We were very hopeful this morning that we’d be able to make good miles today to make up for our pathetic mileage so far–only around 20 miles done, and 40-plus left to go.\u00a0 It was pretty cold, though not outrageously brrrrrr, considering that we were completely surrounded by snow.\u00a0 Right from the start, we were wearing our snowshoes, and were doing quite well at spotting cairns.\u00a0\u00a0 The vast snowy expanse, and the high peaks were spectacular, and we were awed at so much amazing scenery.\u00a0 The only bummer was endless postholing, even with our snowshoes on.\u00a0 Sometimes we’d come to snowmelt marshes, and had to just walk right through them.\u00a0\u00a0 Brrrr, cold wet feet!<\/p>\n
I was trying very hard to watch the maps and keep track of the trail, but it was hard with so many relatively similar mountains and ridges all around us.\u00a0 Late in the morning, despite my best efforts at navigation, we missed a very important turn, and \u00a0found ourselves at the edge of a big dropoff, looking down at a lake far below.\u00a0 Oh no!\u00a0 We’re not supposed to be here!\u00a0 The one good thing was that now we knew exactly where we were, and that the trail was way up high on a mountain on the OTHER SIDE of the lake.\u00a0 To get there meant a big backtrack (there was no way down the dropoff) and then a walk straight up the side of a steep ridge.\u00a0(I love my MSR snowshoes for this kind of thing–they really grip the snow and don’t slip and slide.)\u00a0 At the top of the ridge, we finally managed to locate the trail again, and it was back to following cairns–slow going because the cairns are so far apart, and it’s hard to spot them.<\/p>\n
We stopped for lunch on a rocky ridgetop surrounded by snowy mountains.\u00a0 Besides eating, I was consulting maps and Fixit was consulting Guthook.\u00a0 I was able to figure out from the maps pretty much exactly where we were, but we were very worried, because we couldn’t figure out how to make Guthook match our maps.\u00a0 As best I could tell, for our whole morning’s hike, we’d only made 5 miles.\u00a0 That is beyond pathetic, and it leaves 37 miles to go, and only 1 1\/4 days of food in our packs.\u00a0 At this rate, we will never make it to Wolf Creek Pass.\u00a0 If we were on good, clear trail, 37 miles would be no problema, but a look ahead showed us a whole lot more of what we’d already been struggling through.\u00a0 Obviously we had no choice:\u00a0 we had to bail out.\u00a0 But NO WAY did we want to go back to Chama.\u00a0 What could we do?<\/p>\n
One of the maps I was using (Trails Illustrated) was originally very large, but I had trimmed it down drastically to save weight and bulk.\u00a0 Looking closely at it, just next to the trimmed edge, I spotted a dirt ROAD, way down at the bottom of\u00a0a fork of the\u00a0Navajo River\u00a0canyon that was just up ahead of us. If we could bushwhack down the canyon to the road, we could eventually work our way out to the highway and roadwalk to Pagosa Springs.<\/p>\n
So that’s what we did.\u00a0 It took us from 1 pm until 6 pm to get off the ridge and down to the Navajo River.\u00a0\u00a0 At first it wasn’t too bad–somewhat steep snowy hillsides that we could negotiate in our snowshoes–but eventually we reached steep cliffs and had to figure out how to get past them.\u00a0 Finally we got to treeline and were back in the forest.\u00a0 At that point, we stowed our snowshoes, because it was so steep and so rough, that even though there was still a lot of snow, and yes, we did still posthole a bit (I had to dig myself out of baaaad postholes twice!) we found that just going in our hiking shoes worked better.\u00a0 Finally we were out of the snow and following a cute little creek down a side canyon, heading for the main Navajo River.\u00a0 Everything was wet and sloshing with snowmelt.<\/p>\n
Down we went, and the farther down we got, the bigger the cute little creek became.\u00a0 We decided we’d better cross it before it got any worse, and if even this little side creek was raging and\u00a0roaring, the main river would probably be pretty bad.\u00a0 We knew we had to cross the river to get to the road.\u00a0\u00a0 At last we reached the floor of the main canyon and headed to the Navajo River.\u00a0 My heart sank when I looked at it.\u00a0 “There’s no way we can get across this,” I thought.\u00a0 Even Fixit, who is very fearless about river crossings, was dubious.\u00a0 We decided to try walking upstream a ways, hoping to find a wider, flatter place where hopefully the current would slow down and it would not be too deep.\u00a0 A half hour or so of walking, and we spotted a crossing place that looked barely do-able, maybe.\u00a0 Fixit actually got into the river and tested it to see how\u00a0strong the current was.\u00a0 He climbed out and said, “It’s pretty bad, but let’s camp now and try crossing early in the morning.”\u00a0 (In case you’re not familiar with snowmelt river crossings in the mountains, early morning is when the water level is at its lowest, and late afternoon, it’s at its highest)<\/p>\n
Finding a campsite was not easy.\u00a0 Every bit of ground was literally running with snowmelt (which explained why the river was so roaring!).\u00a0 Plants were sprouting everywhere, and things were very green.\u00a0 But I finally found a small, level, DRY patch of pineneedly ground under a tree up on\u00a0a hill above the river.\u00a0 Now we’re in our tent listening to the roar of the river and praying like crazy that we can make it across tomorrow.<\/p>\n
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SUMMARY:\u00a0 We were very determined to get in lots of miles today, and at first all went pretty well. We were in snowshoes right from the get-go, and were doing well at spotting cairns. But the snow here is so soft that even with snowshoes, we were sinking in and postholing, which made for some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-colorado"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":770,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions\/770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montybillpct.net\/blog2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}