Comfortable. After a rather rough first day of hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park, I woke up in the backcountry at Skeleton Gulch camping area surrounded by mountains and forest feeling so much better. Torrey and I were not in a rush to do anything more than watch the mountains wake up around us, waiting for the sun to kiss our tent and banish the morning chill. We meandered down to our bear canister, positioned near a cheerful creek, and looked for any evidence of nightly visitors. We didn't see any, which relieved me more than I'd like to admit, and got to work on breakfast, fumbling with numb fingers over the locks on the bear canister before finally extracting what we needed to make oatmeal.
We truly weren't in a hurry but eventually found ourselves with our gear packed and ready to move on to our next site. We had a final chore before we left, needing to fill up our water bottles, which meant filtering water from the icy mountain stream near our camp. In hindsight we probably could have waited until the morning warmed up a little more, but I just wanted to get it over with, so I shoved my hand into the burning cold water so many times that near the end of it I almost lost the water filter, fumbling and shaking as I was. It slipped out of my hands and landed on a root right over the water, and I almost overbalanced as I lunged for it. Neither losing the filter nor me going into the water would have been a disaster, we would have been fine without it for the rest of the hike and I would have dried, but it wasn't the way I wanted to start my morning. Thankfully neither happened, and we finished filtering without another incident, though I gripped the filter a little more strongly than before.
Our next camp site, Box Canyon, was less than three miles away, but it required us to hike back down the way we came, including a portion of the incredibly steep trail. Going down something like that is always easier than climbing up, and the hike was mercifully short, including a brief walk on a dirt road that runs from the border of the park to deeper in. Once off the road we had a short but steep hike up to Box Canyon, but it went a thousand times better than the hike up to Skeleton Gulch, as short as it was. We arrived at our site to find the previous night's occupants still there, so we kept going and paused for a snack in the adjacent meadow before deciding to stash our packs and hike up to Thunder Pass. Thunder Pass is a story in itself and I'll write about it in my next full length post, but let me tell you right now that it has earned a spot on my list of top ten hiking trails. It was amazing!
Once we returned from Thunder Pass a couple hours later Box Canyon was empty and we set up, preparing for an afternoon of being off our feet. We made lunch, hung out by the creek, took a hundred photos, and watched as storms began to build and close in around us. We never went far from the tent and had plenty of time to get our gear stored away before it rained, and we watched as the single blue patch of sky directly above us grew smaller and smaller, eventually enclosing us under a blanket of grey.
We got lucky: the storms were still babies when they passed over us and we only got a few sprinkles. Further down the valley, back the way we had come, we listened to thunder echoing off the mountains to the south and east. Have you ever heard thunder echoing off the mountains? Its like drums talking to each other from either side of a valley, rolling in one direction, then coming from another. It was peaceful, sitting there in the warm, snug tent, listening to the storms bother somebody else. The storms and sounds would have been less cool if we were in the middle of them, and we didn't take that for granted, but it was still nice to have a calm evening. The temperature dropped with the storms as evening closed in and we got ready to settle down for the night, even though we knew the sun was still up and we had a couple hours of light left. Why move when you're comfy? Then, of course, when we were content with the world and our place in it, we had a visitor.
Did you miss the first two installments of my Rocky Mountain Adventure? Read them here and here, and don't forget to keep an eye on the Snapshots to read about our first of several wildlife encounters while in the back country. Preview: We didn't know what it was at first, just something huge right next to our tent!
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