I thought we were done with this foolishness. If there was one thing we had no interest in seeing, it was yet another storm cloud to start the day. The forecast certainly made no mention of them, and yet there it was, dominating an otherwise azure sky, pouring rain on the valley below and now chasing us down with alarming speed.
The Art of the Perfect Near-o
There's an art to performing the perfect near-o. It takes just the right mix of near-zero miles (hence the name “near-o”), but also a healthy dose of town food and, potentially, transportation to or from the trail. Nail all three, stick the landing and you have yourself a textbook near-o. Limit the miles to less than five and you've got what our good friend Gazelle would lovingly call a “hard near-o”.
The Legacy of Water
Its fingerprints are all around us. The lingering patches of snow that still cling to the coolest of high alpine corners. The lifeblood of the thick carpet of tundra-thriving grasses, bold enough to color such a forbidding landscape with their flowering blooms. Even the glaciers that long ago sculpted the waves of stone we've called home for these past 6 weeks.
Choose Your Own Adventure
Hike your own hike. It's a mantra you hear often on nearly any long distance trail. In real world terms, its meaning is simple: you do you. Hike at your pace, linger when you want to, and take the detours that most captivate your sense of adventure. Answer to no one’s whims but your own.
Welcome to the Dining Room
We don't give them much thought, but they sure are everywhere. Roads. Dirt ones, paved ones, gravel ones, long-since abandoned logging ones, and every other flavor of the road rainbow. Walking long distances gives you a new appreciation of just how extensive the totality of our road system really is…
The Magic of Kindness
Like a truck stuck in second gear. That's what it felt like when my feet took their first steps away from our camp this morning. The evening rains had left only to return a time or two overnight, ensuring that we'd be packing up wet tarps, at a minimum. There was no blue sky to herald the morning, only a thick cloud that we seemed to be finding our way out of little by little.
The Dusty Superhighway
Settled into a gentle curve in the Arkansas River, the town of Salida is beautiful little place even in the swell of a global pandemic. Our day off yesterday gave us a chance to run some errands in the downtown area where old brick buildings that harken back to days long since past lead right to the river, where whitewater kayakers play in the rapids.