July 22 - Next Up: Colorado Trail

Next week we'll start a thru-hike of the 485 mile Colorado Trail, Denver to Durango.  It should take us about a month.  We rode through parts of this region on our 2007 Great Divide Mountain Bike Route journey; other than that one trip it will be new terrain for me (and mostly new for James).  We're looking forward to high altitude beauty, big mountains, flowers, creeks, blue skies and afternoon thunderstorms.

Here's our CalTopo map full of all the details.

And here's a simplified CalTopo map that just shows the route and the town access points.

We'll stop occasionally to have a hot meal and resupply our food:

• hitch to Jefferson
• bus to Breckenridge and/or Frisco
• hitch to Leadville
• Twin Lakes (on route)
• Monarch Crest Tramway and Gift Shop (on route) (and maybe hitch to Salida)
• hitch to Lake City
• Molas Lake Campground (on route) and probably hitch to Silverton

We'll carry a SPOT Tracker.  Remember - absence of SPOT data means the device has died, it does NOT mean that we have a problem.  You can view the data on a desktop computer using their (pretty crummy) SPOT website.  I prefer to view it using the iPhone app Spot Buddy, which is a nice clean interface for viewing SPOT and Delorme data, and allows you to export the info to the iPhone App Gaia GPS if you're a map geek and care about that sort of thing.  Our SPOT ID if using Spot Buddy is 0ecLfMlFzRSTMAUzQyKyunGxTcArU9Vm2.

We're keeping our fingers crossed that we don't encounter any reroutes due to wildfires, and we're hoping for mild monsoon afternoon thunderstorms and nothing too severe.

Cheers, Amy & James