October 2 - 4: Durango, CO
Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 6:33PM Durango was without a doubt the highlight of the trip. The town is gorgeous and the weather was perfect; mid to high 60s and sunny. I got into town from Amarillo around 4pm so there was no time to do any hiking. There was really only time to find a hotel and hit the town. Trip Advisor helped me find the Wapiti Lodge, which had wifi and was walking distance to downtown.
"wapiti" is navajo for "our air conditioning doesn't work"
After wandering around a bit I found a cool rooftop bar that had a pretty good guitar guy, a female hockey team taking pictures everywhere, and a weird homeless-looking guy who told me where to find the best steak in town (not sure how he knew that). They also have the worst website in the history of websites.
spot the hockey team
Since I always follow the advice of homeless people, I decided to go get that steak, at a place called the Ore House. It was honestly one of the best steaks I've ever had (20 oz. t-bone). April and Chad were sitting next to me at the bar and gave me some advice on where to hike the next day. They convinced me to do the Colorado Trail, a long hike that runs from Denver down to Durango, since I was looking for something about 10 miles with good scenery. As an aside - Chad was an engineer at Lockheed and got fed up, so he and his wife went to Durango and opened up a flower shop. Gotta respect that.
So I got up around 7am to grab some breakfast and hit the trail. The weather was fantastic - about 65 and sunny. The trailhead is just a few miles outside of downtown and was pretty easy to find.
trail headI parked and headed out around 9. The early part of the trail follows the Animas river for a while before heading up to higher ground and back into the woods. There's one overlook that was pretty spectacular, about 2 miles in. After that it was mostly wooded areas with a couple good views.
first overlook
There were some runners initially, but they quickly disappeared. Same with the hikers. After a while all I saw were a couple bikers. About 5 or 6 miles in I stopped even seeing bikers and was basically alone. It's a little nervewracking to realize you're completely alone in the middle of nowhere but it's also a good adrenaline rush. So I decided to keep heading further out until about 2pm, to give me time to get back before dark. But around 1:30 I came across some relatively fresh droppings in the trail that were not from any animal I was familiar with. I knew there were bears and mountain lions in the area so I got a bit paranoid and figured it might be time to head back. It's a great feeling to be out in the woods alone until you start to think you might be being watched by something with fangs.
should have gone left
On the way back I decided to take an alternate route back just to see something different, so I turned off on the Dry Fork Trail, not realizing that I was adding about 5 miles to the trek and another 1000 feet of elevation change. So my 2000 foot, 10 mile hike turned into a 3000 foot, 15 mile hike. Bad idea.
I finally saw a couple bikers again on this section of the trail though, so that was a good feeling. There were a few little makeshift campsites too, from people doing the hike from Denver, I'd presume.
Overall it's a great hike, especially in the fall when the leaves area all changing.
Reader Comments (1)
Love this whole page. Nice!