Hot on the heals of last weeks New Mexico section, here’s the highlights of the Colorado. Set to the beat of Rock and Roll, Part 2 by Gary Glitter (no comments about kiddy fiddling please).
As you’ll gather from the video, the defining aspect of Colorado was probably the snow. When we entered Colorado and crossed the San Juan Mountains (in June) you could barely follow any kind of footpath. It was mostly buried deep under snow so the map and compass were always at hand taking bearings and working out where over the next ridge we were supposed to aim. We had days where we’d hardly step foot on bare earth all day and it was a strugle to find anywhere to pitch our tent on the evening. But as June turned into July things started to melt and there was a bit more grass to laze about on at lunchtime, but this caused it’s own problems of water logged ground and swollen streams to cross…
Our favourite section of Colorado was the San Juan Mountains, you might notice a couple of extra people in the video – that’s Boston & Cubby, two fellow CDT’ers we helped through the start of this tricky section. It’s probably worth noting me & Paul were the only people out of the 11 northbounders to complete the San Juan’s, everyone else took the Creede cutoff. But probably the best singular highlight was climbing Mount Elbert, which is the highest mountain on the Continental Divide. The long panorama towards the end of the video is the awe-inspiring view from the top. But also for me, my girlfriend Nicky came out halway and walked with us for 2 weeks (we had to slow down a bit for her).
We had our best Steak of the CDT here, it was at the Back Street Steakhouse in Grand Lake. (probably our most expensive meal too…)
About a third of the way in there’s a shot of me in the tent during a lighting storm. This was probably the scaryest moment on the CDT, lightening was hitting the ground every 10-15 seconds and all round us in every direction… After crouching down in the trees for a while, we decided we couldn’t bare the sight of it anymore and had to just get in the tent, close and eyes and hope that we waked up in the morning! Well we did :) and we were at the Wyoming border a few days later, the halfway point of the CDT.
I filmed it on a Sony HDR-SR12, it’s got a 120GB hard drive which you need for a six month walk! It performed pretty well, got it wet and dropped it a few times, but it kept on working. It seems to pick up a lot of background wind noise, in retrospect I probably should of got an external mic.
First: Gorgeous
Second: What sort of camera where you using?
After so long, that tune sounds fresh!… got some funny looks from my office compadres’ though!