I got to wash my hair!

Amanda here, If you hadn’t figured that out from the title, since Josh is so concerned with the cleanliness of his hair. Yes, I got to wash my hair yesterday, after trying to find some water-less shampoo, I decided to just use a cup and our aquatainer and some shampoo of course. You see we have not had access to showers in over a week now ... on to more important things.

So picking up where Josh left off, below you will see what began as some minorly inconvenient snow drifts across the trail.

And here you see about the elevation we got to and decided to turn around.

The pictures don’t do the experience justice, but you get the idea.

So after hiking for 2 ish hours up and 45 minutes down, we decided to head to Durango, co, only to discover that our internet connection/joshs phone was on the fritz. After much deliberation we decided to just hope that the phone would restore itself and head on without a stop to Verizon (who weren’t much help on the phone by the way).

This was our home for the next couple days. We got in at 930 Friday night of memorial day weekend and were somehow still able to get a camping spot in the free lower Hermosa campground. We woke up the next morning thinking we would get coffee and head on to fruita, co. At this point we had some idea that it was memorial day weekend. After packing up our camping gear and heading into town, we realized just what this meant … lots of people everywhere, which meant that trying to find camping in Fruita was going to be difficult, so after much deliberation (yes, it is becoming a theme of our trip), we decided to stay in durango til Memorial day let up. So, we caught up with email etc at the coffee shop, then went BACK to the campsite to find that our camping spot was still open, set up our tent and headed back into town. While walking around downtown Durango, we spotted this sign (link), a trials competition at a waterpark, how fun. This is a picture of one of the competitors. Trials is a kind of biking that Josh equated to climbing while we watched bikers jump from rock to rock. We hung out here for awhile, reading our trail map in the shade (its been really sunny for all of our trip). We realized that there was a short shuttleable downhill run nearby (Durango has soooo many mountain biking trails that you can even bike to from town!). So we drove out towards the Colorado trail and looked for a trail off of a forest service road. Josh rode the trail twice and then we headed to dinner. This place ended up being a favorite of ours.

Love, Josh and Amanda

Colorado Trip 2011 - The first few fun days (Part 1)

Actually, the excitement started in Oklahoma when the skies got dark and we pulled into a gas station where a news station storm chasing team was frantically running around.  We got a little concerned and got back on 40 - For the next hour, we listened to storm chasers broadcast on the radio spotting tornadoes forming and saying things like: "theres a lot of rotation here", "oh yea, this ones just formed and its going to cross I-40".  Fortunately we learned we were driving away from the tornadoes and the next hour of listening to the broadcast was entertaining instead of frightening.  If we had been 30 min or so later coming through there, we would have gone through some nasty stuff!

We made it to one of the best campgrounds in New Mexico (down in the Rio Grande gorge) that night around 11pm after 16 or so hours of driving:

View from campsite:

We did a short hike the next morning and immediately saw some a group of 3 big horn sheep which tried to pose for a picture:

Enjoying the hike:

After that hike, we went into Taos and got advice from Taos Cyclery (dude there was super nice).  For our intro to desert biking, we chose the Horsethief trail which has great views of the Rio Grande and some nice singletrack (with cacti to avoid riding over).  We thought this was going to be a pretty short ride but it turned out to be a little longer than expected, especially with reading the map and navigating.  After about 7 miles, we weren't quite sure where we were (which meant we didn't know if we had a few miles left or over 10).  Amanda's response was "I'm going to kill you!" which then turned into "I'm going to kill that bike shop guy!".  After that we figured out where we were and it wasn't too much further.

Start of trail:

One of many views:

Amanda riding:

Back at the campground:

The next day we headed into Carson Daly's Party Forest (also known as the Carson National Forest) southeast of Taos to ride the Woodpile trail (14 mile loop) which started around 8600' and topped out at 10,360'.  This was up out of the desert which was nice since we definitely prefer trees.  This was also a major navigational challenge with lots of second-guessing but ultimately we made it with only a few minor wrong turns.  The bike shop guy said "slow" on this loop was about 3 hours, so I assumed it would take about 5 - it took 6 hours and 20 minutes.  The trail was mainly doubletrack and the elevation made it difficult, but there were very pretty spots, and we saw more wildlife (1 brown bear, 2 assumed elk) than people (just us).

Yay trees!

Signs are very helpful in this forest:

Pretty aspen tunnels:

A nice meadow:

We camped that night down on the forest roads.  The next day, we attempted a hike from 10,000' up to 12,400'.  Everything was against us on this hike.  Carson Daly's Top 40 map (Also known as the National Geographic Carson National Forest map last revised in '96) was COMPLETELY wrong about where the trail head was, which resulted in an hour of bush-whacking looking for it.   We finally found it and started hiking up; I didn't waste much time before falling in a creek which my cell phone didn't seem to like too much. We kept going after that where we encountered a lot of knee-deep snow.  After lots of "Well, lets just go another 30 minutes", we finally gave up around 11,300'.  What was supposed to be a short morning hike took several hours and we didn't even make it to the top, but it was still fun.  After that we drove 4 hours to Durango, ate some "Serious Texas Barbeque", and pulled into the camping area I knew of around 10pm where there was fortunately one spot left.

This morning (Saturday), we're at a coffee shop in Durango planning out the rest of the trip.

Josh

Colorado Trip 2011 - The drive out

Amanda and I are currently in Oklahoma on I-40 on the drive out to New Mexico.  PDANet from the droid to laptop is nice to have.  We drove 11 hours yesterday from Lake Lure, NC to Little Rock, AR to stay with Stacy, Ivan, and Madelyn and have 16 hours today to Taos, NM.  Percy will hopefully enjoy his stay with the Wilson's - we were sad to leave him.  Some pics of the drive out and Madelyn:

I'll drive to update this blog as the trip progresses.  Looking forward to some desert biking!

Josh