Rocky Mountain High

Rocky Mountain National Park to Cedar Bluff, Kansas (10/6):

Today was a battle against the elements. The overnight temperature was much colder than anything we'd faced as of yet (teens), and it was accompanied by a strong wind which our tent didn't entirely block out. For the record, I was wearing two pairs of socks, three pairs of pants, three shirts, a fleece jacket, and my winter coat and was covered by my sleeping bag and three blankets, but I still woke up around dawn really freaking cold. Dawn is also when the elks began their mating bugles again, this time about a hundred yards from our tent. From a closer distance, it sounds less like a bugle and more like an old-school modem screeching while making a connection. But we were listening to an elk hanging out in front of our tent, which was pretty damn cool, so all is forgiven.

We then headed over to Bear Lake for our 3 and 6/10 mile hike. The elevation increase was 605 feet from the trailhead, which is similar to hikes we've done at Lassen, Crater Lake, and Glacier, but it started from 9475 feet, climbing to over 10,000 at the end. I rarely stop when we're hiking, but given that anything over 7,500 feet makes me out of breath and dizzy, making it up that climb was really intense. Close to the top I had to stop and flop out on a boulder for a minute to catch my breath, and by the top my head was swirling and I was pretty dizzy. Added to that was a crazy wind with strong gusts that sometimes blew shards of ice into our face at 25 mph. The trail was covered with ice and snow, which made for a slick journey back down the mountain. That does make it sound much worse than it actually was, as I did enjoy myself as we were hiking, but perhaps a bit less than I normally enjoy hiking. Even more enjoyable than the hike was thinking about the hike in retrospect, and we treated ourselves to a giant lunch at Cracker Barrel in the afternoon.



Rocky Mountain NP was our last stop of this leg of the road trip, so the next two days will involve driving as far as we can without many fun stops. After leaving the park, we made it to western Kansas by 10 pm, finding a state park to throw up our tent for the night. I was a little wary of the park because it was dark and scary with no one around, but it was a close to full moon and because it was Kansas it was flat with few trees, so I reasoned we'd be able to see someone coming from pretty far away.
-M