Valderee, Valderaa, ...

I come into the mountains for the solitude: the peace and serenity of being by myself.

Unfortunately, the really spectacular scenery is popular, and attracts the galloping hordes, spoiling my spiritual renewal.

This morning, the Bear Lake parking area, which holds 400 cars, was completely FULL at 8:00 a.m.! What's more, the overflow lot back up the road a mile. holding another 500 cars, was also full!

Okay, Change of Plans. Head somewhere else. Sprague Lake Trail. Nope...Full. Storm Pass Trail. Full. Glacier Falls Trail. Full. Deer Mountain Trail. Full.

Dang. Lots and lots of hikers out today. I hate crowds. Give me solitude. Please.

On the flip side, however, when I do travel down a "crowded" wilderness trail, especially one that goes deep into the backcountry and climbs some real serious elevation changes, I derive some small amount of personal satisfaction from the reactions of those young, spirited hikers I encounter on these trails. They are all in their late teens or early 20's, sporting their cargo shorts with long-sleeve sweatshirts, baseball caps, and their 'hoody' tied around their waists. The girls have their pony tail pulled through the loop at the back of their baseball hats, and the guys usually have not one, but two, of those titanium walking stick things, making them look more like out-of-place skiers.

They take one look at me, and their mouth drops open. Six miles from parking lot, two-thousand-plus vertical feet up from the start of the trail, in the thin mountain air at the 11,000 foot elevation, with my gray hair and my big round belly -- made even more bloated by the fact that I'm drinking copious amounts of water -- and my long Dickies workpants.

"Where did you come from?" "Did you walk all the way up here?" "Is there a shortcut we don't know about?" "Are you going to be okay?" "Can you make it down all right?" "How old are you, anyway?"

Because I take lots of rest breaks, I'm not even winded. I'm actually doing better than many of them! When I return to the parking lot, they're all leaning against their cars, winded and out of breath and complaining about blisters and aching legs and the high altitude and being pooped. The fat ol' gray-haired tortoise enjoys smiling and asking them how they enjoyed the view from the top!

Today I passed six different trails (all with full parking lots) before I finally threw in the towel and decided, what the heck, maybe a long strenuous trail will be less crowded. I drove out to the Moraine parking lot, and started up the Odessa Lake trail. There were several dozen cars in the lot, but the trail is 10 miles, so I figured the people will be spread out.

However, about an hour into that hike, it was suddenly cut short. See the post a couple below for the reason why! Here, kitty, kitty, kitty... nice kitty. Maybe the one and only time of my life, and I don't get a picture. Bummer.

I never found out what happened to the people who owned all those cars.

After returning to my car, I decide that a hike on a crowded trail beats no hike at all. There are so many I've taken that I like, and so many more that I haven't yet tried. I chose the Cub Lake trail, which I've never taken before, and decided to take it all the way up to the Fern Lake trail, and make a big loop. All day hike.

Here is the moraine, the marshy wet area at the foot of the valley and Big Thompson River gorge, at the beginning of the trip. The soil is damp, like walking on a wet sponge. Rich soil. Nice wildflowers.



Into the forest, the trail begins to climb. Up. Way up. Sometimes the trail is easy to follow, like you see here. I always take it slow and easy.


As you get further and further up the trail, you encounter fewer people. The city slickers have given up and tuckered out. A couple of miles out and a thousand feet up, the trail is not as wide or as noticeable, like this one. (A dozen yards further down this one, I ended up taking off my socks and shoes and rolling up my pants legs and fording a bit. Das braun vater ist koldt. They call this Glacier Creek, because it begins as meltwater from several of the glaciers further up the gorge. )


After several miles, sometimes it's downright hard to find where the trail is. "I'm never lost, but the trail sometimes misplaces itself." Can you see the trail in this picture below? (Hint: Look way ahead for the part in the bushes.) It's a good thing I've got a good sense of direction. I wonder how many people get really, really lost out here?



This is Cub Lake, about three hours up the trail from the parking lot. Gorgeous. I waited until most of the people left to take the pictures.


I thought I had seen on the map where the trail made a circle around Cub Lake. The main trail definitely went to the right aroudn the north side of the lake. I took the little side trail to the left, following the south side of the lake.

After a few minutes, however, that trail got sparse, and then finally petered out entirely. Thinking surely there's got a to be a trail here somewhere, I kept pushing on. Finally, I was bushwhacking, climbing over fallen logs, sloshing through sloughs, picking my way through underbrush. I probably should have turned back, but by now, I figured I was halfway around the lake, so I might as well continue on.

It took me a full hour and a half to get around this lake, even though it is probably less than a quarter mile long! When I finally got around the lake and back on the trail, I took off my backpack and checked the map. Nope. No trail on the south side of this lake! I had been thinking about Fern Lake which has a trail encircling it.

Oh, well, I enjoyed the cross-country excursion. Of course, I knew exactly where I was at all times, like I said, the trail just sometimes gets misplaced. I continued on, past Cub Lake, and took this shot looking back. The hole in the clouds made the lighting effect.



I had just passed Cub Lake, and was on my way down on the other side of the ridge, to the Mill Creek Trail intersection, when I met a young couple going up. As they passed, I greeted them, and as is my custom, I encouraged them by saying, "you're almost there, you've got about five more minutes to Cub Lake." They stopped dead in their tracks, and said, "Cub Lake? No, no, no, we're going to Fern Lake."

"Not on this trail, you're not," I replied. "If you were going to Fern Lake, you should have taken the right turn about two miles behind you." I've never been to that intersection, but according to the map, it should have been a right turn. There aren't many overpasses and cloverleaf's at the 11,000 foot elevation in the wilderness.

"What?! No, that can't be right. Let's get out the topo map, I think you're mistaken."

I'm not mistaken.

Sure enough, their map confirmed they had missed their turn-off. They turned around. I gave them a good head start before following them down.

Walking real slow, I make less noise when I'm by myself. I see lots of stuff the twenty-somethings never see. Such as the large wooden sign saying, "Fern Lake, this way, Cub Lake, that way!"

And wildlife. continue on down to my post below for some photos of the wildlife I've taken in the past 2 days.

I encounter lots of rewarding scenery, too, such as this beaver pond.

I sure appreciate my monopod: it's a walking stick with a camera mount on the top. I lean the monopod up against a set of rocks or jam it into bushes, and voila, I can take a picture of myself. All of these pictures of me were taken by the timer on the camera.

To give you some sense of how much I hiked today, here is a view looking back towards where I started. Click on this picture below. See the mountain on the right? And see the two mountains in the center? The trail goes down in between the mountain on the right, and the lower mountain in the center, through a gorge. I came up from the trailhead, way way down there. This is real wilderness. This is way up. This is far out. And this is really, really cool.



And here is where I'm going. At the bottom of the mountain cliff in the picture below is a gorge. The trail is way deep down in that gorge, at the very base of that mountain in the distance.


Here I am at the turning around point, at the end of the gorge. This bridge crosses the Big Thompson River, and was built by Youth Conservation Corps volunteers. It took them three summers to build. They had to fell the trees, saw the timber, and put it together out here without power tools. This is a wilderness area, and is at least three miles from the nearest dirt road.

I enjoyed myself. I would have preferred not to have met the dozens of people I met on the trail, but hey, it was fun nevertheless.

Note to self: in the future, when on an all-day hike on the day after eating dinner at the Grumpy Gringo's Mexican restaurant in Estes Park, having Grumpy's Special Enchilada combo with the green sauce... don't forget to put a couple of sheets of toilet paper in the backpack. I didn't need it today, but I can see where it might come in handy on a 10-hour hike in the future. Oh, and extra batteries for the camera, too.