July 17th

July 17th 2015

So yesterday, July 16th, I woke up and hiked an extremely elongated 8 miles to town.  Maybe it was longer... When I arrived in Grand Lake around 11ish I had a super tasty breakfast burrito smothered in sausage gravy and cheese. Afterwards I went to this interesting hotel with bunk room set aside as a hostel.  A bit later my friends, the troublesome trio, arrived in town via car and we met up. Almost immediately someone offered them a place to stay at their house.  We hung out over there for a while and I headed back to the hostel. We made plans to hike out together around 7 am.

Turned out they were kinda lazy and were a no show for the 7 am rendezvous. I told them I'd camp early and I took off. The hiking was easy enough and I even managed to go a mile or two out of route. I listened to a good bit of music and audio books as hiked. I saw a moose and later in the day I spooked a bear. I was too slow to get pictures of either.

Around 7:30 pm I realized I hiked a bunch of miles so I stopped for the day. I thought to myself that would be plenty of time for them to catch up. After a meal, snack, and some phone time with Katie they still didn't show up. I suppose there was no reason to stop that early.  Tomorrow I will start the day off with a huge 3000 ft climb and have a pretty good day planned out. If all goes well I'll only have 20 miles to hike on Sunday to get into Steamboat. Things were calm where I set up but the wind just became rather violent. Good thing I checked for widow makers above my tent, the beetle kill round here is pretty drastic. Fingers crossed for a peaceful night.