Beyond the Trees
Backpacking - 7/3 - 7/4 2020
2 DAYS, 1 PEAK
Watch the video below!
T-1 Week
This was Zeus’s first backpacking trip with us so it was just this was his introduction to overnight adventures. He’s been hiking with us for over a year but never backpacked before so we were interested to see how he would be in the tent. I honestly thought he would be restless the whole night as he always seems to be on his feet and is hyper-aware to any noise but (spoiler) he blew us away with how well he did in the tent!
We’ve done the hike to the pass where we planned to camp many, many times before, it’s one of our favorite snowshoeing trails, but for this trip we made it a point to point hike (or trailhead to trailhead) so we could summit one of the peaks in the area (this one being 11,857 ft). There was a little bit of planning to figure out how to get back to our original trailhead where our car was parked. We could have backtracked the same way we came but we wanted to descend from the peak and get those views as we went down, so I (Katrina) decided I would just run the couple miles along the road back to the trailhead to grab the car, then drive back to pick up Scott, Maxi and Zeus.
Prior to this trip I made the hard decision to chop off all of Maxi and Zeus’s hair. Maxi hadn’t had a haircut for about 2 years and his hair was a good 12 inches long in some areas and Zeus’s was reaching around 8 inches. I would have kept it long but with them wearing their packs and laying around the campsite in the dirt, they would be a mess after just one day and grooming them in the mountains isn’t exactly easy. I took them down to an inch all over but kept Maxi’s head hair long so he could still sport his signature look with his pony tail. Grooming a sheepdog is definitely much faster and easier when their hair is short, when their hair was long I was spending several hours a week on grooming alone so it’s a good thing I enjoy to do it! A matted sheepdog is an unhappy dog so grooming is a priority for me especially considering they’re hiking dogs.
Day 1
On Friday July 3rd we drove to the trailhead after Scott and I were both done with work. Usually we would never hike in this late but to get to the pass it’s just 2.5 miles with 1,200 ft of elevation gain. When we got to the trailhead the sky was dark and it was pouring rain, something we had expected prior to arriving, there’s no way to avoid afternoon thunderstorms in Colorado, you just have to wait them out. Lucky for us we were able to spend our time watching a few moose graze in the meadow near the parking lot. Once the storm passed over we made our way up to our camping spot in the trees just before the pass. We had clear skies for the rest of the evening.
There was a field of glacier lilies just in front of our tent
Once we set up camp for the night, we didn’t waste time in making and eating dinner because the mosquitos were horrible here. This was probably due to all the snow melt creating bogs and marshes nearby. We have never been swarmed by so many mosquitos before, but thankfully it was late in the evening and we headed into the tent for the rest of the night. We were surprised by Zeus instantly laying down in the tent, for his first time in there he was very relaxed!
Day 2
After a restful sleep, we woke up the following morning to the sun hitting the surrounding mountains. Due to the mosquitos we packed up camp fairly quickly and decided to head up to the pass where the slight breeze would keep them from swarming us and give us an opportunity to eat breakfast. It’s times like these that we’re lucky the dogs have long hair because the mosquitos weren’t able to bite them despite their efforts.
At the pass
After eating breakfast we started our climb up to our destination. There were lots of ups and downs in order to get to the base of the mountain we were planning on summiting. There wasn’t a trail to guide us up to the summit but it was pretty obvious where we were going and just followed the ridge the whole way. The views at the summit were breathtaking!
At the summit
Just above Zeus’s head to the right is the mountain we climbed on our next backpacking trip
We ran into a bit of an issue on our way down due to snow blocking our route. The typical route is to descend from the south side of the peak to the ridge below and then continue to hike down to the meadow below where you’ll find a primitive trail. However as you can see in the photo above (to the right of Zeus) there was a huge blanket of snow covering that route. As we made our way onto the snow to find a good path down… we realized there really wasn’t one. We could see the primitive trail in the meadow below but there were steep snow banks/drifts that we would have to jump down and then slide down to the bottom which isn’t exactly feasible or safe to do especially with huge dogs. We actually saw someone take a tumble down the snow and straight to the bottom, she seemed to make it unscathed though. We decided it wasn’t worth the risk and ended up climbing up the southern ridge to the next peak and then made our way down from there where there wasn’t any snow which was definitely the better decision. From there we were able to get onto the primitive trail and continued our decent down into the meadow.
The wildflowers were in full bloom in the meadow, particularly the Indian paintbrush (the red flowers you see above), one of my favorites. After taking a small break in the meadow we got back into the trees and continued a steep hike down to the parking lot where I put on my running shoes and ran back a couple miles back to our original trailhead where my car was parked and then drove back up to pick up Scott, Maxi and Zeus. On this day we hiked just over 4 miles with 1,112 ft of elevation gain.