FKT - 10 Canyon Traverse

Colorado Trail Days 10 and 11

Colorado Trail Day 9

Colorado Trail Day 8

Colorado Trail Day 7

Unsupported FKT. Northbound via Collegiate West. 

Day 7 (9/1):
In the morning I headed towards Cottonwood Pass and admired the now-day-lit views. It was a steady descent down to Texas Creek where I would begin hiking trail that I had covered a few weeks earlier during a training trip. I took the newly constructed and inaugurated section of the CO Trail up towards Lake Ann Pass.

It hurt to swallow and my tonsils were now notably inflamed. It felt like strep throat, except that I could not imagine how I would have contracted it. Then I remembered the bottle I pulled from the trash at the starting trailhead a week prior.

I continued over Lake Ann Pass and began the long steady descent toward and along Clear Creek. It was nice to travel familiar trail. Rain began and the sun set as I headed toward Hope Pass. Fortunately the rain relented. The climb began uneventfully. By the time I was five hundred feet below the pass, I was suffering from incoherent auditory hallucinations. I took a desperate 20 minute nap in the middle of the trail. Rather than ending the hallucinations, the nap merely made them slightly more coherent. I continued up to the pass while listening to a pair of advertising media executives with New Jersey accents extolling the need for their representation atop of the pass. It made little sense then and it makes no sense now. At the pass, I ate an entire tube of Oreos, which finally put an end to the unwanted sound track. The combination of calorie and sleep deprivation seemed to have been the problem. 

From the top of Hope Pass, it was a punishing three thousand foot descent at a 15% grade. I had flown up this climb a few weeks prior. But the combination of my exhaustion and the painful condition of my feet made the descent torturous. The sensation was of my feet being beaten with a meat tenderizer. I forced myself down to the bottom and called it a night.


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Nathaniel G

Colorado Trail Day 7

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FKT - 10 Canyon Traverse

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Colorado Trail Day 7

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