Colorado Backcountry Hiker

"Day 6. Hike Tennessee Pass from Uncle Bud's Hut via the Colorado Trail"
-- from The World Outdoors' hike description

Us, five days after the start.

"Beginning right at the front door of Uncle Bud's Hut, we venture once again into the heart of the Holy Cross Wilderness and along the renowned Colorado Trail. With breathtaking ridge-line passes, beaver-pond meadows, craggy peaks and a trail's end that straddles the Continental Divide at Tennessee Pass, today is truly a fitting finale to a wonderful week."
-- from The World Outdoors' hike description

They made us bacon for breakfast, among other yummies. But: Bacon. Everybody loves bacon.

Everybody. This little guy showed up while I was out taking that vista view I featured in yesterday's lineup; Jackie and I had seen him from our upstairs window but then figured he'd left, so I went out to take pictures and caught him again.

He came up right on the porch.

This is another one of those "don't carve on the trees" moments: Yes, you shouldn't do it and you're sorry others have, but how much greater is this trip because we had a semi-tame fox come sniffing around? I really love the way foxes look, these rangy little wild dog-like creatures, so I took a lot of photos. But as Eric and Mark pointed out, the fact that he came up and was so fearless was a bad sign -- it meant others had fed him and now he came expecting to be fed, which meant he was less able to adapt to the wild. We didn't feed him. Just stole little bits of his soul.

And right after breakfast, we were off again. The weather was now officially overcast, and threatened rain, so we wore our jackets (even me this time). I think our hearts were gone out of it now; we were ready to be done and finished. It was sad and gratifying at the same time, but we were ready for real showers -- not solar ones -- and to not have to walk multiple miles up and down all day. Today's distance was 8 miles, with 400' elevation gain and 1300' loss, so there was a lot of down, down, down, mostly through dense, thick forest.

Again, the terrain shifted all the time. We passed by this lily pond; someone mentioned that the rock peeping out of it looked like a polar bear's head.

Up close:

And another pond at a distance:

The Sisterhood of the Hairy Legs posed for our one and only photo together:

Look at that dork in the middle with her socks pulled up! Gah. Still, the bugs were biting. you really wanted to be covered up. On some of that downhill they simply were swarming, despite the wet (or maybe because of it) and I was spraying Deep Woods Off like it was hairspray.
And then we headed home.

Epilogue: A bunch of us staying at the Evergreen met up for greasy snacks and drinks after we'd cleaned up and gotten organized; Jackie and I wandered around Vail afterwards to decompress and go over the trip. Overall, World Outdoors does a great job. The nitpicky stuff I came up with is just that -- nitpicky. I mean, nobody got lost, nobody got really hurt, and we were really traveling in general comfort. I think that the trip could be improved, and told them so, but I would recommend them to anyone thinking of this kind of trip. They do offer other trips, just check out their Web site. And get out in the outdoors! It is quite something to discover your limitations, and exceed them, and get to capture some outstanding scenery at the same time.
Now I have to go and rewrite the book.