Inspiration on the Colorado Trail

I'll have to put you through a bit of a time warp here; I really should have posted this one a couple of weeks ago, the weekend after Orycon, but it took me this long to download the photos from my camera and write up the report.

I enjoy writing while I'm hiking. I talk into a tape recorder while walking through the forest, climbing mountains, anything to be out in nature and away from distractions. That's another essay entirely.

The Colorado Trail is a marvelous route winding 468 miles across the heart of Colorado from Denver to Durango. With my hiking partners -- Rebecca's sister Diane (and valuable first reader on all DUNE manuscripts and other novels) and her husband Tim (with whom I've climbed many 14,000-ft peaks) -- I have already hiked over 240 miles of the CT. The trail is divided into 28 segments of ranging from 12 to 20 miles in length. I drive to the trailhead at one end of the segment, Tim and Diane drive to the opposite end, and we swap car keys in the middle and drive the other car home.

On the weekend of November 11 and 12, we arranged to drive off for an overnight trip to knock off one more segment before winter sets in. Segment 19, 13.5 miles, has a maximum altitude of 10,400 feet -- the lowest segment we still had left to hike. It winds in the gentle Cochetopa Hills near the town of Gunnison (setting for the Kevin Costner film OPEN RANGE); it's one of the most isolated and least-traveled segments of the CT.

The weather looked good, with possible clouds for Saturday but no harsh storms or cold temperatures predicted. It sounded perfect.

Some friends of mine, including a young aspiring writer, allowed us to stay at their empty home in the lovely mountain town of Crested Butte, some 20 miles from Gunnison (and still an hour and a half from the trailhead, but it made a good base camp). Since the house was quiet and empty, I arranged to come up early in the day so I could have some time with the laptop to do a good amount of editing on SANDWORMS, undisturbed by phhone calls and doorbells. Tim and Diane would follow later in the evening.

I drove out early in the morning, had lunch at one of my favorite pizza places, Amicas, in the town of Salida, CO -- wood-fired pizza and a microbrewery right in the restaurant. Yum!

On the gentle drive to Crested Butte (about 4 - 5 hours from my home) I managed to dictate two chapters in a new novel I'm working on (I'll talk about that later, too). When I arrived in the mountain house in Crested Butte at about 2:00, the sky had clouded over and snow had started to fall. Inside the very quiet, very welcoming house, I set up my laptop and my little stereo and managed to edit six SANDWORMS chapters before Tim and Diane arrived. The snow was really coming down heavily now.

I have a 4WD (necessary for all the mountain roads I drive to trailheads and the heavy snow in winter), but because we knew from previous experience that the Segment 19 trailheads were both on fairly good (though obscure) dirt roads, Tim and Diane had taken their van instead of a more rugged vehicle. Getting up the steep roads to the Crested Butte house was a bit of a challenge for them; by now, about three inches of snow had collected.

By morning, when we got up early to head off in separate vehicles to the ends of the trailhead, we found at least 8" of snow piled up on the roads. Tim drove my SUV down the steep and snowy road, and I followed in the van very slowly behind him, slipping a little, but once we got to the highway, everything was fine. We split up to take widely divergent roads about 40 miles past Gunnison, and by now the snow had faded to only a dusting of an inch or so. Tim and Diane had a much longer drive to the other trailhead, 28 miles down an isolated forest road, very slippery and covered with snow. It took them an hour and a half to get down that single road!

It was cold, gray, and windy when I set out, and I was uncertain I really wanted to do 13.5 miles through the absolute wilderness, with snow on the trail and much worse weather threatening...but by that time I was out of contact with Tim, and I had no choice but to go all the way. With the isolation of this segment, it is not a good place to get lost or in trouble.

But I set off with my maps in my pocket, my tape recorder and some chapter notes in hand, and trudged along. I had hiked 9.5 miles before I met up with Tim and Diane. All in all, we saw no other people all day long.

During the hike, I did get another three chapters dictated in the new novel, plus quite a bit of THINKING time to study the overall picture of SANDWORMS.

When I got to my car, and the 28 mile drive back out to the highway, I followed Tim's tire tracks all the way up. Even though it was a Saturday, with fairly nice weather, not a soul had driven down the road the whole day!

Two more chapters dictated on the drive back to my home; all in all, a very productive weekend.

--KJA

Next Entry (November 29, 2005)