Hiking The CDT- Part 13- Grand Lake To Silverthorne
By: Benjamin Kerr
Tags: Hiking, Camping, Colorado, Rockies, Lightning

In the hostel in Grand Lake, I found myself upstairs digging through the hiker box. A hiker box is a box of random things along main trails. Hikers ditch items into them after realising they don’t need them, or ending their trip. They can be a real treasure trove or just a pile of worthelss junk. Hats, packs of ramen noodles, torches, maps. All kinds. This particular one was useful for me, as I was once again out of maps. I opened it to find the Northbound CDT hikers ditched maps, which now became useful southbound. Win. I also found a selection of cereal bars and snacks to add to my stock. Not long later another hiker checked in. Her trail name was Beads. I had met her earlier back before Anaconda. She had been hiking with the bubble, but had already hiked sections in between at an earlier date, so had skipped ahead and here I found her. I said I was going to take a look around the town but we could grab food later. Down in the reception a note had been left for me. Tribhu and Kirsten had stopped by moments before, dropping of a nice shiny new sleeping bag. After finding out I wasn’t a couple of days behind as they had thought I was, wrote down where they were staying and a mobile number. I gave them a ring and later on the four of us, plus another hiker, turned up into town and went for dinner. The all-american restaurant that we stopped in had a floor layered with peanut shells left by the previous diners.

The next day Tribhu and I headed off towards the Devils Thumb, a prominent rock pillar back up on The Divide. The map had noted a serious blowdown had happened the previous winter and it was true. A good few hours were spent hopping and crawling over a completely downed forest beside Lake Grandby. Afterwards the trail dropped momentarily towards a campground where we stopped for a beer. One thing the Colorado section of trail is great for is there is always beer nearby. We hiked on past Monarch Lake and up towards the divide. Camping in a meadow just before.

In the morning the climb was tedious. It was sweaty from the word go and I had an awful time, but cresting onto the ridge line, the views high up became phenomenal walking between 10,500 and 13,500 feet for the next few days. I know I said in the last blog I would be far more careful about thunderstorms, but what can you do. The first thunderstorm of the section was on James’ Peak. We opted to take an over mountain route with some scrambling instead the official hike to the valley. A giant cloud rolled over right as we crested the summit, and we descended in a rush to a ridge that would take us onto Mt. Bancroft. We sheltered in a small pocket on the ridge between two large blades of rock. We listened to the lightening crack around us, but felt reasonably secure in our small haven. An hour or so passed before we moved off again as the clouds appeared to be dissipating. It was well into the evening by now and we arrived at what seemed to be an old weather station high on the mountain. A couple of collapsed weather vanes and radio towers scattered the area, and a large deserted aluminium box stood tall. With another large cloud approaching fast, we decided to stop the night in the old metal box. Inside, the old wooden floor had collapsed but we sorted a few boards into sleep-able decks and rolled out our sleeping bags. That night I was hassled by a persistent mouse determined to get my food. I lost a lot of sleep chasing it away, and kept re-awakening to the sound of its teeth against the fabric of my drybag. In the morning I woke to discover it had pooped in my shoe as vengeance for denying it the goods.