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Day 2 – Red Mountain to Divide Peak
We wake up pretty dry! First resupply rendezvous at Battle Pass is excellent – hot drinks and all. Slow slogging up snow to Bridger Peak. More minor misnavigations – keep thinking we’ve gone further than we have. Much snow along the divide, bright sun, and quite a few mosquitoes. Again I think we’re further than…
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Day 1 – Border to Red Mountain
Posting from Rawlins! The phone system works, but consumes too much time and battery power, especially with a weak signal. So probably no real posting from the trail, oh well! Sunny and warm to start, and even a nice bit of cross-country navigation. Soon we’re into snow, and I lose the divide and find it…
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Sendoff
When we arrive at Bottle Creek campground, Pete remarks that it looks like “the Land of Mordor”. The surroundings are beautiful, but the campground has been clear cut to remove trees killed by pine beetles that could fall on campers. The entire region is peppered with brown trees fallen victim to beetles. Eventually it will…
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Gone Hiking
Wyoming is the land of my birth, the source of scars, friends, habits, and fears. It’s a patch on the earth with nearly as many quarter sections as citizens, dappled by clean bright light and dark dreams. The same air that kisses the skin for an hour can flare into a wicked icy wind the…
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Hyde Park Circle
This a perfect refresher hike. A good climb, nice ridgewalk, fresh air. This post is almost more significant than the hike – the first draft of the map was posted from my phone! It’s a precarious stack of home-rolled and bleeding-edge open source software that I balanced on to accomplish it, but I’m going to…
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Rails Trail
We kind of expected this hike to be easy. That probably ensured that it would the hardest yet. The combination of heat, flies, monotonous trail, and unexpected difficulty finding the southern trailhead bruised our resolve. We hiked in opposite directions to avoid a two-car shuttle, and perhaps hiking alone made it harder too. Ann used…
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WordPress Geo Mashup Releases 1.2.6 and 1.3alpha1
Release 1.2.6 is a collection of small fixes issues including some leftover strange category line behavior, the disappearance of tabs on the option page in WordPress 2.8, some wrong icons in the visible post list (issue 226), and future post info windows (issue 213). Release 1.3alpha1 is a preview of some 1.3 features – see…
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Ann’s solo hike in the rain
Ann did a backpack trip on her own starting Friday afternoon. During the night a heavy rainstorm moved in, and kept soaking her through the day today! She managed a nice 22-mile route with about 6,000 feet of climbing over the crest of the Sangre Cristo mountains regardless, and caught a ride home with some…
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St. John’s Atalaya Loop
Ann pours on the steam today, climbing Atalaya like a machine. Apparently all of our hiking has had some effect. She is ahead of me in preparations for our Wyoming hike as well. I decide that I may have to skip our weekend hike to catch up, and we discuss alternatives she might do without…
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Mesa Chivato Loop
There’s a desert stretch of the Continental Divide Trail I’d like to map, and we figure it will be a good way to test ourselves and our gear in some hot, waterless terrain. The forecast is for sun and wind, but clouds and occasional rain storms spare us from the heat. Many cactus are beginning…