Are you Kidding Me?
Ryan and I had a brilliant plan to hike the entire Rawah Trail over a weekend. We left Friday night and hoped to hike 6 miles to camp below Twin Crater Lakes. The skull and backbones foreshadowed the trek to come.
My new headlamp was awesome and made Ryan’s look like a candle in comparison. We made it to the Rawah Trail and started to see snow. Our "hey look, snow!" comments soon turned into "shit, where are we going to camp tonight" as the snow deepened and the trail became harder to navigate. Our hopes of reaching the lakes were soon dashed. We found a dry spot among the snow and marsh and called it a night.
The next morning, we continued along the ‘trail.’ The duo that passed our camp turned back due to the snow. We soon lost any sign of the trail and did some route finding to reach Grassy Pass. Our route included several bogs, lots of snow, and one deep river crossing.
There were lots of animal tracks in the snow, but the bear tracks followed by a long trail of blood were the most ominous.
After the river crossing, we continued toward Grassy Pass, still trail-less. We passed the guy who had a 45 minute head start on us on the way up. I hope he made it…we never saw him again. A few minutes later, we stumbled upon a fragment of the trail, completely flooded by the melting snow. A couloir of sorts loomed ahead of us that we soon had to ascend.
After the mini couloir, the snow disappeared and we climbed to the "summit" of Grassy Pass, a saddle point between two peaks. Numerous jokes were cracked; "Hey, we made it over the lowest possible point between to maxima," and "the derivative equals zero here!"
The view at the top was awesome, but our hopes of an easy descent were crushed at the sight of more snow blocking our path. We headed to Rawah Lake #3, stopping for lunch in a sunny dry patch along the way.
The snow slowed our progress. In places, we were able to walk across the surface of the snow, but then in others we would fall through knee deep. At one point, I fell through a snow bridge over a small creek and lost my shoe in the muck. We reached a steep section of snow and slid down on our butts. It would have been really fun, had the snow not filled my shorts on the way down.
We had no idea where the trail was, but headed in the direction of Rawah Lake #2. There were 4 lakes in probably a square mile, but we managed to miss every one of them. Good thing we weren’t playing darts.
Things started looking really bad when we reached a steep bank leading to the roaring river below. A giant branched covered log spanned the width of the river, which I made it across without incident. Ryan, however, fell after two steps, caught himself by his feet and one hand, and hung from the log with the water rushing just below him. I watched helplessly from the other side as he pulled himself up and crawled across the remainder of the treacherous log. This picture doesn’t do the situation justice.
We tracked through more snow, bogs, and marsh before finally picking up the trail again.
After passing Rawah Bog, we filled up on water and waved goodbye to the last of the snow. The real trail wasn’t much better than our bushwacking, as the forest service hadn’t done any maintenance on it yet this season. Fallen trees blocked our path every 100 feet that we either had to crawl over or hike around.
We found a campsite near Halfway Creek around 5:30, started a fire, and put up the tent.
6:30 came too quickly the next morning. We lit a fire, cooked apple crisp for breakfast, and headed down the final 4.4 miles to the trailhead after a quick stop for water.
We caught a glimpse of the road below us and thought the worst was over when we saw this covering the trail 0.2 miles from the trailhead.
We crossed the finish line, then realized we still had to hike 4.7 miles of boring road to get back to the car. Several cars passed us along the road before one guy stopped and picked up Ryan after 3 miles of walking. Ryan brought the car back, picked me up, and we drove home. The Poudre River Burger at the restaurant in Rustic was amazing.
I know it sounds like the trip must have been terrible, but we honestly had a fun time. 21 miles, 40 hours, and 2 nights. We made it.
