Well I didn't get as early of a start as I wanted. It was freezing that night and I woke up to frozen grass and water in the morning. What kind of August is this??? So I hid in my tent till things thawed out a bit more. We left camp around 10am. Thank goodness I'm fortunate enough to have fast walking horses because we had a 28 mile day ahead of us.

We were above treeline almost the whole day. We even reached the high point of the Colorado trail on this day at 13,200 ft.

This is the first half of a 40 mile stretch that stays around 12,000 ft. That is very high. This also meant that we were camping above treeline so no highlining in camp this night. I had to leave the horses on picket lines for the whole night. The horses did well, but I got up several times during the night to make sure they hadn't gotten themselves tangled. This was definitely the coldest night I had on trail and temps went down into the high 20s. All of our water froze and even my tent's rain fly was stiff in the morning.

#2017CT