I left camp today with 29 miles to cover, so it was another long day, but thankfully not a lot of elevation gains, which was a relief after the last two days. About 10 minutes after starting, I ran into Aaron and his hiking partner Dixie; we travelled together for about 2 hours. The trail eventually followed along the shore of Granby Lake, then climbed a little to overlook the lake, and unfortunately there was a tremendous number of downfalls. At one point I couldn’t even see the trail and had to rely entirely on GPS to know which direction to go. But while speed might not be Takoda’s strength, jumping is, so that was good news for me that day.

We proceeded somewhat slowly, jumping over lots of downfalls, and at one point, in the midst of jumping some obstacles, a bull moose came wandering up the trial towards us. Thanks to the downfalls, the moose, despite his best efforts, could not get very far off onto the trail toward us before hitting a wall of downfalls that prevented him from coming any closer. And neither could Takoda and I give him much of a wide berth because of the wall of downfalls on the other side, so very cautiously Takoda and I slipped past behind the moose, with only about 30 feet between us. But the moose gave no indication that he was bothered by us, and we continued to go our separate ways. Shortly after that, the CDT runs through Grand Lake CO and follows the streets through the town. Takoda and I walked through the town before getting back on the trail for a short six miles where we met at a highway crossing in Rocky Mountain National Park. Once we were in the park, only about an hour from meeting mom, we saw about 5 moose (4 bulls and 1 cow) it seemed as if every meadow had its own resident moose.

#2018CDT