“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.” Alan Alda
The goal of this second outing of
2019 was to go back and “fill in the blanks” – hike segments we had
skipped in June due to the heavy snowpack at higher elevations. So we
planned to hike segments 9, 10, 12 and the beginning of 13, a total of 51.8
miles. If successful, we would pass the halfway point between Denver and
Durango during this hike and would complete the first 14 segments of the
Colorado Trail.
Here are a couple of quotes from a
book I’ve enjoyed by Roger W. Thompson called “We Stood Upon Stars”:
“There is a
higher purpose of adventure. An adventure simultaneously reveals who we are
capable of becoming and nudges us in that direction.”
“I’ve visited the
great cathedrals as well as modern churches. Sometimes I feel God there,
sometimes I don’t. But the more I travel off the map, the more I know He’s
near. The Wild is God’s scent. The deeper we travel into it, the more we’ll
smell His presence. The farther we travel up, the more we’ll see His evidence.
One day our search will end and then blood will mix with water and our story
will be made complete. I hear God better in the lost places, where no one else
tampers with His voice.”
Excerpt From: Roger W Thompson. “We Stood Upon Stars.” WaterBrook, 2017-05-02. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
Before leaving for this adventure, I
was monitoring the Colorado Trail Foundation snowpack posts regarding
“passable” segments of the trail. A week before we left, they
were reporting segments 9 and 10 were impassable or likely impassable, but
“wouldn’t be for long”. Segments 12 and 13 were reported as
passable. A little later, there was a report from a hiker that all the
snow was gone on segment 10, so we assumed segment 9 would also be passable by
the time we got there….little did we know!