Changes

It is the first day of summer and it is raining again. In the mail today came a few last stuff sack kits made of Dyneema that I wanted to try, some elastic cord for pullouts on our new Zpacks tarps, and amsteel blue for more continuous loops for use with our hammock suspensions and ridgelines. If none of that makes sense then welcome to the world of backpacking!

All of this is in preparation for our upcoming thru-hike of the Colorado Trail. It has been six years since we thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2013, taking six months to do so. We have always wanted to do another long trail since then. The time never seemed right, however, for such a long break from normal life, until now, when I think we are once again ready to go for a walk in the woods.

We plan to start in a little over four weeks on July 21.

Today was Kristie’s last day of work, while I have three more weeks to go, with a business trip to Canada thrown in the middle just for good measure. After that we have a week to pack our truck, drive to Colorado, park the truck in Durango, fly back to Denver, meet Billy, our friend from Indiana who is flying in on the same day and will be hiking with us for the first 70 miles, meet Kim, our other friend from Indiana who is now from Denver, who is picking all three of us up at the airport, have one last night out on the town, get any last minute supplies, and then start the trail the next day. Hopefully not hungover. What could go wrong?