July 26 – 28, 2013
My brother-in-law (Scott Hatfield) and I took a 3-day/2-night backcountry adventure through Rocky Mountain National Park. We’ve been talking about doing this trip for almost three years now. The conversation started as a joke (especially since I was 60 pounds heavier then and out of shape). As things evolved we began to get a lot more serious about it. Our families planned a reunion of sorts in Breckenridge this summer and we decided it was now or never.
Originally we had planned to map this out and do the trip solo. Fortunately we wised up and decided we had very little experience backpacking. We hired a guide from Apex (https://www.apexex.com), Tim Benson. Best decision we made! Tim was awesome and provided the exact trip that we had dreamed of.
This blog will unfortunately be unable to actually describe what we accomplished. I have included a Google Earth map view so you can see the Trek. The location marked “Move” was where we camped each night.
After the first day of hiking about 7-8 miles, we were pretty tired. First time carrying a 50 pound backpack on a hike! We got to camp at a good early time, setup and able to relax.
First night camp site
Our guide, Tim Benson
Wasn't a good idea to have coffee before bed...
Oddly enough, only two miles into the trek we saw the highlight of our wildlife viewing! On the way to the trailhead, I was commenting to Scott that the one animal that always eludes me is a Bull Moose. Then we saw this dude…
Russell's Bull Moose
The second day was much tougher, and longer than the first. We thought Saturday was going to be the hardest day….but we were definitely wrong. About half way through the hike on Saturday, the trail ended. This was all part of the plan; after all we wanted a true wilderness adventure. Tim had mapped out an off trail area that had not been crossed before so we set out to be the first.
We camped near an “Unnamed Lake” on the map. Tim told us that it was unnamed because there were no trails leading to it, this was all backcountry. Well….we had to name it of course. Welcome to “Lake Timscottruss.”
Day 3 was a truly unique experience! We still had over 9 miles to go, most of which was over uncharted terrain so there were a lot of unknowns. Tim had us do an alpine start with headlamps, so we packed up and headed out shortly after 4:00 am. The first hour and half of this trek covered around a mile. It’s impossible to recreate what we did, especially since I have no pictures because this part was all done by headlamp. We in essence hiked/climbed/crawled over a giant boulder field to reach the upper unnamed lake. Then continued up the rest of the mountain to reach the pass close to sunrise. The clouds were low (another reason why we started early), so we couldn’t see the actual sunrise. But I was able to find a rock and capture some long exposure shots of the views.
It's hard to see exactly what we did - but the arrow below points to the gulley area that we climbed to reach this lake.
This next section was harder for me than the uphill climb. I took this picture of the lake about half way down the mountain. This gives you some idea as to how steep our descent was to get to the lake.
Climbing down
This close up view from Google Earth shows the map of what we had to hike up and over the pass and then down the mountain towards Lake Verna.
Day 3 Map
Down to the lake
After reaching the lake, the hardest part of the trek was definitely over, but we still had about five miles left to go. We did have a nice opportunity to come across some more wildlife on this part of the journey.
Complete Gallery of my Pictures from the Trek
And of course, the celebratory beer at Breckenridge Brewery!
