Epic Road Trip 2009 - Day 4 (July 1, 2009)

Day 4, Rest Day Colorado – We slept well in our small, modestly appointed room. The hotel was not a problem at all though there were what I still swear were blood stains on the carpet, but they didn’t look at all fresh so I didn’t really worry about it. We stepped forth for the first time into the mountain daylight and turned to see our next day’s foe, Mt Elbert. There are two large mountains side by side; the frighteningly monickered Mt. Massive and its neighbor the slightly taller but less scary sounding Mt Elbert. They stood in the distance looking pretty intimidating. Unlike in New Mexico, here we could point to the mountain we were going to climb; it would remind us of the upcoming challenge throughout our rest day.

Despite being on a rest day we did have a few tasks that we needed to accomplish. First among these was breakfast. Jared was craving coffee, as I believe he may always do, so we stumbled into the Cloud City Coffee House which had passable coffee and some pretty good baked items to eat as well. We relaxed and I began to notice something a bit disconcerting about Colorado so far. We were surrounded by incredibly fit people. Nobody in our group could be accurately described as unfit but Colorado seemed to be populated entirely by rugged outdoorsy people. 60 year old women that could break us in half walked by our table as we enjoyed our morning victuals.

Next we needed to get a tire patched and after talking with some people at the coffee shop were pointed in the proper direction to do this. The service station was not around anything at all interesting and we basically stood around waiting while they did this. Fortunately it didn’t take too long and we soon had four reliable tires once again. This was encouraging as we were a long way from home. We popped into the local Safeway to gather some provisions for the following day’s hike and decided to visit the forest ranger station to talk with a knowledgeable member of the forest service about our designs.

We found a friendly ranger and told her what we wanted to do and she responded with a colorful flyer, “So you want to climb Mount Elbert.” This had lots of common sense information on it like, “Make sure you don’t get struck by lightning,” and other such wisdom. It also had some good directions to the trailhead and other useful stuff. Until this point we were not sure which trail we would use to climb the mountain but the ranger didn’t give us any options so we figured we would do what she said. She agreed that the following day’s weather looked agreeable to a climb and we were on our way.

Since we had time to kill we thought it would be prudent to actually go find the trailhead since we would not have the benefit of daylight the following morning (once again...start early as to not get struck by lightning). We followed the instructions and easily found the parking lot and trailhead that would be our starting point. There were many cars but few people indicating that quite a few people were climbing around on that big mountain.

By this time lunch was a concern so we headed to a place we had passed a few times already on the main street in Leadville, the Tennessee Pass Café. It comes highly recommended as the food is quite good and they have a good variety of sudsy beverages to choose from. We did not enjoy any of said beverages as we were thinking ahead to the climb but did have plenty of the delicious food. The waitress was very friendly and seemed genuinely interested in our activities.

After lunch we just wandered around Leadville for a bit not finding anything overly interesting. We had noticed from previously in the day a strange concentration of Porsches in Leadville. The longer the day went on the more conspicuous this concentration was becoming. One could literally not look in any direction without seeing multiple expensive imported German vehicles. I captured five in this one photograph:

I finally stopped an old couple getting out of their Porsche to ask what the deal was. Apparently the world’s largest Porsche rally was coming through Leadville. We headed back to our room and spent the afternoon actually resting. Packs were adjusted and repacked, naps were taken, trashy daytime TV was watched. This may seem like lame activity for a vacation but we were thankful to have a bit of time to relax, plus Jared needed to do some work. After some dinner at a deli in town we turned in early to get rested for the big climb.