#fishing
Backpacking Eaglesmeare, Upper Cataract and Surprise Lakes, Colorado
At the Fjällräven Classic, I was a little smitten with the Kajka 75 backpack which I saw a bunch of people carrying around. As it turned out, we got a discount as participants in the Classic, so a few days later I found myself the proud new owner of a Kajka, and in need of a backpacking trip to “break it in”. Since I was still on sabbatical, it was just a matter of picking a location, packing up my gear and heading out.
I came across Colorado’s Wild Areas, which has a nice summary of a few backpacking loops. The Eaglesemeare / Surprise Lake Loop one looked perfect for what I wanted, so after a little more reading and planning, I was off on Wednesday morning to hit the trail. I got started a bit late (about 9am), so wasn’t on the trail there until about 11am.
Since I was going to end up there, I parked at the Surprise Trailhead, then hiked around to the Eaglesemeare Trailhead and entered the trail there (main backpacking hike is the red line on the map above). It’s a pretty long, steady climb up to the lakes (CalTopo tells me it’s about 1800 feet of elevation, over 4.3 miles distance). Once there, I stopped and cooked up some lunch and had a bit of a break. I fished for a little bit, since I was seeing some small rises, but didn’t catch anything. The lake was so clear that I could actually see some little fish doing the rising, and they were tiny.
Once I was fed and rested, it was time to head off again, down from Eaglesmeare and through the valley towards Tipperary Lake, and beyond. Once I got rolling, I decided that I wanted to make it to the trail that leads to Upper Cataract, and hit the small river that runs down near that for my camp. That gave me some water, and a good starting point for the morning.
In the morning I got up and broke down camp, then stashed my main pack, and took just the “brain” (top bit) as a day-pack, for a quick hike up to Upper Cataract and Cat Lakes (blue line on the map). I took my rod and gear and had a shot at some fishing up there as well, but again, no luck. It was absolutely gorgeous at Upper Cataract, especially on the small meadow on the west side of the lake. I think I’d like to get back up there and camp right up at the lake at some point.
With my morning hike in the bag, I was back down to the main trail, and reunited with my pack. I got everything sorted back out again, and then it was time to hit the mainly-downhill trail back to my truck. Along the way is Surprise Lake (another beautiful alpine lake), which looks like it’s seen a lot of campers over time (big worn out area near it/the trail. I kept on rolling all the way down, and was off the trail and into Silverthorne/Dillon in time for a late lunch, then back home before dinner time.
SCOUT Epic, Day Four (August 8)
I woke up early again (around 6:30) and packed up and got moving. My plan was to grab breakfast on the road, so I was out of camp pretty quickly. Stopped at Starvin Arvin’s in Montrose and got what turned out to be an insanely huge breakfast. My “side” was a cinnamon roll almost as big as a dinner plate. The actual breakfast (a “Hobo Scramble”) ended up being enough for 2 breakfasts.
From Montrose, it was a relatively quick drive down to the county road that takes you in to the Blue Lakes trailhead. The road is pretty rough (rocky/bumpy), but would be fine in a 2WD. At the trailhead I ran into a bunch of Forest Service workers who were heading out to work on the trail, armed with Pulaskis! I got my gear together, locked the truck and headed up the trail… only to be absolutely dumped on with rain within about 15 minutes. It continued to rain almost the entire way up, which only encouraged me to go faster and try to get out of it sooner. Of course I also didn’t have a pack cover, so my pack was drenched, which probably added another 10 lbs of weight to the hike.
Once up at Lower Lake, I set up camp and ended up taking a bit of a nap while the rain (and hail!) kept coming. It wasn’t too heavy, but it was enough to not really want to be out in amongst it. Since it was so wet, I brought all my gear into the tent, which turned out to be a bit of a mistake when I discovered a not-completely-sealed water bottle, leaking out of my pack, onto the floor of the tent. It turns out you can use paper towel at least a few times, squeezing it out like a sponge each time. After that little scare, and once the rain gave up for the afternoon, I was able to get out and take a good look around.
Wow. It’s gorgeous up there. I hiked up to the second lake as well (didn’t make it to the third lake, probably should have), saw marmots and pika, trout in both lakes and generally just stunning views. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves, although they really don’t capture the full majesty of the cliffs, lakes and surrounding forest all together.
Something that doesn’t normally engage me that much (nice, but not really my main reason for being out there) was the wildflower display. It was really, really impressive up at the lakes, and I found myself wandering through meadows/banks covered in all sorts of flowers. I was so captivated that I actually stopped to take pictures of most of them:
Back down at Lower Lake, I had some sunlight left so I set up my Tenkara rod and started fishing around the mouths of all the small streams feeding into the lake. After being completely ignored by most fish (apparently they’re pretty notorious there for being very used to people trying to catch them), I changed up flies and finally got a solid hit. Beautiful.
That afternoon/evening, I also heard-then-saw 2 rock slides up on the face of the cliffs on the south-east side of the lake. A big boom/crack, followed by a roaring/rushing sound, and visible boulders bouncing down the scree-field below. It was a very impressive show. After a long and exhausting day, I was out like a light by 10pm. The next morning I had to get back down and then head to Telluride, so it was another long day coming up!
SCOUT Epic, Day One (August 5)
On the first day of the trip, I wanted to head south through Deckers to go fishing, and then get down to Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve. The fishing in Deckers turned out not to be too great (and it was drizzling), but it was beautiful nonetheless. The water was also a lot colder than I expected, so I really should have brought my waders/boots so that I could have gotten out there properly.
From there, I took 67 and 24 down to Colorado Springs, and then I25 all the way down to Walsenburg. I was going to grab something “local”, but things seemed to be pretty shut/quiet, and I ended up just grabbing a burger at Carl’s Jr (barf) before heading out again. Heading west on 160 (some beautiful scenery along here), and then north on 150 took me to the Great Sand Dunes, which were super impressive. This is where I picked up my “America The Beautiful” pass, so now I have no excuse not to get out to more parks/forests etc.
I had originally planned to hike in the afternoon, and then camp at Zapata Falls Campground, which is a few miles outside of the dunes. When I talked to the rangers at the park though, they suggested that since I had a high-clearance 4WD (yay new Ranger!), I should head up Medano Pass Primitive Road a bit, where there are a bunch of first-come-first-serves campsites. I got there later than planned, so I was going to be hiking the dunes in the morning anyway, so this made a lot more sense (coming back that way already).
To be honest I was a bit nervous about heading up this road, because I’d read a little about it, and it sounded like some pretty serious 4WD-ing. I hadn’t even turned the knob to make sure the 4WD worked on the Ranger, and definitely hadn’t taken it off-road. I was also driving alone, and didn’t feel super prepared for if things got ugly (no winch, no high-jack, etc etc). But… YOLO. So I headed off, and it turned out to be relatively fine; some good mud, some sand, a couple of small creek crossings and I was into my campsite (site #0, right after you technically leave the park, just over 5 miles in on the road).
I initially grabbed a campsite a little further up the road, but after fatbiking up and down to the next creek crossing, I decided to come back to the the very first one, which was more protected and looked nicer. It was a pretty awesome campsite, although it had been raining pretty heavily (and continued drizzling) there, so everything was wet. Getting a fire going was pretty tedious and involved a lot of stoking and blowing. Eventually I got something to hold a flame though (albeit with a bunch of smoke), which gave me something to do in the dusk hours.
Southern Colorado and Utah (SCOUT) Epic Roadtrip/Adventure
When we moved to Denver, one of the primary reasons was to be able to get outdoors and enjoy nature a lot more. Between moving to a new city, then buying and working on a new house, I didn’t actually feel like we’d done much of that, so this summer I planned to fix that. With a three month from sabbatical, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I planned to take a road trip, and combine it with a bunch of hiking, backpacking, fishing and mountain biking. I spent a week on the road, heading south from Denver, then across the bottom half of Colorado, into Utah, back up to I70 and across to Denver again. It was amazing.
This post series will cover each day in a separate post, and will break down that portion of the trip, the things I did that day, and the things I saw. Keep an eye on this post, which will link all of them together.
Fishing Adventures
I decided to start a separate blog as a kind of fishing journal to track my adventures in fishing. It’ll probably focus mainly on locations, what I tried to fish with, how I went, etc, but it might be interesting to you. If you’d like to check it out, head over to fishing.beaulebens.com (I’m still back-filling some posts back to when I relocated to Denver).
