Arapahoe Pass and Diamond Lake

I met Bill Briggs, Bart Miller, and Mike ? at the Eben G. Fine parking lot at 6 a.m. this morning. We all piled into my truck and drove up to the Hessie Trailhead above Nederland. From there we ran up the dirt road to the Fourth of July Trailhead. This took me 45 minutes and I ran it with Bill Briggs. Bart went off the front almost immediately. He was running strong. I urged Bill to go with him, but he stayed with me and we chatted whenever I had enough breath to speak.

Once at the upper trailhead, Bill and Bart took off up the trail, leaving Mike and I far behind. I power hiked mostly from here on up to the trail junction near Arapahoe Pass at an elevation of 11,600. Bill and Bart had tagged the sign about ten minutes before me and I passed them on my way up. We all regrouped on the way down and ran together to the Diamond Lake Trail, which we followed to Diamond Lake. We passed John Ortega on the way down. He was with his dog and a friend and headed for the summit of South Arapahoe peak. They were moving along at a good clip - nothing like the hiking slog I used over this same terrain.

Up to now the snow we had to hike through was previously tracked and we avoided postholing for the most part, but now we followed the little-used trail from Diamond Lake over to the Devil's Thumb Trail. This is a faint trail in the summer and no one had passed over this trail so far this spring, so we had no tracks to follow. We kicked steps across steep snowslopes, bushwhacked a little, and climbed quite a bit more to gain the ridge above treeline where there was no snow and we could follow the faint trail by the cairns marking it.

We headed down on the now more visible trail to the Devil's Thumb Trail and followed that all the way back to the Hessie Trailhead and my truck. We passed Christian Griffith coming up the trail with two of his dogs. He was out training for the San Juan 50-miler as well. We chatted a bit before heading down. This run/hike took us 4h45m, involved probably between 15 and 20 miles, and a total of 4500 vertical feet of climbing.

This was my first and final tune-up run for the San Juan Solstice 50-miler next weekend. That will be my first ultra experience. It's going to be not an ultra-run, but an ultra-hike. I told Bill that I was doing the run today "at race pace!" Normally when you tell someone you are going run at race pace, they assume you are going to go hard, but race pace for a 50-miler, at least for me, is really, really slow. I like my new race pace! Time to rest and taper!

Next weekend I need to do the equivalent of this run, three times in a row. That'll be fun...

Bill
- posted by Bill Wright @ Sunday, June 13, 2004