Hi kids, and welcome back to ‘Crazy Dutch adventures in America’! Frans left you in the Boulder area with Nathan the Native with whom we spent an evening on the Walmart parking lot. On Wednesday, we headed back to the town of Nederland in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, where we hoped to hike a few days. From earlier observations, we expected trails below 10,000 feet to be accessible so we planned some five day hikes in the area. However, the month of May had been very snowy and none of the trails in the Indian Peaks Wilderness was free of snow as of yet, as I discovered during a hike to a lake at 10,500 feet while Sander and Frans were skyping (I never reached the lake, but stranded in 2 meters thick snow).
So, the next day we headed out to Rocky Mountain National Park with very small expectations; we had learned in the past couple of weeks from the National Park Service website that the park was still covered in at least 2 meters of snow. However, the NPS was wrong! The day after we arrived in RMNP, we climbed the 11,500 feet high (3485 m) Twin Sister Peaks from which we had an incredible view of Longs’ and Meeker Peak, the two highest mountains in the park with altitudes of over 4,000 meters. We stayed in the national forest nearby at a dispersed campground where i pitched my tent on a near vertical slope which caused me to slide down my air mattress every time I turned in my sleeping bag. The day after we climbed the Twin Sisters, we made it to the summit of another 3,300 m high peak (Estes Cone) and we decided to hire snowshoes for a few days.
With these, we hiked to Bear and Emerald Lakes which are the great summertime attractions of RMNP. Even while covered under a meter of snow, the trail was immensely popular and we were the only ones with snowshoes and, consequently, dry feet at the end of the day. The next day, we set off for a hike in the Wild Basin, a little-visited valley bordered by 4 km high mountains in the south-east of the park. We made our way to Ouzel Lake, a lake at some 3,200 meters altitude which hadn’t been reached by anyone this season. With our snowshoes, this proved to be a piece of cake and we were rewarded by great views of white mountains, frozen lakes and wildlife such as blue woodpeckers and running marmots.
Sanders knee hurt after this adventure, so Frans and I decided to try and hike up the 12,000 feet high pass below Longs’ Peak and from there climbing the 13,250 feet high Mount Lady Washington which would be an altitude record for the both of us. We started at 8 a.m. and in three hours we had reached the saddle point, where an incredibly powerful wind was blowing us off the mountain. We still tried to climb Mt Lady Washington, but after my peeing all over my pants and Frans getting his sunglasses blown off, we turned back with our tails between our legs (the wind was blowing from the front). Below the treeline we were finally able to peacefully eat our pasta salad. We only had to descend some 8 km from here to the point where Sander would be picking us up so we figured it’d take us another two hours. Wrong! We lost the trail and had to descend through a snow-covered forest with a slope of some 50 degrees before we hit upon the trial again. The snow had by now been heated enough to be unable to bear our weight, even with snowshoes, so every second step we sank up to our thighs in the wet snow before we were finally below the snowline, where we discovered we lost the trail again and had to follow a small creek down to the valley. All in all, it took us 4,5 hours to descend, after which we didn’t even have time to read our books (Frans is reading War and Peace which is disintegrating so he has the last 200 pages bound together with a peg and has to take out a page a time) before Sander turned up with the ever faithful Hoff.
We drove to Fort Collins, a large town in the north-east of Colorado where we spent the night at a Walmart parking lot. At least, Frans and Sander did: I demonstrated that even in urban areas, pitching a tent isn’t an impossibility if you’ve a mind to it and I slept next to the Walmart parking lot. On Wednesday, we drove all day to reach South Dakota where we’ll be spending some time in the Badlands before heading to Montana where and uncle and aunt of Sander live who we’ll be visiting. Today, we had a small hike in Windcave National Park, a small park with limestone caves underneath a landscape of rolling hills covered with grass, forest, grass, herds of buffalo and more grass. By the way, buffalo are the coolest animals ever! They weigh some 900 kg and they always seem to be chilling; we saw several of them crossing the road at a leisurely pace and just standing on a parking lot among the cars. Later on, we saw some prairie dogs, antelope-like animals and two eagles!
The last few days, we’ve been hearing a weird sound coming from our brakes. We figured that they needed new rubber so we went to our friends of Midas (the same company which took three days to replace our ignition in Chilliwack). After just over an hour, we were summoned back to the office where we heard the good news that our brakes were fine. And the nice lady behind the counter didn’t even want money for it, even though the mechanic had been working on the Hoff for at least half an hour! It’s great that we’re living in a 33 years old van with more rust than paint; this, in combination with our unshaven faces and unwashed bodies (we haven’t taken a shower in 27 days now, though we wash in creeks and rivers every day) causes every US citizen to take pity on us and treat us like three orphaned puppies. Awesome!
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