#twin lakes colorado

CT day 11 - 23.4 miles

We woke up early this morning feeling excited and motivated to meet Nates parents for breakfast! We heard they might be making breakfast tacos for us. So we booked it down the trail and met them in Twin Lakes where the trail crosses the highway.

I love this area of Colorado. Twin Lakes is beautiful and we’ve spent lots of time here. It’s sorta become a special place for me, so to hike through it was pretty amazing. Nate’s family made the whole spread—breakfast tacos, potatoes, fresh fruit, coffee, and Nate’s sister even brought homemade scones. It was amazing. We hung out with them for two hours before getting back on trail.

The rest of the day seemed to fly by pretty quickly. Since the trail was relatively smoothly graded, we crushed miles fast. We passed by the day hikers complaining about the rocky trail, and past a few mountain bikers. As we approached Clear Creek, it started to storm. At one point the trail followed an access road for some power lines and when I saw lightning in the distance, I heard the power lines overhead buzz. It was very weird and creepy. We hiked quickly past them. We reached the ridge where the trees cleared to begin descending into Clear Creek and saw that there was a big front coming our way. We debated whether we should wait it out at the top where there were trees, or run down the exposed trail to lower ground. Neither were ideal in a lightning storm, but we decided to run down the trail in hopes of getting to the base where we could find shelter. We ran, our packs bouncing on our backs, hearing lightning & thunder only a couple miles behind us. Being exposed on a ridge like that makes you feel incredibly vulnerable. We finally got to the base and found shelter in the woods.

The storm passed and we hiked another mile and a half up the next ridge and camped in the trees. I had signal there so I FaceTimed my friend Wang who we hiked the PCT with. After that I crawled into the tent and researched lightning safety. Another sleepless night for me. Even though it wasn’t storming, I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking of storms and all the ridiculous running from storms we’ve been doing over the past few days. I just need to sleep. It’s hard to do big miles when you haven’t had a good nights rest in over a week.