This first picture is from the first 3 miles of the trail. Its some random mountain somewhere near the continental divide. Note the dark gray clouds in the upper right corner. We'll come back to those later...
Angela one the way down the trail. This being a National Park, it
wasn't hard to find the trail. Hopefully, Angela feels like she's
carrying a "marshmallow" pack. That's a pack that's full of big
bulky lightweight equipment. But on the first day, nothing feels
light. This was Angela's third backpack trip(#1 was in Canyonlands in
April, snowed. #2 was on Timpanogos in July, good weather, strange) I
think she enjoyed it. She's willing to do it again, so that's good. She
picked the trail this time, and it was a good one. An excellent loop.
A picture of the pine trees the morning after the first night. We went over to the lake we were camped by for sunset then returned to our tent at dark. Just as we got in, it started to rain (remember the dark clouds two pictures ago?). It rained off and on all night. At about 3 am, the rain changed to snow and it snowed a skiff that night. Did I mention that we (where "we" = "Michael") broke a tent pole the night before car camping with Jennifer? We were hoping it wouldn't rain. In the end, the tent did fine. Turns out it works pretty good with 2 instead of 3 poles. A little droopy, but we stayed dry.
The second day we descended into a more deciduous forest out of the pine and the fall colors were turned up to "bright" Turns out that in Colorado, the fall colors come in one color: yellow.
Night two was snow and rain free, but the moon was so bright you could go for a beautiful moonlight hike at about 4 am (which we didn't, but it was pretty bright in the tent). We did hear animals night 2, but our food was all in the bear-proof can and we survived with no problems. Day 3 started out blustery, then cleared off nicely for this picture in the pines as we climbed out of the valley.
Not long after the previous picture, the clouds rolled in over the divide and it started to rain. Then it hailed for a bit and rained alot more. In fact, it rained the entire last 3-4 miles. Neat. This is a picture of us at the end of our loop. The trail in the top right corner is where we set out 2 days previous, the trail to the left of us is where we go to get back to the (warm, dry) car an the trail in the foreground is where we were coming from.
Epilougue: Turns out the rain we got on day 3 was the start of the storm (this was thursday) that shut down I-80 for most of the weekend. We were ready for snow, but not as much snow as they got around 9,000 feet where we were. We felt very fortunate that we had lucked out with the weather and not planned our trip 1 day later than we did. Otherwise, we'd have had to bail out early.