Day 5

Tuesday, July 8th 

Slept in this morning on our "off the ground" bed in our lovely suite for the night. 

Packed up our gear, ate homemade cinnamon rolls, and departed to the trailhead with our newfound hosts. What a wonderful home stay with these two beautiful people! 

Dana "Mother Earth" and John "Paul Bunyan" . And yes there's Pippy on the right. See the braids? 

Our trail today was surrounded by wildflowers and aspen! 

There's Pippy with her favorite flower , the Colorado columbine.

Wild roses accompanied us along the aspen lined  trail.

Zippy's favorite tree.

It continued to be a perfect, beautiful day....

And then.... This is what happened. 

Dark clouds, breezy rain, clapping thunder, bolts of lightening, and...what's round, white, made of snow, hard like marble, and goes ping ping ping off your head? That's right. Very good. It was HAIL! 

But everything is still awesome! Pippy and Zippy were encased in waterproof clothing topped off with an ultralight umbrella (which is the bomb!). We highly recommend to any extended backpacker to buy one. The clothing is from Patagonia and they are excellent. We stayed dry the whole entire day! 

After three hours of storm, 9 miles, and 10,400 ft elevation later, trees opened up into this amazing meadow. 

We kept walking on over this ridge into the meadow where we scrambled as fast as we could to pitch our tent up. There was a ominous fog of yet another downpour that was like 15 ft behind us. We snuggled in our warm dry clothes and semi dry tent and went fast asleep. But not before tucking our trail friends into bed.