Our tent in the Chicago Basin

Our trip last year to Mount Whitney really influenced this trip in many ways. Most importantly, the folks we met while camping at Soldier Lake in the Sierras told us of this cool hike they did in Colorado where they rode a steam train to the trailhead around Silverton.

Around January this year, I did some research and found out what area they were referring to. It looked amazing.

The second major influence last year’s trip had on this trip was to not spend the whole time wearing ourselves out; work some flexibility into the schedule so that we wouldn’t be hiking from dawn until dusk every day. That worked out just fine.

The plan was this: Take the Durango and Silverton Narrow GaugeRailway north halfway to Needleton, get off and hike up to Chicago Basin. Establish a base camp and spend two full days up there doing whatever we wanted. Hike back down to Needleton to take the train north to Silverton. Have a quick bite and take the bus back down to Durango, where we had stashed a duffel bag for showering and changing into clean clothes after our hike. We would take the shuttle back to the airport, catch a flight to Denver and then a plane home to San Diego. It was a good plan.

Trail Sherpa

I was asked by Tim at Trail Sherpa if I wanted to be interviewed as a part of his #hike2020 series about my recent hike to Mount Whitney, as well hiking in San Diego in general. The interview was conducted using hash tags in Twitter, which ended up being pretty interesting and encouraged audience participation. Tim is a great interviewer and I thought he asked some great questions. I was his second interview in the series, with Pamela Wilton, of the 8 Thousand Kilometer Challenge being the first.

Read the interview at Trail Sherpa if you get a chance.