Into the Lost Creek Wilderness - Lost Park to the aptly named Refrigerator Gulch

I have thought long and hard to come up with an almost infallibly complete list of things one should most probably do when the sole of a shoe they are wearing detaches from the rest of said shoe at the toe and peels back to form a flappy flipper on which you are subsequently forced to walk.

The list:

Stop walking.
Change shoes.
Do literally anything on the planet other than proceed further into the wilderness to spend the rest of that day, the entire next day, and at least a portion of a third day on your feet, away from cell service, and hauling a ~30 lb backpack 30+ miles – if, and only if, said flappy flipper shoe doesn’t delay that schedule further, thereby forcing you to spend even more than that allotment of time flappy flipping around in the middle of nowhere.

That’s it. That’s the list.

It should come as no surprise that this precise scenario presented itself to my friend George, his loyal pup Boone, and me on the initial day of our three-day trek through Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness in late October 2018. We had set off from the Lost Park campground south of Kenosha Pass, the trailhead for the Wigwam Trail that would serve as the initial section of our trip, and had done so devoid of any other human interaction. Just a hop-skip from one of the busiest sections of US-285, and we were already out there.

The road up to Lost Park was a nearly 20 mile gravel grind, washboard for much of the way, and the campground had been closed for the season for several weeks already owing to the usual wintery weather that descends on that part of the state that time of the year. Most years, that is, as we only got around to planning this particular loop once we realized it had not yet snowed and looked surprisingly mild for that time of year – putting this trip together the week-of as the low-50’s highs enticed us in.

As we set out, four intact soled shoes among us, the terrain began to unveil itself in a manner that’s hard to describe even today with years of reflection baked into my ~~expert~~ infantile analysis. Thanks to viewing a recent episode of NatGeo’s Drain the Oceans, though, I finally came across a method to describe just how odd, unique, and goddamn gorgeous the landscape in front of us was:

It looked like we were in the canyon country of southern Utah, or northern Arizona…but with the typical green sub-alpine trees on top of it all. Meaning, the same pines and aspens that flank the ridges and mountains all over central Colorado were all there, but instead of the usual gray-granite slabs as their bedrock, these were cast upon the more lumpy, red-brown sandstones. Sandstones that looked like they’d been dripped straight out of a piping bag like icing, sometimes with much more of a heavy-hand than others.

It was simply gorgeous, and as we wound our way along Wigwam Creek, the terrain that rose above us in that narrow valley continued to evoke that odd blend of canyon-mountain. This section of the trail was also nearly flat throughout, which we knew, and had deliberately opted to use as our intro to the three-day loop to let our legs get stretched out in the most easy, straightforward fashion. That was, of course, until George let out an ope! and we both looked down to see his right shoe flap-flipping at us like it was saying Kermit theee Frog, here!

If you loop back to the ~~expert~~ infantile list I curated above for what to do in said scenario, you’ll unsurprisingly not find what we chose to do included on said list. We did not stop walking. George did not change shoes, since George had no other shoes into which to change. And rather than do literally anything on the planet other than proceed further into the wilderness to spend the rest of that day, the entire next day, and at least a portion of a third day on our feet, away from cell service, and hauling a ~30 lb backpack 30+ miles – if, and only if, said flappy flipper shoe didn’t delay that schedule further, thereby forcing us to spend even more than that allotment of time flappy flipping around in the middle of nowhere – we viewed the entire situation as an opportunity to improvise.

That’s the rub about these kinds of trips in the first place. There’s nothing about any of these that has to happen. We never have to be doing any of the things about which I write here. There are cars and houses and beds and Grubhub and couches and televisions for these body shell-casings of ours and the organs within them to consume, there are even gyms with parking lots and treadmills and weights should we choose to put these body shell-casings through rigmarole to whip them into a different shape. Nothing about stuffing food and clothes and shelter onto your shoulders and riding your hush-puppies up the mountainside to sleep on the ground – at least not under these non-apocalyptic parameters – has to happen. For whatever reason, some brains crave the sensations that come with trimming the fat of societal life away for short periods of time, thereby allowing the nether-reaches of their brains the chance to spring to life in ways not normally needed.

So, when things like a shoe disemboweling itself happen on the trail, there is almost never an instinct, never an inkling that brings well, guess we shouldn’t be out here anymore to the forefront of your psyche. Instead, it’s the exact opposite. How can we fix this without the creature-comforts of home becomes the immediate diagnosis, with a combination of MacGyver reruns and inner congratulations bubbling up inside the brain when you realize that there are two or five things you threw into your pack that didn’t necessarily need to be in there that now, in this random scenario, have become as essential as anything else you have in your possession. Apollo 13 mission this was not, but we were absolutely going to channel our inner Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert.

Duct tape would’ve been the obvious gold here. Wrap that Kermit-shoe up a time or five and get back to walking. Duct tape, as it turns out, was too obvious this time around even for a pair of guys who like to think we know what we’re doing on these kinds of trips, as in a stunning twist of fate we realized that the individual amounts of duct tape we always carry had – unbeknownst to us – run down to their final inches, not nearly enough to accomplish what was needed here. (If anything, that was another reminder that we so often become too complacent with the easy answers to things, as we’d both relied on our duct tape stashes so often over the backpacking season that we’d both exhausted their supply and not even bothered to notice.)

What I did have in abundance, though, was some 550 paracord, nearly 50 feet of it at the time. We were in bear country without bear canisters, after all, and our food was going to need to be hung high off of something in the evenings, and I’d just re-upped with a new spool right before this particular trip. Lopping off six or eight feet of it wasn’t going to be the make or break for Yogi reaching my biscuits and gravy, I didn’t believe, but it could serve as enough of a wrap-bandage for George’s flip-flap to ensure that he could uncomfortably walk – but still walk – for another two full days to keep this entire cockamamie endeavor afloat.

A quick knife-cut and a double-knot later, and we were back in action. Four paws, three intact soled-shoes, and one shoe-sole held hostage by paracord on the trail again, this time in search of the best place to call camp for the night. The only problem at this point was deciding just how much we wanted to bite off for day two, with the location of water becoming our primary driver.

It’s worth pointing out that backpacking in late October with mountains and high valley walls on your sides means that daylight is not in abundance. Unlike in June when light – and heat – stays on your shoulders until 8, 9 PM, your days become much, much shorter in late autumn. As a result, the idea of leaving a few extra miles to be churned up the next day isn’t exactly as easy as it sounds in other times of the year. Add-in that water sources are at their driest – it’s the farthest removed from snowmelt as you can get at that time of year – and knowing where you are, how much sunlight is left, and precisely where your water sources are become a paramount trio of factors impacting each decision made as the sun turns the corner mid-day.

As we neared the trail junction where the Goose Creek Trail peeled off south from the Wigwam Trail, we made a calculated decision to press on. The paracord seemed to be holding the flip-flap at bay, the sun appeared to be giving us a window to keep going, and we knew that the subsequent four-ish miles would feature a steep descent – gravity would be giving us a rocket-boost as we rode it down.

Despite the Goose Creek Trail’s name, there would be absolutely no water for the next four-ish miles, not until we peeled back west and made it to the nadir of our entire journey. After spending most all of the day trekking along somewhere around 9500 feet above sea level, what lay ahead was a thousand-foot delve into Refrigerator Gulch, where we knew there would finally be a trickle of a stream by which we could set up camp and rehydrate.

This was also late October in the Colorado high country, though, and we knew that despite the fortunate 50 degree temperatures that afternoon, the cold air of the evening would undoubtedly come to cuddle that night. Cold air, as it is wont to do, tends to pool at the lowest points it can find, and we knew the name Refrigerator Gulch probably didn’t get its name by accident. Drinkable water is still the beacon and the end-all, be-all in these types of scenarios, however, and with our water bottles on empty and it the next – and last – source we could reach as night fell, we knew we’d have ample on which to sip and subsist.

As the sun laid its rays more horizontal on the landscape, the vastness of the Gulch began to glow. To the south we could begin to make out the back of McCurdy Park Tower, a monolith of rock beaming out of the valley that we’d loop around to see fully the next day. Boulder fields stacked behind us and on the wall across the gulch, a wall we knew we’d get to shoot straight up in the morning as part of a near three-thousand foot ascent that would grind us to a pulp.

We knew we’d picked the coldest possible spot to camp for the night, and had done so after weighing all options. It would have all the perks – all of them, really – in lieu of the lone disadvantage being its temperature. The stream, as expected, was flowing just fine, and there was a spacious flat area where we could set up tents comfortably. There was enough wood around to cobble together a fire around which to cook and eat dinner, and the aspen leaves – though they’d fallen off their trees earlier in the week – had covered the ground all around us in a golden blanket. I’d been cold at night before, had prepped to be cold this night and the next, and wasn’t about to let the cold stop me like some unfixable flappy-flipper of a shoe sole, not with the rest of the perks of this particular site in play.