Backpacking the Lost Creek Wilderness – Thawing out in Refrigerator Gulch, and the climb to McCurdy Park

This is a follow-up to the first portions of a trip report from a 3-day backpacking trip through Colorado’s Lost Creek Wilderness. The trip itself took place in October of 2018, and I began the trip report in early 2022. You can find both the introduction and part one at those respective links.

There is a laundry list of considerations when picking a place to camp while in the backcountry. The first, and most important, is to do your dead-level best to land an existing site, as the repeated creation of new sites is precisely what begins to damage the wilderness you’re there to see in the first place. That pertinent point aside, you next begin to weigh your options.

Bugs eating you alive? Find a spot away from the trees, perhaps a bit of exposure, so that a bit more wind may do its part to help you out.

But is it going to storm? Sitting perched on an exposed rock might get you out of the bugs, but it could jut you right into lightning alley, or at least into winds greater than both you and the mosquitos care to enjoy.

Are you in a spot where a fire makes sense, and is allowed? Access to already downed timber becomes a priority, whether it’s for warmth, cooking your food, or for a centerpiece of camp for the evening.

Is it at all flat? You can find a site with scenery unlike anything you’ve ever dreamed up before, but if you end up forced to pitch your tent on an angle, good luck getting any real sleep as you slide to the far wall all night. (Not to mention, the legs and feet that carried you X-number of miles that day are going to curse you if they sit pooled with all the blood in your body all evening.)

That’s just a fraction of the checklist, but all serve as co-1As to a dependable source of water. Sometimes that water can come straight from your pack, if you plan ahead for a dry camp and lug enough from another source to where you plan to rest your head for the night. A couple liters will get you through the evening and into the morning, in all likelihood, with at least another liter or two needed for cooking purposes, but that can begin to get you into the range of an extra ~8-10 lbs on your back and shoulders – not to mention that you’d need to account for even more water to get you from broken camp that next morning to your next water source.

Camping at water, obviously, becomes the most efficient way to roll through the wilderness. Hell, take one look at the history of western expansion across this continent and that’ll become readily apparent, with the likes of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Denver all popping up at major water confluences for a reason.

It was with this in mind that we chose the bottom of Refrigerator Gulch for our first camp. It had water, it had an established camp, had flat tent spots, and was nestled within a grove of aspen trees that should provide us with ample wood for a fire – a fire we’d need for light thanks to the mid-autumn sun’s early setting.

A quick dive through the historical weather data shows that the lows in the area that night dipped into the low-20’s in nearby locations like Fairplay, Alma, and Jefferson. Add-in that we were in the depths of a shaded gulch on moist ground on the banks of a drainage stream, and it sure as hell felt much fiercer than that. My 20-degree rated sleeping bag got help from every single article of clothing I’d brought along with me that night, and still I shivered through a mostly sleepless night, jealous that George had Boone – his ~80 lb boxer pooch turned heat source – in his tent.

I’d never wanted a pooch so badly in my life, especially when the first light of the morning had me reach for a water bottle that had frozen completely solid.

Learning enough calculus to pass the course was tough. High school breakups were tough. Beating Battletoads on the original NES was tough. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is tougher than convincing yourself to get out of a sleeping bag on a frigid morning despite the embedded knowledge that the only way you’ll ever get warmer is to do just that.

After the inevitable inner shouting match that saw that inevitability win out, I dug myself out of my tent and into the cold, yet beautiful view above. My joints ached, my muscles giving them a run for their money atop the ‘what hurts most right now’ leaderboard. The opposing wall of the gulch looked down on me like it had spent all night prepping itself to be as steep and stubborn as possible set an early tone for what would be an arduous Day Two in this, the beautiful Lost Creek Wilderness.

At its very bottom, Refrigerator Gulch sits at roughly ~8,600 feet above sea level. Where the small creek crossed the McCurdy Park Trail we’d hiked down into the gulch the elevation is probably within 100 to 150 feet of that bottom, with Lost Creek itself bubbling its way through rock and chasm in something of a rock playground.

It’s rather difficult to describe, really. It’s far from your typical river valley where there’s one clear depression where the water has flowed and eroded everything in its path for millenia. Rather, this gulch floor has the occasional typical creek with two banks and walls on either side, but it just as quickly flows into the base of a giant rock wall and seemingly vanishes for several hundred yards, only to re-emerge elsewhere as if starting over anew. That not only makes following the creek impossible, it makes following where you are on the map a struggle, since you’re never really sure exactly which bend you’ve just walked past.

Such was the case for us on the morning of Day 2. We thawed out as best we could and begun our ramble west, knowing we’d have some time at the bottom and at least one good creek crossing before we began our climb up, up, and out of the gulch towards McCurdy Park.

We lost the main trail at least three times in the first hour of our day. It was less to do with the trail being poor and more to do with the numerous spur trails to campsites near the creek, as those were seemingly just as trail-ish as the main trail we’d intended to follow. We actually crossed the creek once thinking we were in the right creek-crossing location only to get to the opposite bank and find nary a trail and a rock wall dead end, forcing us to turn heel and cross back through the stream and seek the correct spot to cross further down.

I’d be lying if I said it was anything other than demoralizing. That section was supposed to be the ‘easy’ section of what we knew would be an arduous, fiercely uphill day, yet it was turning into a maze – and that water, much like everything else we’d experienced so far in the Lost Creek Wilderness, was goddamn cold.

We had options for where to camp that night, both of which sat on a plateau above us named McCurdy Park. It was grassy all year, and marshy when there was enough water atop it, but by October we worried there wouldn’t be a good enough source on it to sustain us once we reached. That meant we’d either have to haul enough water up the climb to sustain us through a night of camping – McCurdy Park sits at nearly 11,000 feet of elevation, I should add – or at least haul enough to keep us hydrated while we climbed up, passed the park entirely, and pushed on past McCurdy Mountain to the east side of Bison Peak where we knew there was a more dependable water source.

Either way we were going to be bogged down with heavier packs that we liked while putting our feet down on switchbacks heading almost straight up. Perhaps it was the early frustration of getting lost that drove our decision, but we opted to carry just a couple liters of water and search for another dependable source along the route.

The next two miles were pretty hellish. We climbed switchback after switchback under a heavy canopy of trees, as not even the occasional good view could distract us from the vertical march we had chosen to pursue. On top of that, the first two would-be creek crossings we enountered on the map proved to be dry, meaning we’d have to wait another mile before finding out just what kind of water fiasco we’d put ourselves into.

Finally, after we’d made it to about 10,500 feet (and about 4.5 miles into our day), the trail began to flatten into a mere moderate climb. McCurdy Park Tower began to come into our view on our left, a craggy granite slab rising several hundred additional feet above our heads that’s one of the best rock climbing destinations in the entire state. We wondered if we’d be the only ones up here at this late juncture of the year, since surely there would be other groups had it not been a frosty, late-October trek.

As we continued our push south and the Tower’s face began to come into view, the faint sound of running water began to tickle my eardrums. Sure enough, another hundred feet ahead brought us to a creek that was still running fast and clear, and we had our source for the camp we’d inevitably make another mile down the trail towards the junction of the McCurdy Park Trail and the Brookside-McCurdy Trail we’d take the next day.

We made it to camp around 3 PM, giving us still a couple of hours before the sun began to set behind us and cast an incredible alpenglow onto the Tower in front of us. We scrambled to find firewood, something that proved elusive across the park given that it was perhaps the last night of what had been a five-month window to camp in this location, one that usually sees heavy use during the summer and early fall months – in other words, all dead limbs that had fallen in the area had already been scrounged up and put to the torch already.

As we foraged what little sticks we could find, the wind gradually began to pick up. The above photo shows the establshed fire pit in our site as being inside a giant sandstone boulder, and that did prove to make it a pretty wind-resistant place to spark a flame. However, the lack of big logs and the sheer depth of the rock walls around the actual pit meant the fire we made never actually warmed the rocks all the way through, so we realized quickly we weren’t getting much residual heat from the rock as the wind began whipping-up harder.

I’d scoured forecasts for days in the leadup to this trip. It was late October, and I knew there would be snow on its way soon enough. I was confident in the window we chose, and remained confident that the storm that was brewing wouldn’t begin to precipitate on the area for at least another 36 hours, meaning we had all the time we needed to get some sleep, pack our things up the next morning, and bust out the 11+ miles of trail over Bison Peak’s shoulder and back to the car at Lost Park Trailhead.

What I think I’d slighty underestimated was how much wind was going to roll in on the front of that storm, wind that grew from a steady breeze to a howl as the sun began to set after 5 PM. The last thing we really did before dark was to move our tents from where we’d set them initially to an area tucked behind a few more boulders, the best windbreak we had in the open park area that had significantly fewer trees than where we’d stayed, and nearly frozen, the night before.

Whereas night one featured a gulch where all the cold air left in the valley pooled, night two featured a more elevated, exposed point on which the cold wind would batter us for the 13+ hours we sat there without sunlight. By morning, I would have a new standard set for coldest night I’ve ever experienced.