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South San Juan Wilderness, 8/22/10-8/26/10
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Home › Forums › Campfire › Member Trip Reports › South San Juan Wilderness, 8/22/10-8/26/10
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Aug 31, 2010 at 8:38 am #1262815
We just returned from an incredible 5 day backpacking trip to the South San Juan Wilderness in SW Colorado. This is a neighboring wilderness to the larger and more popular Weminuche Wilderness, has 45 miles of the CDT going across it and is known as Colorado's wildest corner. We arranged a shuttle and thru-hiked a section of it. The route we took is shown in the TOPO map below. We had a group of 10 backpackers, 7 of which were hangers.
We started out near Ellwood Pass, at around 11,600 ft elevation. The first day we had a relatively short hike over the Continental Divide and down to Crater Lake. We camped at Crater Lake for two nights at just above 11K ft to let ourselves acclimate to high elevation and do some peak bagging and fishing. The weather was constantly changing and it rained frequently. The clouds drifting across the lake gave us some really nice scenery.
There was a good variety of hammock gear along on this trip. In the foreground of the picture below you can see my Warbonnet Blackbird hammock with integrated netting (~23oz), with a Te-wa 2/3 down underquilt for bottom side insulation (~13oz), and a MLD cuben fiber hex cut hammock tarp (~6.5 oz). I used amsteel whoopie sling style suspension, which is just about the lightest and easy to adjust method out there. I used my GG hiking poles to put the tarp in "porch mode" when sitting around during the day. To round out the gear discussion, I had my ULA Circuit pack along, and used a Golite Ultra 20 for a top quilt. I used a BPL 550 & tri-ti Caldera Cone stove w/everclear for cooking, Micropur tablets for water purification and a 4L platy for camp water storage. I used a couple of SmartWater bottles for water on the trail, and a Blue Desert SmarTube Hydration System. I had a Houdini windshirt, Snowpeak UL umbrella, North Face Diad hard shell, and Montbell Peak Shell rain pants. I rarely used the hard shell rain gear, but on at least one occasion it was nice to have. I also had a lightweight spinner rod along to catch some of those delicious native cutthroat trout.
On day 2 we climbed back up to the CDT for a day hike to summit Montezuma Peak.
We headed South along the CDT to reach the approach point to Montezuma Peak (13,150 ft).
The line we chose to the top required a bit of scrambling.
But the views up there were expansive and mind blowing.
The next day we headed south on the CDT for around 12 miles towards our next campsite destination. Elevation ranged from around 12K ft to 12.5K ft most of the day until we dropped down to Adams Fork.
Adams Fork was an incredibly beautiful glacier carved valley, with a stream running through it. Beautiful native cutthroat trout seemingly coming out of nowhere from that little shallow stream.
The 4th day we backpacked out of Adams Fork and up to the Continental Divide again, and went over to climb Summit peak, at 13,300 ft the highest point in Archuleta County.
We dropped our packs on the trail when we reached the approach point and climbed to the summit to experience more incredible views.
We then crossed back over the Continental Divide and hiked down to Quartz Lake to camp for our 4th and final night.
On the 5th day we hiked out on the Little Blanco trail to our pickup point, and went into Pagosa Springs to celebrate and enjoy eating some food that was not boiled in a bag.
Here are parts 1 and 2 of Youtube videos that have a narrative of this trip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xCd-VtTlbI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coy2ChgMsyo
All in all, it was an amazing and memorable trip that I won't soon forget. There were several ground dwellers in our group that got a good look at hammock life and I suspect we'll have a couple of converts in the near future. I'll have a hard time topping this trip on my next big outing.
Aug 31, 2010 at 10:19 am #1641857Yet another beautiful trip report. I am envious of all the beauty you got to see and I am sure all the great company. That must have been the largest gathering of hammocks I have personally heard of. Very inspiring. Thanks for posting it.
Aug 31, 2010 at 12:57 pm #1641924Hey Drewboy, excellent report, great job showcasing the gear. Looks like some very nice stuff, and those are some great fish for a stream that size. :) I still want to get down your way and hike with you all. Thanks for taking the time to post it all here.
Paul
Aug 31, 2010 at 1:28 pm #1641935Wow! Maybe I'll head thee next year instead of the Sierras. Beautiful above tree line photos. Did you use a shuttle service or just friends? Is Durango the nearest airport?
Aug 31, 2010 at 1:49 pm #1641946Hey Paul, any time you can get away we'd love to go out with you down here. And yeah, it blew me away that fish like that were lurking around down there.
Hi Frank. We used local friends/wife to provide shuttle service on this trip. I'm sure that you could line up some Pagosa Springs locals as well for a modest fee. I believe that Durango is the closest place to fly into this area.
Katharina, thank you for the nice comments.
Aug 31, 2010 at 1:53 pm #1641948Hey, something new for my gear box!
Google: Blue Desert SmarTube Hydration System
Aug 31, 2010 at 2:00 pm #1641955Andy,
Great photos, thanks for sharing. I encourage everyone to check out the videos since they nicely complement the still photos & text in the report. Those views from Montezuma are fantastic with the colors, textures, & shadows below.As we discussed separately, you had 7 hammock hangers, which goes well with BPL's new Hammock forum. It's impressive how tightly you could put everyone among the trees, with what appears to be minimum impact to the camp site…are you sure you didn't double stack some hammocks? ;).
The videos take you through the different hammocks, if you want to get a quick education. I'll be watching this string to read what comments people have about the hammock gear.
Tom
Aug 31, 2010 at 3:22 pm #1641987I am itching to come down and hike, maybe in the early spring before it is nice up here. :) Like Tom said very cool to see you all packed in so nice and tight on that first spot at Crater. The videos really do complete the report, I need to shoot more video on hikes but find I don't think to and end up shooting mostly stills. I helps a lot of get a better sense of the scope of the terrain though.
Aug 31, 2010 at 5:55 pm #1642039What was the brand of your setup inlcuding the tube? I am looking for a similar setup.
Aug 31, 2010 at 8:58 pm #1642096This trip I just had a Pflueger Micro spinning kit, and the plastic storage tube was one I purchased at BPL a few years ago. I hear that fluorescent light storage tubes work really well for this purpose too. Another guy in our group had a Tenkara fly rod, which worked pretty good for him down at Adams Fork. I decided not to bring my Tenkara Hane rod along this trip because we were camped at lakes most of the nights.
Paul and Tom: yeah, we had folks pretty much racked and stacked at that first campsite. ;) I'm finding that it works out really well to have a mixture of hangers and ground dwellers on these larger group trips because there is not much competition for campsites. And assuming that we get below the treeline at night, the hangers can pretty much camp anywhere.
You guys should definitely come out here in the Spring. We'll come up with something real special for you. And I agree, the videos do seem to add a lot. I'm finding that I get a lot more enjoyment out of re-living the trip by watching them. I just bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS1, which shoots really nice high def videos, has a nice optical zoom, is waterproof and shockproof and very compact. I'm really pleased with it.
Aug 31, 2010 at 9:01 pm #1642098Awesome trip report! The videos were fantastic! Those hammocks look very comfortable.
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