Week 1: Waterton Canyon to Breckenridge, 102.4 miles

Thru-hiking, the act of hiking a long trail end to end, makes minutes feel like hours, and hours feel like lifetimes. But unlike many experiences in life where time feels oh-so-slow, thru-hiking is one of the only times when the time drag isn’t necessarily negative.

Miles drag on, but the scenery changes. Muscles grow ever more sore, but my body gets stronger each day, pushing farther than I ever thought I could. The relentless rain turns into soggy, cold nights, but the sun is there in the morning, providing much-needed warmth.

I am one week into a thru-hike of the Colorado Trail, which weaves up and down through forests, alpine meadows, mountain passes and desert landscapes, about 500 miles from Denver to Durango.

It’s been miserable, beautiful, painful and the most amazing thing I’ve ever done.

‘Smiles not miles’

In the thru-hiking community, the phrase equates to “the journey not the destination.”

And a journey it has been, indeed.

My hiking partner, Ariella, and I started on a windy Sunday morning in Waterton Canyon, just south of Denver and the northernmost terminus of the Colorado Trail.

We posed for a photo with the trail sign. Looking back at the photo, our nerves and anticipation are palpable, and unfortunately valid, as we faced multiple injuries, gear failures and other mishaps in the first week.

But we’ll get to those later.

Going into it, we’d been told to power through the first parts of the trail to get to the beautiful parts.

It hardly felt like “powering through.” The beauty of the early trail landscapes was unexpected and wonderful.

The first few days on trail took us through lush, green forests, then dipped us down into the burn scar from the Buffalo Creek fire of 1996.

It was hot, exposed and so beautiful — with the lack of trees giving us miles upon miles of views across the landscape and leaving us pondering how it once looked before the human-caused wildfire removed 12,000 acres of forest.

Left behind were towering boulders, and we made time pass by calling out what they looked like.

“That one’s a frog — see his mouth?” I told Ariella.

She pointed to another, “That one’s a whale!”

The new growth filling in the burn scar with small trees, flowers and shrubs was a constant reminder that life persists, despite the hardships. And, despite a cacophony of injuries and woes we, too, could kept going.

The landscape changed more quickly than I could have imagined, a reminder that we were, in fact, walking very far.

Around each corner, it felt like we were on a new trail. In the morning, we walked through dry, desert-like forests. After lunch, we found ourselves creek hopping and keeping an eye out for poison ivy, surrounded by a cave of green.

We celebrated our first 20-mile day on day five atop Georgia Pass, the descent from which dropped us into Breckenridge — the end of our first week on trail.

The climb up the pass was long, but the exhilaration and adrenaline of being atop our first mountain pass took all of the pain away in an instant.

Alongside our new trail friends, “trail named” Pinky and Siesta Queen (see: trail names below,) we ran the last part of the trail to the top, skipping even with our 25-pound packs, and letting our joyous tears fall freely.

I’ve been atop many a mountain pass in Colorado, but the sheer joy and beauty of Georgia Pass and the milestone we’d reached was cathartic.

The four of us threw our things on the ground and screamed into the valleys below, letting our sounds disappear into the sea of trees and mountains, swallowed by the vastness of it all.

The wind whipped our raincoats, but it didn’t matter. We were on our first mountain pass of the trail with new friends, as crazy as we were to be in this place, and the joy was all-consuming.

The descent into Breckenridge took us past the 100-mile point.

“It takes us hours to drive here,” Ariella reminded me. “We just walked that whole way.”

The suck

We weren’t always smiling. In fact, the first night we sat in the tent and cried.

The night before hitting the trail, I was a nervous wreck, going through every possible bad scenario over and over until I’d surely come up with every solution for every problem known to man.

While we didn’t face every single bad situation that has ever existed, contrary to my own belief, the nerves were valid, as the first week dealt us mishap after mishap.

Before our first day on trail was even done, Ariella stumbled into camp in immense foot pain.

Ariella is no stranger to long trails — having hiked the entire John Muir Trail in California a few years back — and no stranger to the shoes she chose for the trail.

The pain came out of nowhere, and left us wondering if our first day on trail would be our last.

The following day, I started to feel a new pain, stabbing in my inner knee that left me limping on flat trail.

“Maybe our trail names should be Aches and Pains. Which one do you want to be?” Ariella joked.

Later in the week on a rainy, very cold night, Ariella awoke at midnight on the cold, hard ground. We both opted for expensive — but warm and comfy — sleeping pads.

Hers had lost all of its air in a matter of hours.

For the rest of the night, she filled her pad and woke up every hour on the ground, eventually giving up and shivering herself to sleep.

The next day, we did everything in the book to find the leak — pouring water on the pad and looking for bubbles, adding soap to the water, taking turns lying on it and listening, dipping it in small pools, and no hole was found.

The injuries, the aches and pains and the lovely addition of long and unexpected thunderstorms at all times of day left morale low many nights.

We went to sleep almost every night cold and wet, letting the rain patter lull us to sleep, hoping desperately for morning sun.

‘The trail provides’

There’s a popular saying in the thru-hike community “the trail provides.”

Sometimes, on days when the trail felt like it went straight up forever, when we were injured hobbling into camp in a rainstorm, it felt like the trail took more than it gave.

But then we met strangers who went out of their way to help us when the trail got particularly rough.

On day two, Ariella was able to put a name to her foot injury, one that every hiker dreads: plantar fasciitis.

This felt like a death sentence to our hike. With every step, her stabbing foot pain brought us closer and closer to the realization that we might have to get off trail.

We stopped for breakfast that morning atop a ridgeline, overlooking the burn area that blankets the region southwest of Denver.

As we ate, we lamented the injury and its very real potential to be the reason we would quit.

That’s when we met Bob — a total stranger who was section-hiking the trail and stopped for breakfast at the same place.

“Did I hear you guys talking about plantar fasciitis?”

He walked over to us and recounted his struggle with the injury over the years, explaining that he had been in and out of physical therapy to fix it, and offering advice for taping the injury and stretching it. He gave us strips of kinesiology tape from his own stash, insisting we take it and that it would help.

By the end of the day, her pain was mostly gone.

We may never see Bob again. We don’t even know his last name. But he is very likely the reason we were still hiking.

On a particularly warm day with few water sources, two campground hosts and total strangers to us, Gimpy and Smurf, greeted us with cold water and fresh fruit.

They recounted evenings cooking hundreds of hot meals for thru-hikers passing by.

On some of our most difficult days, our trail family (see: tramily below) kept us laughing until our stomachs hurt.

When our legs felt like they might give out after 20 miles of endless uphill, we’d reach the most jaw-dropping mountain pass, where we’d pause to fuel our bodies and take in the glory of the world from way up high.

When we spent our mornings slogging in the dark, packs and clothes soaked from relentless overnight rain, the warm sun on our skin was like a kiss from the sky.

There was no shortage of lessons learned from that first week, but one in particular stood out: The trail really does provide when we need it to most.

Thru-hiking terms

Trail name: It’s a common theme in the thru-hiking community to get and receive “trail names,” or nicknames that hikers use for one another. There are no rules for where a trail name comes from, but they are often given by other hikers to reflect a unique characteristic about the named hiker.

Tramily: short for a “trail family,” referring to a group of hikers who end up hiking and/or camping together frequently.