We are planning to start backpacking the Colorado Trail on June 25th. Over the seven months leading up to this through hike* Julie spent hours each week studying the trail guide, watching videos or reading the internet, thinking about food (recipes, calories per day, and how to re-supply), and we both worked on our fitness. Some of the online resources are listed below.
We also took a few shake-down / test run short backpacking trips both to get used to carrying packs loaded like we expect, and also to test some of the new gear we purchased. Speaking of new gear, another thing we did to get ready was a lot of shopping. We bought a lighter tent, I bought a lighter sleeping pad and rain gear, we paid stupid tariffs to import four ounce hiking shirts made in Japan, and we both tried different shoes and clothing.
We also weighed things. We know how many ounces of socks we are carrying, how much our rain coats weigh, and that our tent weighs two pounds three ounces. Here is what we are bringing and how much it all weighs (courtesy of the free, open-source LighterPack website):
Julie’s List (Note: several items with quantity zero are in Julie’s pack - these are the back-up plan in case Brian bails out)
Note that the weights are all just the permanent things (known as “base weight”) - food, water, and cooking gas weight will add ten or more pounds to each our packs.
Resources we found helpful:
There were several steps to finally get on the trail, and we received a lot of help from our family and friends. Our neighbors drove us to the bus stop. The bus (driven by our bus driver neighbor!) took us to the light rail. The light rail took us to the airport where we stayed at a hotel for our early morning flight. The flight took us to New Mexico, where some of Julie’s father’s friends picked us up at the airport and brought us to his house.
We spent some time with Julie’s father and did some light hiking up at 7000 feet elevation to try to start getting acclimated to the altitude and, as it turned out, also getting acclimated to 90 degrees and sunny weather.
Then we drove up to Colorado where we visited my sister at 8300 feet, then to Denver where we stayed with my father while we did our final preparations.
After a day of visiting with family, my dad drove us to the trailhead early in the morning. My dad is a critical part of our support team - he is our emergency contact, he will bring a box of stuff to us at trail mile 70 on day five so that we can change our minds and exchange things that we brought with different stuff, and also get a little more food. He will mail a resupply box to us around mile 200, and likely will be our ride out if something goes wrong and we have to leave the trail. Assuming everything goes as planned, he will pick us up in Durango at the end of the hike.
Those same friends who picked us up at the airport are going to let us stay at their condo in Frisco at trail mile 104. We also have friends who are looking in on our house, and others helping take care of our garden while we are away for two months.
Some people do this trail without all this support, but we feel very fortunate to have so many friends and family members making this easier for us.