T Minus 7 Weeks to Peru! Chasm Lake Hike

As many of you know, Im "in training" for a hiking trip in Peru in October. We leave September 30th, which is exactly 7 weeks from today.

Today the intrepid Julia and I took our first truly higher elevation hike. Chasm Lake.

Alltrails.com describes this trail as 9.4 miles long (there and back) and with a 2600 foot elevation gain.

We arrived at the Long's Peak trail head around 6:30am only to find the parking lot full. Not a problem; parking 0.2 miles back DOWN the road, we began our ascent. First back up to the parking lot, then into the woods and the real climb began.  I think it's fair to call this one a 9.8 mile round trip, although Julia's GPS wants you to believe we hiked 1.5 miles longer than that, and trust me, I'm tempted to run with her numbers to boost my impressiveness, if nothing else.  Hahaha.

As for the elevation gain... 2600 feet is about 1400 feet more than any of our other recent hikes. Yikes! But I was assured that the views made it all worthwhile.

Let's break the hike into 4 stages.
Stage 1: We jumped from the truck, sucked in a few breaths of thin air, embraced our sudden dizziness and realized it was going to be a hard hike.

The trails starts wide, smooth, uphill but gentle on the feet. The air was cool and moist and smelled wonderfully earthy. Even though my muscles were well prepared for the climb, they burned nonetheless. It wasn't long before a winded me was warm and ready to shed layers. That may have also been the start of the snacking... I can't recall.

A couple of miles in, we found ourselves cresting treeline and that was the beginning of outstanding views. Blue mountains, bluer skies. Greenness all around and beautiful rock formations.

God's little rock garden?   ... An abundance of flowers and wildlife on tundra that is precious, ancient and beautiful. 

Stage 2:  Across rocky ground, under cloudless blue skies.  This leg of our journey took us to fork in the road, where the Long's Peak summit trekkers depart right and we, on the way to Chasm Lake take the left path. There's a privy here, if you need it. Beyond that, the trail narrowed, the view changed rather dramatically and we had a brief but delightful passage downhill, across the stream/waterfall that separates Chasm Lake from the one beneath it. 

Yes, those ARE marmot eyes!

Stage 3: You can't see Chasm Lake yet - all you can see is a giant rock mound and no discernible trail up it. The lake lies just beyond this and it took all we had and then some, to scramble up that rock!  We were now 4+ miles into our hike. The sun was warmer and closer, at 12,000+ feet. That dark-o'clock departure time was starting to affect us.  Oh my, what I would do for a nap by the lake!!!

Up we went.

 

Holy moly... all of sudden... there it was! Ta-da!

The whole hike had been fairly spectacular and in these cases I normally expect the finish line to be anticlimactic. In this case, not so much. Beneath Long's Peak lies Chasm Lake. Clear, cold and surprisingly host to an abundance of wildlife among the rocks. 

We had earned a break. Feet freed from boots. Reclined in the sunshine. Relishing the most gorgeous day one could have asked for. 

Julia broke out her healthy apple, egg and nut snacks. I tucked into my chocolate chip cookies and Cheez-its! (I felt no guilt or shame at my choices, FYI)

There were photo ops everywhere, but one my favorites was this... watching Julia try to take a pic of her own toes with a Chasm Lake and Long's Peak backdrop. How the heck she managed to summon ab muscles to hold this crunch, is beyond me. All I know is that only Julia and that tanned, topless runner we saw up there, seemed to have extra energy after hiking uphill 4 miles!

Stage 4: The descent. 

Ok, so before we move on, I need to also log something else. I'm taking Diamox to Peru. A prescription med used to ward off AMS (acute mountain sickness). I'm kinda a weeny when it comes to altitude and by 11,500 feet, I am usually showing the first symptoms. Not dire, but headache, nausea, inability to hold a conversation, swollen hands and feet. By 12,500 I have experienced symptoms that are joy-killers... vomiting, numb legs and arms and a LOT of missing IQ points!

Today I tried out Diamox. One pill last night, one pill this morning. At 12,000 feet I had NO headache, nausea etc and was chatty Cathy the whole way up and back! The side effect is that Diamox is a diuretic and my bladder was filling a whole lot quicker than I'm used to. It also forced me to drink more water, which is not the end of the world by any stretch. 

The long and short of this story is that I needed to use the privy on the way down... and that is worth talking about too. LOL

The privy. An open-air, somewhat private surround with a door and a toilet that "looks normal".

I entered the privy and closed the door behind me. Julia waited patiently outside. Having evacuated a very busy bladder, I stood up and suddenly noticed the view. There are two windows... one looks down to Boulder almost, the other is a sweeping view of Long's Peak. Not too shabby!

Then I noticed the instructions on the wall. Apparently after finishing, you are supposed to pump the foot pedal 5 times and close the lid.

I follow instructions/rules. It's just who I am.

Two pumps of the foot pedal in, I noticed there was a kind of conveyor belt in the toilet that was supposed to move your more solid efforts around and into the holding tank beneath. No, there is no water and the foot pedal is not in any way, shape or form designed to "flush" in the more conventional way. In fact, the conveyor belt when I pee'd was almost clean... them that went before me must also have pee'd and "washed it".  By moving the conveyor belt, I had recirculated a part of it that was WAY less clean! (If you are the queezy type, stop reading here.)

Were Julia and I the only people on the Chasm Lake trail without diarrhea?  Apparently so. Now the toilet was buzzing with flies and odors that cannot be described and the part of the conveyor belt that appeared was definitely more... soiled.

I shut the lid quickly and exited as fast as I could. Not mentioning my behavior to Julia, as she stepped in to take her turn.  Whoops!

Ok, so her face as she burst out of the privy 10 seconds later was priceless.  Not really surprising, but hugely entertaining anyway. I advised her to hold her breath and as she covered her mouth and nose with her shirt, she entered again... after all, there were no other options for relieving oneself in the vicinity.

It would be later in the day, on the drive to Estes Park that I would confess my ignorance and errors regarding the privy.  And lucky for me, Julia has a sense of humor and we both laughed 'til we cried about it.  (Although I think next time, if she takes me hiking again, she'll opt for using the privy before me.)

Then it was time to scoot back to the car... another 90 minutes or so of rugged downhill hiking, hot sun and beautiful wild flowers.

Did I mention that everything above treeline is miniture? Dwarf trees, tiny flowers, baby pine cones!

We arrived back at the truck about 1:45pm. Tired, exhilarated, ready for a late lunch at Estes Park. And ice cream!

Note to self... when you take a thousand pictures and run your GPS tracker (Strava) there is a good chance your cell phone battery will not last all day!  I was at 4% battery when we hit the end of the trail. Just enough to turn off Strava, but not enough to see any of the pics I'd taken or send a "down safely" text to Mark. And yes, I had been in airplane mode all day.

Next time, I'll take a battery back up just to be sure. No, taking less selfies, is not an option.  :-)

To recap the hike:

Hmmm... what's next for training hikes?