An excerpt from ‘Extremes’
After making the turn up Long Canyon, we breezed along the second mile. Occasional trees had been cut, but chainsaw use is not allowed inside wilderness boundaries. Shortly after crossing into the Columbine-Hondo Wilderness, our clear sailing came to an end. A crew of two, a man and a woman, stood near a large-toothed, six-foot-long crosscut saw, colloquially know as a misery whip. If the cutters were synced up, it was said to slice through trees at a surprisingly quick rate. But how far could two people get in a day? The guy swung an axe removing smaller branches that were blocking access to the bigger tree obstacles. We had entered the first of many zones of thick downfall. We were on our own from here.
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The hike down past the bristlecones to the meadows had an easy stride, yet there was no avoiding what lay ahead. A small cow path led around some of the tangled twisted destruction. This descent followed the stream and diverged from the alternative route taken earlier. It was not long before the creek bottom turned into the all too familiar hodge-podge of fallen logs. No sign of a trail.
We struggled to cross over the snarled debris aiming toward the water to where we guessed the more doable track might be on the opposite bank. No opening in sight, still. No sign of where we had been in the morning. Higher and higher we searched for some familiar marker. A grouse hen and one visible chick moved along a dropped tree before taking flight in their heavy, labored manner. Deer trails led down canyon through less obstructed forest. However, the undergrowth was thick. “Where the hell are we?” came to mind. This was beginning to be a common refrain these days. Thinking we would be in familiar territory, this was one of the very few times that Bob did not bring his GPS.
Somehow, we were too high above the canyon bottom. The creek was barely audible but present enough that we started to work our way in its direction. After longer than either of us wanted to admit, we saw the trail below, not far from where the forest crew of two had been that morning.
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