Day 4
We decided that with our extra time in the trip, and the tough day we had previously that we would make this a light day, almost a layover day. The trail leading up to Columbine Pass going up Johnson Creek was supposed to be the steepest trail in the Weminuche. We decided we would relax most of the day and then do just a couple of hours of hiking to knock off some of the hike for the next day.
We spent the morning spreading out our gear in the sun to get everything dry. It took a long time for my boots to dry. Wendy and I enjoyed just feeling the warm sun on us. For the first time we weren’t wrapped up in something to keep the elements at bay. I took a bandanna bath, but I didn’t notice a change in my smell after it was over. Sometime after lunch we finished getting our gear dried and got packed up. Ironically enough, in 2007 when we came here, we made a day hike up Johnson Creek. It rainy and cold that day, and we returned to camp cold and wet. We spent the next day then drying out our gear. This camping area was becoming a dryout camp for us.
The previous day, our camera had told us that the memory card was full. I found this hard to believe that a 2 GB memory card was full with some 100 pictures on it as I had taken way more pictures than that on it before without it being full. I had just emptied the card while we were in Durango onto my laptop. So we spent some time that day deleting pictures that didn’t look so good or were duplicates. I had brought an extra battery, but no extra memory as I had never run into this problem before. I later discovered that after I emptied the card and then formatted it, the card had much more space on it. I don’t know why that was the case, but I’ll have to remember it. We now had to limit our picture taking as we only had so many left we could take.
We hiked about two hours up the trail. The map showed some flattening out after one of the sets of switchbacks. We found a nice spot off the trail that was surrounded on three sides by creeks. I spent the rest of the day reading and Wendy spent some time exploring and reading. I began realizing that after all of this time, I had yet to get to see any stars as it had been cloudy every night so far. I had hoped to get to see some stars, but it got cold after the sun went down so I didn’t get to see anything.