Way up in the Gore Mountain Range

Drew, Kristin, Laura, and I have been planning to go on a backpacking trip since the beginning of the summer. We were meant to go last week the 23-25 but due to Kristin's bad cough and to the fact that Laura and I both got a temp job for those two days we decided to postpone until this week to go, but without Drew and Kristin. :(

We decide to hike a loop that would go up and over Eccles Pass. It is the mountain that is directly north of Frisco, CO. We were planning on hiking 5-6 miles each day and go for 2 nights and 3 days. It didn't quite work out that way.

Day 1

This is Laura's first backpacking trip. Doesn't she look great like a true mountain woman!

The trail started out nice and flat through a forest with a ton of trees that were dead, dying, or fallen over.

We crossed this creek or other smaller creeks about 30 times and only a few of them had bridges. There were a couple of close calls for both of us but we ended up getting through the whole trip dry!


We hiked through some gorgeous mountain meadows with beautiful flowers of all shapes and colors. The picture of the flowers does not do justice to how beautiful they were.

We had heard that there were going to be some waterfalls along the trail but we had no idea that they were going to be as cool as they were. We could hear them from the trail so we trekked about 50 yards off to the side and we found...
Can you find Laura in the above picture?
There were several other waterfalls that we didn't get very good pictures of. They were awesome. Much bigger and loader than these pictures make them look.

We continued on for another 2 miles or so and found a nice camping spot. We were only 100 feet or so from the creek and there was a ton of firewood all around. It was a really nice place to stay.

This is taking longer than I thought so return tomorrow for the even more exciting Day 2 of our backpacking trip...