Lost In Leadville

I admit that I am directionally challenged.  Streets, trails, large rooms, it doesn't matter -- I get lost easily.  I'm a few satellites short of an operational internal GPS.  But I've learned to cope, more or less.  Frequently, when faced with a directional choice, I play a little game in which I intentionally go in the exact opposite direction from that which my intuition insists is the right way to go.  More often than not, I find that my anti-intuition keeps me on track.

However, this past weekend, I foolishly let my intuition be my guide and ended up lost in Leadville.

I spent last Saturday and Sunday of the Fourth of July weekend up in Leadville in order to get in a few more high-altitude training runs. My plan for Saturday morning was to run from May Queen over Sugarloaf to Fish Hatchery and back -- a route I ran only seven days previously, so you might think I would be somewhat familiar with the trail.  You'd be wrong.

I can report that for the first 90 seconds of the run my intuition kept me on course.  But by two minutes in, I got that all-to-familiar feeling that I was going the wrong way.  Still, I pressed on for a few more minutes hoping I might see a tree or rock that I remembered from the previous week's run to assure me I was on the right trail.  Of course, that never happened.  By the time I accepted that I was going the wrong way, I was close enough to the crest of the climb that I just kept on going to the top.  After summitting, I turned around and ran back downhill to May Queen to start over. 

Reassuring myself that my five-mile, wrong-way jaunt up the mountain was still good training, I reassessed my directional options.  My intuition, after apologizing for its initial error, confidently insisted that it now knew the right way to go.  Again, I foolishly trusted it and set off on my second attempt to find the trail up Sugarloaf.

This time I went about three miles before I was sure I was lost again.  So, I did the only reasonable thing to do in this situation:  I climbed a tree, took a cell phone photo of the surrounding topography and texted it to my brother Tim in Michigan, with the words, "lost. sugarloaf?"



Actual pic I texted to Tim


Within a minute he called to tell me, based on his assessment of the photo, the sun/shadow angle and the time of day, that I was "an idiot."  I was on the exact opposite side of Turquoise Lake, 10 miles from where I wanted to be and heading in the wrong direction.  I immediately realized he was right on all counts.

So, I turned around again and ran back to the starting point at May Queen, cursing my intuition the whole way.  Figuring I still had over an hour to at least get to the top of Sugarloaf (having abandoned my initial plan of running to Fish Hatchery), I set off on my third attempt.  After getting lost one more time (though now that I was more oriented, I was at least heading in the right general direction, just on the wrong trail), I finally picked up the actual trail at my turn-around point near the top of the mountain under the power lines and was able to run the real trail back down to my starting point.  All told, I was out there five hours, and spent only about 35 minutes on the actual trail I was hoping to run.

Later that afternoon, after lunch, I took a hike with Molly up Hope Pass.  We got an eerie and tragic reminder of how unforgiving this area can be when we passed half a dozen police cars, an ambulance, a search and rescue truck and a FOX News van parked in the middle of nowhere just a few miles from our trailhead.  It turns out the two missing hikers from Boulder (Dad and daughter, missing for over a week) had just been found not far from where we went hiking.  They apparently died from a fall likely caused by high winds.

Sunday, I did a 15-mile morning run around the north side of Turquoise Lake covering the only remaining section of the LT100 course that I had yet to run.  It feels good to have seen the whole course now, even if it cost a few wrong turns on the way.