Where am I?

Turns out its not all downhill after all. I still have this thing call the Continental Divide to climb over like 8 more times. That's alright. The reason I chose the Transam is because it follows the Divide for as long as it does. It's giving me a chance to reminisce and visit the best hiking trip I've done so far. This morning was a long trek up the divide to willow creek pass. Even though we had to climb like 2000 ft the first 1200 ft or so was over 20 miles on a quiet back country highway. The scenery was fantastic the road was in good condition for Colorado and the traffic was basically non existent. 

The only problem was I couldn't figure out where I was on the divide. Unlike Hoosier pass I know I had hiked over this one. For the entire 8 miles of climbing up to the pass I kept looking at it trying to figure out when I had gone over it. Nothing looked familiar. It wasn't until I got within a mile of the pass that I finally figured out where I was. This was the pass with a hut on the mountain and 3 routes down it. I had gone down the Ley alternate which had me walk a steep ridge down to a road, the CDT went along a knifes edge ridge down to the pass, and the new CDT had you go north along another ridge before dropping down to the pass. I couldn't recognize it from the direction I was heading since the mountain blocked everything behind, including the hut, and the snow made the ridge and road I walked down unrecognizable. 

When we set out we thought the hard part of the day was going to be getting over the pass cause after that it was all downhill. Well it was all downhill a very slow gentle downhill. However the wind, oh man the wind, that was not downhill. That was a constant 20 mph crosswind with 35+ gusts. The wind seriously kicked our asses. Keith kept getting blown over. Whenever a truck would pass us the brief break we'd get from the wind by being in its slipstream would almost knock us over since we were leaning over so much. The traffic wasn't bad and we setup a draft train which basically took over our entire lane since we weren't drafting behind the leader but were on their shoulder. We had to give a couple feet of space since the gusts caused us to shift back and forth so much. That downhill section was exhausting. We were all wiped out by the time we hit town.

The only good thing about the wind is kept the mosquitos away. We had heard that this section and the town we were heading to had some horrible mosquitos. I don't know about the road section since any mosquitos had to have been blown to Nebraska but when we stopped at town and a store on the way we were swarmed.