Colorado Trail: Sick, cold and stranded

Week 4: Salida to Lake City, 105.4 miles

Hitting the trail again after a town rest day never gets easier, and the first day back on trail tends to feel like a slog.

We were freshly showered, reminded of simple life pleasures, like a real bed and flushing toilet, and full of delicious (albeit not very healthy) town food, as we took off from Salida back into the mountains.

Due to where the highway intersects the trail, we were able to get back on Collegiate West to finish off the route we'd started, rather than finish off the East route.

Right off of Monarch Pass, where the trail crosses the road, we headed straight up a hill, immediately lamenting the elevation gain and struggle. It felt extra hard that day for whatever reason.

Little did we know the trail was about to hand us the biggest, hardest test we've faced so far.

Sick, cold and stranded

Day Two out of Salida started soggy — and only went downhill from there.

The storms overnight were relentless, dumping rain on our tents all night and waking us up every hour or so with loud, rumbling thunder and bright flashes of light.

Being in a tent in a lightning storm, with only a thin piece of fabric between you and the elements, doesn't lend itself to the best of sleep.

Our alarms went off at 6 a.m. and I woke up to rain still pattering my tent. Ariella and I exchanged few words and decided to sleep longer.

We woke up again two hours later and the rain had finally stopped. I unzipped my tent to discover that we were camping in a cloud.

Where, the night prior, we'd seen a view of the mountains around us, now we could only see white. Water dripped from the trees and our tents as we packed them up, adding however many pounds of water weight to our backpacks with no other choice.

There was no sunlight in sight to warm us up.

After a full day of trudging up and down steep, rocky, muddy hills without much sun to dry off our things, we found a beautiful flat spot atop a hill to set up camp.

We were right at tree line, so we emotionally prepared for a very chilly night.

After a long, cloudy day, the sun finally made an appearance, dazzling us with a colorful sunset while we ate dinner with our new trail friend, Lever.

He left to keep hiking and we retreated to our tents, as the temperatures dropped quickly below freezing.

I fell asleep that night pretty quickly, relief after a previous night of intermittent sleep.

A few hours later, around 10 p.m., I woke up suddenly to stabbing stomach pain. Within moments, everything I'd eaten that night had rejected itself from my system.

Ariella woke up shortly after I did and came to my aid, kneeling beside me as I emptied my stomach over and over.

"It's probably something you ate, you'll be okay, I've got you," she reassured me repeatedly.

This felt less-and-less likely as I continued to vomit. The fear of severe and deadly dehydration, hypothermia and even hypovolemic shock more than crossed our minds.

Ever since childhood, I've had an intense fear of vomiting — called emetophobia — that for a long time kept me from doing a lot of things I wanted to do.

After going to therapy and working through the fear, it is much better than it used to be, but still present. Prior to leaving for the trail, my biggest trail fear was not bears, not bad people, not even getting injured — but vomiting.

Ariella knew this too and did everything she could to keep me calm.

If I could only choose one person in the entire world to have been there with me that night, it would be her. Certified as a Wilderness First Responder, Ariella has the unique and incredibly valuable skill of going into emergency response mode in situations like this — keeping her head on straight and making quick decisions, all while maintaining a calm composure, even when she doesn't feel that way.

The next day, when we were back to safety, she confessed that she'd been terrified sitting next to me in the sub-freezing dark, her finger hovering over the SOS button on her Garmin InReach satellite device — but she didn't even hint at being scared in the moment.

Her ability to keep calm, reminding me to drink water, feeding me one goldfish at a time in the morning when I could finally hold things down, telling me to make "snow angels" in my sleeping bag every so often to generate body heat, very likely kept me from going into hypovolemic shock, or worse.

The longest six miles

After a night of tossing and turning, exiting my tent every 15 minutes or so to empty my stomach and trying desperately to keep warm despite not being able to stay in my sleeping bag, the sun rose.

I have never felt more relieved to feel its warmth.

With the sun came the brutal reality that we needed to get to civilization somehow.

I had stopped vomiting, but my still aching stomach, lack of anything in my system and the zero hours of sleep left me unable to stand.

We were 13 miles from the nearest major road, a distance that felt like nothing on a normal day, but impossible when I couldn't even walk from my tent to Ariella's and had a 30-pound backpack to bring with me.

After some discussion, we decided we should do something we thought, and hoped, we'd never have to do: press the Garmin SOS button, which signals Garmin to contact local Search and Rescue.

It's the kind of thing you never think will happen to you ... until it does.

Ariella went back and forth with the Gunnison Ranger District for several hours after that, working through logistics and assessing how I was doing.

Meanwhile, I was able to connect with another family member in the area, my Aunt Reggie, who said she could drive up a dirt road to get within six miles of our location.

I had started to feel less nauseous, so we opted out of getting help from Search and Rescue, instead deciding to make the six-mile trek to meet up with my aunt and cousin. They so graciously offered to meet us where they could and drive us into Gunnison, the closest town.

We packed up and spent the next several hours hiking the slowest, hardest six miles I have ever hiked in my life.

Ariella, once again coming to my rescue, carried my bear bag full of food, adding an extra several pounds to her already-heavy backpack, as we trudged along, stopping every half mile or so to sit in the shade when I felt nauseous and weak.

Finally, we reached my cousin, Renee, and her partner, Connor. They had hiked partway in and took my pack off my back, carrying it the remaining two miles to the car.

The adrenaline of self-rescuing disappeared as soon as I sat down in the car, leaving me exhausted and still nauseous. Aunt Reggie drove us into Gunnison.

Recovering and reflecting

I went to urgent care in Gunnison to find out I had a common stomach virus, likely caught in Salida. The virus was known to be intense, but short-lived, the doctors told us.

Whew! Time to plan getting back on trail.

We spent a few extra days in Gunnison, refueling our bodies, catching up on sleep and letting our nervous systems recover from fight-or-flight.

In that time, I thought a lot about how we handled the experience. I felt incredibly grateful to have had Ariella that night and family members in the area willing to help us when things got dire.

Without those people, I'm sure I would've figured it out somehow for lack of another option — but it would've been a whole lot scarier.

It also reinforced the importance of emergency preparedness and education in the outdoors. The things that got us safely out of our situation — appropriate water and food supply, our satellite phones, knowledge about wilderness first aid — are things we always hope won't mean the difference between life and death, but can mean exactly that.

It also left me realizing I was missing one crucial piece of "gear" — backcountry rescue insurance, which I quickly invested in when we got to town.

The moral of the story: It's easy to believe the emergency situation will never be you, until it is. The importance of preparedness cannot be understated.

Back to the trail (hesitantly)

After three rest days in Gunnison, we got back on trail with a new game plan: take it nice and slow, start out with easy mileage, take it all one day at a time. We were nervous, spending the first night back in our tents talking through our worries and reassuring ourselves that we were capable of figuring out bad situations.

The first few days back re-invigorated us and brought back our love for the trail.

We were greeted with beautiful sunrises, miles of flat trail, excellent camping spots and a new group of trail friends, who got us laughing again and remembering why we were out there.

The trail didn't take it easy on us after that, however, as we entered into the San Juan mountains up and over San Luis Pass.

Un-forecasted storms rolled in while we were above tree line, forcing us to take shelter in some bushes. Rain left us soggy and cold at night and the terrain brought on new blisters, aches and pains.

But unrelenting also was the beauty of the trail. One sunset gave us neon pink skies and mountain shadows on the clouds; marmots and pikas called to us from the rocks; 14ers towered over us.

The stars at night were some of the most spectacular I've ever seen.

We hitched a ride into Lake City feeling both ready and not ready at all to face the final stretch of trail. Our next town in two days, Silverton, was our final resupply stop. It felt a little too real.

About the series