Bill-on-the-Hill

Let me start this one with the Web Site du Jour, which will explain some of the background for this trip: http://www.run100s.com/HR/, home page of the Hard Rock Hundred-Mile Endurance Race, based in Silverton, Colorado, USA. No, I'm not crazy, or fit, enough to run in this thing, but the article will give you a sense of the healthy-yet-happy weirdness of Silverton, where Emily and I spent a very pleasant weekend a couple of weeks ago.

With the benefits of our Italy trip starting to wear off and work becoming stultifying again, we decided it was time to get out of town for a while and do a bit more hiking. Our destination was a lake high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado called, somewhat unimaginatively, Ice Lake. (To get ahead of the game, yes, there was ice in the lake.) This is a good place to backpack into, and there is also satisfying car camping nearby; however, having reached an age where our joints and bones don't take to sleeping on the ground as well as formerly, we only do backpacking trips these days if there's no comfortable bed close to where we're going. In this case such a bed did beckon, in the tiny town of Silverton, set at an elevation of 9200 feet in the San Juans only a couple of miles from the trailhead. Since we had a secondary objective of checking out Silverton itself, we decided to do this trip the sybaritic way.

A word about Silverton before the trip description. The town is in an incredibly scenic setting and is surrounded by peaks with summit elevations ranging from maybe 11,500 feet on up to 14,000 -- "14ers," as they're called in the Colorado jargon. Furthermore, you can't get there without going through some amazing scenery, whether by car on the "Million-Dollar Highway" (so called because it was built back in the days when a million bucks was a lot of cash, and the highway cost a million bucks), or via narrow-gauge train (see http://www.durangotrain.com/) from Durango. On this particular outing, we drove, but we've also taken the narrow-gauge in the past (getting off midway to backpack into the mountains and climb a couple of those 14ers -- in fact Emily and I met on a 14er climb many years ago) and recommend it. Unfortunately, it didn't fit our available time for this trip.

Silverton was a mining town (for guess what mineral) a hundred years ago, but these days it's a tourist destination, plain and simple, and one that caters mainly to two classes of tourists: those who ride the scenic and historic narrow-gauge (and usually just stay for a couple of hours before taking the return train to Durango), and ... those ... other people. The ones who run the Hard Rock Hundred. The ones with body fat measured in milligrams. The ones who spend 30 consecutive hours on a course that not only covers a hundred miles horizontally, but also 33,000 feet vertically -- going up and down more than six miles. The ones who, in my view, are basically crazy. Well, not completely crazy, I guess; I've done 14ers with one or two of them, and have several professional colleagues who are "Hardrockers," as those who complete this race are called, and away from the race, they don't seem so odd. But the notion of doing a race that punishing on the body ... brrr. (Incidentally, Silverton is also an important base of operations for other extreme-sports addicts during the off season. I don't even want to think about what the dead-of-winter equivalent of the Hard Rock Hundred is, so will gloss over the subject with a shudder.) Here's a little of what the town looks like:

Silverton courthouse

We spent two extremely comfortable nights at the Wyman Hotel (web site http://www.thewyman.com/), a rather upscale little establishment in one of the zillions of historic buildings in Silverton. The innkeeper and his son are both among the "Hardrockers" who run in the race, and in fact, when we got there they were out laying out the route for the racers who would appear a couple of weeks later. This isn't unusual; a considerable fraction of the town's 350 or so permanent residents are seriously fit outdoorspeople who are capable of doing things like this, whether they're crazy enough to or not, and the race has very deep roots in the community. I recommend the Wyman highly. It's not cheap, but for your money you get tremendously friendly service with good advice on things to do in the Silverton area (including info about the exact trail that we were going to hike), comfortably rustic lodging, wine and conversation in the evening, and a great breakfast. The Wyman gets at least an A-minus on the scale I gave in my last blog entry, and maybe a full-blown A.

I'll omit most details of the hike, except to say that you can read about the route on Web Site du Jour #2. I hope that anyone reading this knows about WikiOutdoors, an embryonic wiki devoted to hiking/kayaking/birding/etc. that Wikitravel is officially cooperating with. Their featured hike for July/August 2007 is precisely the one to Ice Lake, and its regular article on the site, http://www.wikioutdoors.com/Ice_Lake_Trail, describes exactly what we did -- as it should, since after all, I wrote that article. (BTW, if you're inclined to do stuff in the Great Outdoors, please pitch in and write some articles for WikiOutdoors. They're trying very hard to make the thing succeed, but having a hard time getting enough contributions. A wiki is only as good as what goes into it. Help that one become better.) I'll spare you details on one minor gross-out that isn't reflected in the WikiOutdoors article, and simply say that this was a very pretty day hike that left us in the mood for some serious hedonism when we got back to Silverton. Unfortunately, we wound up sharing a restaurant (the not-particularly-notable Natalia's, located in what claims to be a former bordello) with a mob of incredibly noisy Boy Scouts that took away much of the ambience of the experience. Well, nobody, and nowhere, is perfect.

Up the next morning and 250 miles home, passing back along the Million Dollar Highway among other things. It was a lot of driving for two nights away from the house, but the scenery on this drive is such that you really don't mind the time spent in the car. We'll do it again; there are plenty of other appealing day hikes in the Silverton area, and better restaurants than Natalia's to eat in when we're done hiking. We will not, however, run in the Hard Rock Hundred. We enjoy the ambience of Silverton, but we're not crazy!

One last shot of the scenery at Ice Lake, which will give you an idea of why we did all this driving and hiking to get there:

Ice Lake Basin