This August, our family flew to Boulder to get Rori settled in for her sophmore hear at the University of Colorado. After we got Rori moved into her house, Rori and I headed out to Vail to attempt to climb Grand Traverse Peak.
The Grand Traverse was sort of a friend of mine in a way during my time in Vail, and I’ve always wanted to climb to the top.
Because of weather, we had to move up our hike by a day. Rori and I left in the afternoon and would spend one night before attempting the climb. We drove out towards the Front Range and stopped in Frisco for a bite to eat. There was a cool little rainstorm above the mountains.
We grabbed some juice, and then we headed into Vail. I found an incredible little Airbnb that was significantly cheaper than hotels, and it happened to be across the street from the house where I lived in East Vail when Caleb and I were ski bums. Our house was right on the Gore Creek, and I took Rori to see it. It was very special to stand together in front of the house.
We checked into our Airbnb, which was a little condo that was transformed into a cabin.
We then drove to the trailhead to scope it out during daylight, since we would be arriving at 4:30 in the morning, and I wanted to make sure I knew where we were when we were parking. We took a selfie at the Deluge Lake trailhead and then drove into Vail. We stopped at the East Vail Market, where Caleb and I used to shop, to fill up on supplies, and then we went into Vail for dinner. In our rearview mirrors, we could see the Gore Range looking back at us. It was really cool to see them knowing we were going to try to go up the next day.
Once we were in Vail, we walked to the covered bridge and took another look from in town as the mountains towered above us. We ate dinner at a great little restaurant called Up the Creek, and as fate would have it there were two bears, a mom and a cub, in a tree near the river.
We then said goodnight to the mountains and went over to the Safeway in West Vail to grab a few more supplies.
The West Vail Safeway is where Caleb and I used to go when we had not yet found a place to live. In 1994, Caleb and I each had about $200, a one-way plane ticket, no place to live, and no job. There was also no internet back then. We rode the shuttle bus around Vail and managed to convince a ski instructor to let us sleep on his floor. He gave us a grapefruit every day. We got jobs with the mountain and free ski passes, but since we were short on cash, we ate Safeway-brand canned tomato soup for the first week, plus the grapefruit from the ski instructor. I’m not sure why we chose tomato soup. I guess we just thought it sounded healthy.
It was fun to take Rori to ‘our old Safeway’. We went home, laid out our stuff for the next morning’s hike, and went to bed with a 4 AM alarm to hit the mountains.
Leave a Reply