Expedition One: Colorado (The Rockies, and more!) By Evan Harr

So, I had a lot of fun on my first expedition exploring a lot of Colorado! We did things like hiking in the backcountry of the Rocky Mountains, bugling at elk, playing/ hiking at GIANT sand dunes, and more! All of these things were really fun, but my favorite part of the whole trip was the Great San Dunes, because I went on a cool hike with Tim and Anne up to the top of a giant ridgeline, and then we ran down it. It was just Anne, Tim, and I hiking while everybody else was jumping down a giant hill. Tim taught me some science lessons, and Anne and I took some really cool pictures.

Anyways, it was a really fun expedition, and I thought the first expedition alone was way better than all the expeditions at my first Fall semester at SOAR, The Appalachian Trail. We started out at a couple cool campsites that we camped out of the van and took some cool day hikes. At the last campsite before entering the back country, we literally saw some elk like 200 feet away from our campsite, and there were roughly five of them! I was sleeping in my new OR Alpine Bivy or my new REI Quarter Dome T3 with Mitch (oh and by the way, thanks mom and dad for buying those for me!). We had a lot of laughs and fun times hiking out of our vans in the front country, but then we all packed our giant “expedition packs” with what felt like something like 50 pounds of things like food, personal/ group gear, and personal clothing.

The back country was much better than any of the back country on the Appalachian Trail. We started at a trailhead called Green Mountain Trailhead, and on our first day we hiked to a campsite called Big Meadows, and the name of the campsite is pretty self- explanatory. It had a giant meadow with a stream of running mountain water right next to where all our tents and tarps where set up. Actually, the field staff, Anne and Tim, set up their tent in the field close to where we had our evening meeting. The next morning, we woke up, ate breakfast, did school, and then took of to our next campsite, Timberline. It was a long hike from Big Meadows to Timberline because we got started late, and then hiked in the rain/ pitched black night. We went to bed right away as soon as we got all set up. The next day it was raining all day so we got to lie around in our tents or under the two giant group tarps and Tim and Anne were literally being a waiter/ waitress and cooking food for us in 30 degree weather/ rain ALL DAY until there was a few hours of warm weather and no rain. This let us go on awesome day hike!