My Colorado Trail Obsession

I couldn’t decide whether or not I should include this with the first blog post but decided it is so important that it should get its own post!

I am an over the top planner.  I love doing research for trips and being a stay at home Mom gives me the time to do this!  I google everything. I like checklists and plans. I know, I know, with backpacking and with kids a plan is only so good. You must be flexible. I get that. I’m not rigid. I just really like to be prepared and honestly enjoy the planning process.

I search things on instagram.  Yeah, I check the weather too, but 70 can feel different in Houston than it does in Telluride, or Tahoe, and different yet in Denver.  So I look to see what layers people are wearing.  I know.  It’s  over the top.  One day, while researching something about the Colorado Trail, I was complaining about not finding some excruciatingly small detail anywhere on the dang internet machine-so hubs suggested I start my own blog. I think it was a joke at first. But then I started using the hashtag of Mamaneedsahike on instagram and it became more of a running joke. “Oh, put this on your blog!” “Wish we had known this, put it on your blog.” So here we are. Blame Hubs.

I have wanted to thru hike the Colorado Trail since I first stepped foot on it when I was attending Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado in 2006.  I was raised in the Denver area and the Colorado Trail (CT) happens to run from Denver to Durango.  So, in 2013, while pregnant with baby 2, my last baby, I put a deadline on this dream of mine.

2020.

With this decision came an insane amount of Mom and spouse guilt.  How dare I spend a month backpacking about 500 miles through the Rocky Mountains!!!  How could I even come up with an idea like that before my kids are out of the house?!?

Mom guilt is real, y’all…But I’ve decided to try to get over it and come up with a way to make this dream of mine come to fruition because on top of being a Mom and wife I am also a woman who really enjoys backpacking and needs to be an example to her children to follow their dreams and overcome obstacles… Even if it means my husband might have to do laundry and I might miss kissing a few booboos.  And I will likely have like a billion panic attacks about those things but for the sake of everyone, I need something that is MINE…and I don’t just mean MY WAY of folding the towels.

Even though I’m not thru hiking until 2020, I’ve begun doing an insane amount of research about it.  I love reading people’s blogs about it.  I read gear reviews.  I watch youtube videos.  Seriously, I research things to death. Beyond reading things online, in order to prepare to backpack that far I should probably…well…Backpack.

So, a lot of what I’m going to write about will be centered around my preparation for the CT. Every hike, backpacking trip, REI purchase, etc relates back to the CT for me but there are other things I plan to write about! I will talk about hikes with and without my kids. Backpacking trips. Venting about days like today when I’ve panicked and taken my two year old to the doctor because I’m sure he has a tick embedded in his foot and is going to have Lyme Disease only to realize that it’s just a black splinter…I’m going to talk about everything. Is that okay? It’s my blog space so I guess I get to decide.