Truly Epic may be overused, but at least that’s what it felt like to me. Last week I made a trip with brother-in-law Tim to northern Colorado where we stayed in the ski and spa town of Steamboat Springs. I love Steamboat and have been there many times, but this was Tim’s first visit. We planned to do a legendary 20-mile loop hike out in the Flattops Wilderness, circumnavigating and ascending a huge mesa and then crossing a unique and nail-biting geological feature called the Devil’s Causeway.  (With all our hikes, considering all the landmarks named after the Devil, he sure must like to claim real estate.)

On the drive to Steamboat, Tim and I stopped along the way to hike out to a noted landmark at Rabbit Ears Pass, the twin volcanic towers of Rabbit Ears Peak.  I started writing a new project on the walk and got two chapters done.

After we got to Steamboat, we checked into the hotel, unpacked the car…but there was still time for me to show Tim some of the things he had been missing in town. We went to see the natural sulfur springs in the downtown park, and then headed out to spectacular Fish Creek Falls.

Done with hiking and exploring, we stopped at a brand new brewery that had opened up in town, the Storm King Brewery, where Tim played designated driver so I could sample their IPAs. We asked for the best pizza place in town, and were directed to a lovely place just at the end of their 2-for-1 pizza happy hour. We sat outside as our pizza was delivered—then huddled under the umbrellas as a deluge of late-afternoon rain dumped on us.  Since we were off to do 2o miles the following day, we wanted the weather to get the rain out of its system.

Next morning, we set the alarm for 5 AM, got up, donned hiking clothes, filled Camelbaks with water, loaded lunches and Red Bulls into the backpacks, and set off for the Flattops Wilderness. An hour drive away from Steamboat Springs, we got to the trailhead…and ready to start our big hike. The guidebook calls this a “three-day backpack” so naturally we planned to do it in a day!  We had our maps, and I had my recorder and notes. We set off on the trail at 7 AM.

It was a 15 hour hike, very strenuous. Apart from the first mile, we saw absolutely no people except for one camper at the halfway point.

Wildflowers, waterfalls, (mosquitoes), and after we walked 10 miles along the great wall of that huge mesa above, we climbed up the side and walked 10 miles back along the top plateau, 12,000 feet, mostly grassy, exposed, with almost no trail, just a cairn every half mile or so…plus a couple of insidious “wrong” cairns marking cowboy camps that had nothing to do with the trail, so we were sidetracked several times.  Tim caught a great shot of me while I was walking in front of him dictating.

The Devil’s Causeway itself was in the last couple of miles of the 20-mile hike, and some of the sidetracks had cost us a lot of hours, so we were hurrying along (and dead tired) as we rushed to get there before sunset. The Causeway is a tiny isthmus connecting two mesas, a rock bridge only about 4-ft wide, with a sheer 500-ft drop on either side.  Quite unnerving for anyone with a fear of heights, and even after all I’ve done I still felt a bit of a fluttery feeling as I worked my way across it in the last light of day.  We got to the Causeway with literally only 3-4 minutes of light left before the sun dipped below the mountains on the horizon. We scrambled to take pics, and you can notice the dramatic diffrerence in light from when i crossed (first) and when Tim crossed right behind me.

But, in one of those “angels singing from the sky moments” I saw that all our trudging, our missteps, our rest breaks, and finally hurrying to get there in the last light of day, had left me in a position for absolutely perfect once-in-a-lifetime timing.  While I was in the middle of the Causeway, balanced on only a few feet of rock, I turned to the west and saw the sun dip just behind one of the peaks we had climbed a few hours earlier.  It was breathtaking.

But even then, at sunset, we still had another two hours to go before we reached the car. As night fell, we took out our flashlights and kept going (carefully, over the rocky trail) making as much noise as possible so as to discourage any non-human nocturnal hikers.  We finally got to the car at 10 PM, finally got cell signal (Rebecca was very concerned not having heard from us), and drove back to Steamboat Springs, an hour of winding country roads in the dark.

We were tired, sweaty and hungry, and when we got back to Steamboat Springs, alas, ALL of the restaurants were closed for the night, even the Wendy’s drive-thru.  Well, we had some pretzels and lunchmeat—and a growler of beer—back in the hotel room, so we made do and ended the exhausting and spectacular day on a high note.  Truly epic.