If all went well, in two days I would be in Pinedale and on the next day headed down to Denver to see Vanessa before she flew back home to Massachusetts. I had been really really missing her and it was driving me to go for big miles over the last few weeks just to have a day with her. First though, I had to get over Knapsack Col. This day would be nearly 30 miles with more than 6000′ of total climbing to over 12,000′ with the higher altitudes characterized by snow fields and rock scrambling. About half of the write-ups I could find said that it was way too sketchy and that they would never do this hike again. The other half said that it was stunning and beautiful and should not be missed….. so I listened to the later folks and off I went. It turned out Cube Rock Pass and Knapsack Col were exactly as they were described. You had to earn the right to immerse yourself in them but they both turned out to be some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been.

Cube Rock Pass was filled with refridgerator and house size boulders that you had to scramble over and under with no descernable path through much of them.

https://mountain-boy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/img_1346.mov

Knapsack Col had a similar rock scramble next to the glacier that extends underneath the couloir at the pass to a thousand feet below. Many of even the larger rocks had not settled and more than once I had large door size boulders start sliding underneath my feet which had me leaping sideways to keep from tumbling down after them. It was a harsh and stunning landscape. One person I met described it as a power place and it was all of that. On descending down to Titcomb Lakes 2000′ below the pass, there were a lot of folks camping. In fact the whole valley was filled with tents especially since much of it was accessible through either an easy mostly flat backpack from Elkhart Park. A lot of folks also simply rode horses with outfitters carrying their gear in. I camped above beautiful Island Lake surrounded by innumerable tents and packed out at first light.

The 13 mile hike to Elkhart Park (which included some delicious peanut butter cookie trail magic at the trailhead) was followed by a 15 mile roadwalk into Pinedale where I had originally flipped up from to go to Glacier. It felt a bit surreal walking back into Pinedale. This marked over 2000 miles on trail and closed out all of the CDT for me north of Rawlins WY. I would first be going back to Denver to see Vanessa and now it seems my brother Lou and his family, and then off to finish Colorado.