Rustler's Gulch (Where I popped an important question....)
This is a long overdue post. I've been putting it off because I wasn't sure how to describe all the events that lead up to this hike....
The original game plan for the weekend was to drive down to Crested Butte on a Thursday night and camp so we could hike Rustler's Friday at sunrise. This, I thought, might be the best moment to ask Jenni an important question. As we all know, plans hardly work out and we ended up staying in Denver and driving to Crested Butte early Friday morning. By the time we arrived it was storming on and off and the roads were a muddy mess. The road leading to the trailhead is more like a nearly vertical trail that starts with a deep creek crossing. We decided to do a quick hike around the Washington Gulch area instead of risking it in the exposed gulch (or getting stuck on the way to it).
After the hike Jenni was relieved that I had rented us a hotel room, and that we wouldn't have to camp in the rain. What she didn't expect was that it was a fairly nice room at a resort in Mt. Crested Butte. Not your everyday weekend kind of room, but the celebratory-whoa-this-room-has-two-bathrooms kind of room. Luckily, this didn't tip her off. I had been carrying this ring through lightning storms in multiple mountain ranges, waiting for a break in the weather that would give me a window of opportunity... it never came.
We rolled out of bed early Saturday morning and headed back to Rustler's Gulch. The clouds had parted and we were the first ones at the trailhead. I anxiously rushed her along in hopes of having the point at the end of the trail to ourselves. Jenni, however, was uncharacteristically struggling that morning and needed multiple loooongggg snack breaks. I was on the verge of fireman carrying her the rest of the way...
After 4 miles of chest high wildflowers (there are supposedly 114 different kinds in this area) we finally made it to the top. I fed Jenni another granola bar while I set up my camera. I had loaded a time lapse app onto the camera so that I could take multiple photos without having to actually hit the remote. Below is a slideshow of those pictures (click the arrows on the side to scroll through them).
