Getting to the Trailhead

How do you get to a peak? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall... practice, practice, practice. Then drive to the trailhead.

Some trailheads are more difficult than others to get to. In Colorado, $6M was spent paving 12 miles of Guanella Pass Road from Georgetown to the Mt Bierstadt trailhead, and it was wonderfully easy to get there. On the other hand, getting to the Greys and Torreys trailhead requires a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle due to the dirt road ruts. Around here in the south, it's important to have the right trailhead vehicle... one that you don't mind getting scratched by brush, banged up by potholes, or smashed by vandals. Thus, an important piece of backpacking equipment is the selection of your trailhead truck, which has the conflicting requirement of getting us there, not be too nice, and being the daily driver to work.

It would be something to meet all three with one vehicle.

One solution is to own more than one: a daily driver and a trailhead truck. And decide which one to take, depending on destination. Either hope that the trailhead truck can survive the interstate, or hope the reliable daily driver can stay pretty.

As time goes by, the reliable and pretty car slowly becomes the trailhead truck, the close-to-dead trailhead truck is discarded, and a new vehicle bought for reliable and pretty daily driver... in a cycle period of many years.

I have to think this through better but I may be doing a version of this that involves three vehicles: My 22-year-old tired trailhead truck reached 253K rough miles. It burns oil, has questionable reliability and looks like hell, so I bought a newer truck today to restart the cycle. I have an older van. I may keep the old tired trailhead truck for special occasions where I need to leave the truck at an unfavorable location for weeks, like AT segment hikes... and I do not lock it so as to avoid somebody busting the window to get in to search.

Happy trails to you.

- © 2012 by Willy