The photo that illustrates the Cave Basin Trail in the newly published third edition of Hiking Colorado’s Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness Areas is interesting for several reasons.
We’ll start with this: It’s in color.
The third edition, which is available or will be soon at local bookshops and outdoors shops, has added color after two editions of black and white. The photos are all new, and they’re all in color, author Donna Ikenberry said in a phone interview from her home in South Fork this week.
Also new for the book are color maps and GPS coordinates, which are sprinkled in throughout the trail directions.
OK, another curious thing about the Cave Basin photo: It’s not taken by Ikenberry, as is every other photo in the book. Nope, that photo was taken by her husband, Mike Vining, and those are the tips of his shoes in the foreground.
There’s a reason. On that summer day in 2012 when the couple hiked the trail – one of two new trails added to the book – Ikenberry stepped on a tree root and fractured her ankle. She thought maybe it was just a sprain, so she kept going for a quarter-mile before turning around. Vining continued ahead to finish the trail for the book – and to take the photo.
The 5.2-mile-long (one way) Cave Basin Trail is one of two trail additions for the third edition. It’s accessed via Middle Mountain Road north of Vallecito Reservoir and has become a popular way of getting quickly into the Weminuche.
The Lake Eileen Trail, just to the northwest of Vallecito Reservoir, is the other new trail. It’s a 2.1-mile jaunt to Lake Eileen, and an even quicker entry into the Weminuche.
There now are 59 trails total – 37 for the Weminuche and 22 for the South San Juans. In all, there are 900 miles of trails described in the book, and Ikenberry has hiked them all.
She’s hiked some of it more than once, but she spent two summers in the late 1990s hiking all the Weminuche trails. The first edition came out in 1999. For the second edition, published in 2005, she added the South San Juans.
Back to the photo for one more curious point: It was sunny – at least, the foreground that includes Dollar Lake is in the sun. Emerald Lake is in the shadow of dark clouds, a hint of what was to come that day.
“It was a long three miles back,” said Ikenberry, who has written 13 guidebooks, from cycling coast-to-coast to camping in Utah. “There was a thunderstorm. It got muddy. It was slow going.”
She obviously made it back, but the injury curtailed her hiking for a while and kept her from doing a few more hikes she would have liked to do.
In any case, the 264-page book seems plenty big and plenty informative.
Guidebooks always come with a double-edged sword anyway. They’re a great resource to learn about trails, but when you read them, you start to wonder: If it’s in the guidebook, everyone else knows about it, right?
There are a couple other options out there – most notably, the classic 1976 Backpacking Guide to the Weminuche Wilderness by Dennis Gebhardt, which you can find if you dig hard enough. Gebhardt’s book fits better in a pack, but the maps leave something to be desired.
B.J. Boucher’s Walking in Wildness (1998) is a great look at the joys of hiking and backpacking in the Weminuche. It’s much more that than an actual guidebook, although there are several trail descriptions in the back of the book.
Ikenberry has done an excellent and comprehensive job of presenting the major trails of the Weminuche and South San Juans, and she has plenty of ideas for backpacking loops. If you’re looking for trail information, this is your thing.
But if you want to just look at a map and wing it, there’s something still to be said for that, too.
johnp@durangoherald.com
Review
Hiking Colorado’s Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness Areas, by Donna Ikenberry, Globe Pequot Press, 264 pages paperback, $19.95.
