Buffalo Meadows – Backpacking Trip (Long w/lots of pics)

Last fall Josh and I went on our first backpacking adventure into the wilderness. I’m a little delinquent in getting this trip report out but… better late than never. The area is known as the Buffalo Peaks Wilderness and is located at the southern end of the Mosquito Range. It is a small wilderness area of 43,410 acres and is the only designated wilderness in the Mosquito Range. We had completed an earlier car camping trip to the area in July and enjoyed a pleasant stay at the edge of the wilderness area. See this article for a report.

We liked the area so much that a return trip was deemed essential. The top of the peaks looked as though they would provide a magnificent view of the Collegiate Peaks (Continental Divide) to the west and Josh was particularly interested in composing a panoramic of the mountain ranges. Labor Day weekend looked promising…..Ronda was planning a trip back to Iowa leaving us boys to play.

In the interim Josh began building a special purpose offset-bracket that would allow his camera to be rotated on the tripod without changing the focal point of the images. He bought some scrap aluminum plate and designed the approriate distances/angles, cut it out and smoothed it down, drilled and threaded the holes, and I put the final bend on it with a sheet metal bender at work.

Gear was another issue. Neither of us had an approriate sleeping bag, a backpacking stove, or various other “lightweight” items like cooking pans. These things take on a whole ‘nother perspective when you have to haul them in on your back. Our last excursion to the area was a good training event though. Lesson learned… it get’s COLD up there at night. Those summer-weight sleeping bags just don’t cut it. We are fortunate that we have a local REI Outdoor store. We both found good deals and I picked up good bag for Ronda while I was at it. I bought a neat little stove that uses several kinds of fuel and a nylon tarp too.

Josh already had a nice backpack he had purchased a number of years ago. The only thing I had was an old-school external frame pack we found at a garage sale for $2.00. I decided that despite it’s rudimentary design there was no reason it wouldn’t work for this trip. We knew we had too much to carry… the camera gear (both of us took our cameras, extra lenses, and Josh needed his big tripod) , the food, water, tent, sleeping bags, and so on. Sure enough by the time we had everything stuffed in or strapped on each of was was toting a little over 50 lbs. I was a little apprehensive about the weight given my previous back surgery but the packs are supposed to transfer a majority of the weight to your hips so I figured one can only but try…