How quiet is the Colorado Trail? Quiet enough that one thru-hiker started holding full conversations with marmots — and felt sheepish when a human finally appeared. That's the picture painted in a first-person account of a late-summer hike along the roughly 500-mile route from Denver to Durango, and it's a useful reality check for anyone eyeing the trail.
The season started with doom-mongering. Because Colorado had a record-low snow year, online chatter warned of no water and a state ablaze with wildfires. In reality, the hiker found the weather kinder than on any other long trail they'd walked, never carried more than two litres of water, and endured nothing worse than the odd dramatic thunderstorm. There was one genuine disruption: a 34-mile reroute from Tennessee Pass to Twin Lakes because of the Willow fire near Leadville. Even that had an upside — no smoke to walk through and spare time to knock off some of Colorado's fourteeners as side trips.
The lesson echoed a familiar one from New Hampshire's Whites: hype and horror stories often outrun the actual trail. The same applied to crowds. A caretaker at Kenosha Pass reported 50 to 100 hikers a day streaming through in June, suggesting most people rushed early to beat the supposed drought. Those who started later, like this hiker, had the high country nearly to themselves — maybe too much to themselves.
That's the emotional core of the story. Long stretches alone — weeks passing between real conversations, southbound hikers offering only grunts — made every connection feel outsized. A trail gang of hikers aged 19, 29 and 39 in the first week. A chance reunion with someone met on the Arizona Trail the year before. A hiker train of strangers hiking under trail names, rounded off by a roadside box of free blueberry muffins and almond croissants from ditch-repair crews. By the final night's round of 'rose, thorn and bud', everyone in the group agreed: the trail's low point was the lack of community, and its highlight was finally finding it.
For travellers, this is a genuinely useful datapoint. The Colorado Trail rewards solitude-seekers and late starters, but if your priority is the social camaraderie that defines hikes like the Appalachian Trail, timing matters enormously — June appears busy, while late-season hikers may go weeks between meaningful encounters. Go expecting quiet, and treat any trail friends as a bonus.
