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Can you find this spectacular waterfall, located near one of the hikes in this book?

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

Welcome to what is a surprisingly hefty rewrite of this classic trail guidebook. It’s been more than a decade since the fourth edition of this guide was published, and a lot has changed: Trailheads have moved; trails were built, modified, and made permanent by increased wear; roads deteriorated or were blocked off; private and public land-use restrictions were tweaked; avalanche debris forced detours; and fires altered the landscape. And that’s just a start.

This edition adds a bundle of trails (including a new Vallecito section) and leaves out a few that aren’t all that conducive to hikers anymore. Also, several hikes and sections are reorganized, plus new photos and maps have been added that we believe are much easier to use.

This update has certainly been a labor of love. Everything in here was painstakingly researched. Yep, it’s a tough job wandering around in the wilderness, but someone has to do it.

The first person to create this marvelous compendium was Fort Lewis College philosophy professor Paul Pixler, whose first version came out in 1980. Paul wrote two more editions before deciding to find a successor. Through a mutual friend, Scott Graham, Paul invited me to carry on his work, and I wrote the fourth edition of this book, printed in 2006. Paul died in 2011 at the age of ninety, but a lot of his words remain in this book. This fifth edition started with me scribbling of notes in the margins of the fourth edition, but the bulk of the research was done in the summer of 2019.

There are always people who lend a hand in the creation of a guidebook such as this. Here are a few:

My father, Donald Peel, finished climbing all the state’s fourteeners back in 1951, and was something like the thirty-seventh person that the Colorado Mountain Club recognized for doing so. He, and to some extent my mother, introduced me and my sister, Amy, to hiking. All those Life Savers candies he used to goad me from trail stop to trail stop in those early years paid off in the end.

Eventually, I started exploring the mountains with high school buddies Steve Chapman and Jim Wadge. We all survived our scrapes (usually it was me doing something like desperately clinging to a rope while stuck horizontally on a bridge, or needing dire help from above when stuck on a cliff), and we remain friends today.

More recently, my wife, Judy, and dog, Buda, have shared my adventures. Thanks, Judy, for your constant help, guidance, and editing on this time-consuming project. Friends David Buck and Peter Schertz joined me on several trails and challenging mountains. Leo Lloyd, search and rescue expert, helped to craft some of the gear essentials, safety tips, and first-aid information. One of Leo’s first of countless wilderness rescues, incidentally, was catching Paul Pixler when Paul slipped on El Diente; that incident remains in the ensuing Introduction.

Thanks also to the great team at West Margin Press: editor Olivia Ngai, designer Rachel Metzger, and marketing manager Angie Zbornik. Also, thanks to Jed Botsford with the Forest Service and Joe Lewandowski with Parks and Wildlife for lending their expertise; and to Mary Monroe Brown of Durango Trails 2000 for her consultation.

So pick a trail and refresh your wilderness IQ with the information in the Introduction and Ethics chapter. Use this book as it suits you, and go try to have as much fun as I did.

John Peel

Durango, Colorado