Hiking the CO-X, Colorado Springs

Join India Wood for a documentary film and wild stories about backpacking a 1,500-mile X across Colorado. Be inspired by an older woman’s solo adventure and hear her observations of this state as a square sample of our planet.

India backpacked from the SE to NW state corners in 2020 and the NE to SW corners in 2022. Her route included Sterling, La Junta, east Pueblo, Chico Basin Ranch, Fountain, Colorado Springs, Manitou, and Florissant. Her talk includes photographs by her father, Myron Wood, of these places in the 1960s and 1970s. Myron’s archive is at the Pikes Peak Library. India was born and raised in Colorado Springs and attended North J.H.S. and Fountain Valley School. As a teen she found and dug up an allosaurus now on display at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Feeling stuck in life in 2020, she decided to learn to stand on her own two feet again by hiking. Farmers and ranchers offered help and friendship to this listening Boulderite as she sought places to hike, camp, and cache water. Her challenges included dead trails, desperadoes, a derecho, heat waves, high mountain passes, and a Vail bear with a nose for chocolate. 

She was the first person to backpack the Colorado X, in her 50s.