Daniel Kraft ’11 took the long way home after graduation in May. With a freshly minted diploma in hand, declaring him a graduate of Colorado College with a degree in chemistry, Kraft put on his backpack and started walking approximately 300 miles home to Grand Junction, Colo.

He left CC on June 22 and headed west over Pikes Peak via Barr Trail, then down to Mueller State Park, Eleven Mile Reservoir, Salida,   Tincup Pass, Taylor Park Reservoir, Crested Butte, Paonia Reservoir, Grand Mesa, and finally, Grand Junction. He arrived home on July 13.

“I thought this was a perfect way to end my college career, to show that it really isn’t that far from home to college, even though it may have seemed so,” Kraft said.

However, the Bulletin would not know of this “feat” if not for an encounter Kraft had with a CC alumna along the way.

Kraft sent an email last fall that read, “I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t for a lady I met outside of Crested Butte on July 6 of this year. I was in the middle of walking home from CC to the house where I grew up in Grand Junction and I met a woman who had graduated from CC after the first year of the Block Plan’s existence. I told her what I was doing and she insisted that I contact the alumni magazine to inform them of my adventures. I’m sorry that it has taken me so long to inform you all of this but nevertheless I am getting it done now. She said that she was hoping to be able to read the alumni magazine and see my name in there and say, ‘Hey, that’s the guy I met!’ Hopefully she will get her wish.”

The alumna Kraft met alongside a stream high in the mountains outside Crested Butte was Martha Warner ’72, who graduated magna cum laude with a degree in political economy and is now a judge on the 4th District Court of Appeals in Florida. “I was delighted to find in him that CC still inspires that sense of individualism and accomplishment,” she said. “I was also glad that he wrote to the magazine and I could see it. The mother in me wanted to know that he got home OK.”