Hidden Trails and More

I have always been a follower of hidden trails and the less-explored places. On at least half of the hiking trips I take lately, I'm off the trails altogether, bushwhacking into new territory. But what do I get for doing as Walt Whitman suggested, and taking the "road less traveled?" Some adventure, for starters. The following are some of the things myself and a friend or two have discovered off the beaten path in the ten months or so.

Abandoned Houses and Ghost Towns - Several months ago we lost the trail we were on and started to follow a dry wash instead. Less than thirty minutes from the car we came upon what looked like a ghost town. We discovered that it was an old ranch, with about six or seven buildings and three old cars from the fifties sitting by a stream. We poked about the main house for a while (there was still a wood stove and a chair or two), then headed up the little stream.

Caves - Down the stream from that old ranch, I saw a spring coming out from under a large limestone boulder. From this I knew that there might be caves in the nearby cliffs. A few minutes later we were 100 feet inside the hill, looking through a narrow opening and wondering what we might find further inside the cave. Later I returned with another friend and explored the system for over an hour and a half.

Abandoned Mines - We've discovered at least a fifteen abandoned and sometimes hidden mines in the last ten months, many of them far from any road or trail. One old mine had a mystery involved, with a possible death (although the police seemed to have no interest). There were clothes and unopened food left at a nearby campsite, strewn along a gully. One mine went a thousand feet into a mountainside, and had a rotting photo of someone at the back, in a hole in the wall that appeared to be a shrine. Yet another ended at a vertical shaft which we could not see to the bottom of with any of the six flashlights we had.

Oddities - We often find waterfalls and fantastic rock formations when we follow hidden trails and canyon-bottoms, but we are sometimes surprised as well. South of the town of Fairplay (all of these examples are from Colorado), hiking west into the mountains, we stumbled upon a stream that came gushing straight out of a grassy hill. I'll have to return to see if there is any way to access the caves that the underground stream undoubtedly has carved uphill from the exiting water.

Mineral and Rocks - We find possible flecks of gold in the bottom of my gold pan (it's hard to tell for sure), and we always find crystals, rocks and interesting minerals. In March of 2008 a friend and I became somewhat lost on the backside of a mountain, after climbing to the top to check out a cave or mine we saw. We discovered boulders of quartz and followed them up a hillside, eventually reaching an incredible fifteen-foot-high wall of white quartz, laced with veins of transparent/translucent mica. Apparently someone had blown open the side of the mountain many years before. Gold is often found with quartz, so we may return to the "magic wall."

Before writing this today (12/30/08), I hiked a mile up a canyon near where we live, trying to take advantage of these occasional winter days in the 60s. Hiking through the snow in my t-shirt, I eventually came to the end of my road-less-traveled, after it passed by an old mining camp. Then I followed barely visible trails created by deer and elk through the scrub oak and brambles. On top of a rocky (and dry) hill, I found an old camp site, with tin cans from who-knows when. In two days I may start the new year by hiking another hidden trail I've been meaning to explore, this time in Phantom Canyon.