I wish I could relate a story about how I never left the trailhead on Saturday, an epic involving car trouble, tow trucks, a dog and a wedding party. Unfortunately a friend of mine would be far too embarrassed if I put the story in print, so I’ll just have to move on to Sunday’s hike.
As usual, where to go was decided largely based on the weather forecasts, and Browns Canyon Wilderness Study Area (just south of Buena Vista) was selected. We arrived at the trailhead and hiked just east of Ruby Mountain, over it’s saddle and then down the other side. Here the trail runs along some private property by the Arkansas River and a foot bridge leading to a trailer park.
Soon our path took us across the flats towards Middle Cottonwood Creek.
A few fresh footprints helped define the little used trail as we followed it up the dry creek bed, then climbed the ridge to the south and worked our way east.
Some impressive rock domes and boulders greeted us as we reached Cottonwood Creek on the east side of the WSA.
Since the only climbing gear we’d brought was our helmets, we turned away and headed south towards the one ranked peak within the WSA: 9082.
By now we were about two hours from the car and enjoying the abundant sunshine, not at all wishing our goal was the 14′ers across the valley.
We approached 9082 from the north, working our way to a saddle then following the ridge more or less directly to the summit.
The first highpoint we hit turned out not to be the summit, but the way ahead appeared straight forward.
We found a summit register placed by our friend Ryan last year and became the 4th and 5th signatures in the jar. While snacking we worked to identify our next peak, the soft-ranked 8620 to the south east.
A large dome stood just north of 8620 and we wondered which was really the taller one. First we had to get down from 9082, which took a bit of route finding and some traversing to clear the many cliffs.
As we approached 8620, the views of the dome made me wish we’d brought some climbing gear.
A little scrambling brought us to the “summit” of 8620.
Unfortunately, even from here I wasn’t convinced the spire to the south or the dome to the north weren’t possibly taller. We scouted the spire, but it would have been technical (low 5th class), and I didn’t feel comfortable attempting it without at least a small rope and a few stoppers. And the dome looked to require considerably more gear. Oh well, we may have to come back better prepared in the future.
We worked our way back towards Cottonwood Creek by returning back over the saddle north of 9082 and picking up the old 4×4 tracks again. Along the way we found a few cacti in bloom.
The clouds had thickened and combined with an increasing breeze we had a cool walk back to the trail head.
Uh, did you crash a wedding party?
We met a bunch of the wedding guests and debated crashing the wedding itself. I half suspect more of the guests were talking about us than the bride’s dress or the cake.