Bear Creek Mountain

Thursday, July 1, 2021

When we woke up this morning, it was with the intention of hiking the Columbine Trail. But when we found the pulloff that led to the Columbine trailhead, we could see a front-end loader working on the trail - there would be no way to go around that massive machine. Even if we could get through, we would have had to drive our rental car through Mineral Creek to get to the starting point. So we opted for plan B: hiking up to Grizzly Bear Mine. This was not a hard hike, less than five miles overall. But the scenery was still nice, and there was plenty of interesting rocks to examine along the way.

Bear Creek Trail is famous for its route along the mountainside. The miners carved the trail into the cliffs in order to haul their equipment up to their site. They were excellent engineers, because the trail is easily hiked, wide and safe, despite climbing high above the Bear Creek. There is a scary drop to one side, but the trail is wide enough that footing is never in doubt.

It turned out to be fortunate that this was a short day, because that afternoon there was a thunderstorm with rain pouring down. We walked over to the B&B where we would spending our last night, just to checkout the premises. The proprietar was super friendly. He told us about fossilized stegasaurous tracks that could be viewed from the Twin Peaks trail. Wow, really? Fossilized dinosaur tracks? We changed our plans and for our last day decided to hike up to the tracks via the Oak Creek Trail.

That evening we got fish and chips dinners from the Goldbelt.