Hiking in the Gunnison Gorge

 

After the long drive on Thursday, we did mostly nothing on Friday. It felt good. On Saturday, Kim had an outing to the Gunnison Gorge planned. The Gunnison Gorge is along the Gunnison river below Black Canyon NP. It is very isolated and has a desert look and feel. This is BLM land and is open to many different types of recreation including ATV’s and dirt bikes. The river is only accessible via 4 trails. We decided to take the shortest one, but also the most difficult.  

Here is the team:

To get to the trailhead we had to drive 2.5 miles on a 4X4 road. It was rough, but the truck did fine. The trails and roads were not well marked. We got on the wrong trail and went for about a mile. Then we decided it was the wrong way, and went back and went the other way. We stopped when it looked like we could not get to the river. Looking at maps later, we were pretty close the the final decent to the river. Kim said later, she was glad we did not find the way down. She was not looking forward to climbing back up. We were both very tired when we got back to the truck, but it was memorable and I am glad we did it. Here are a few more shots.

Looking for a way down…not this way!

Kim thought this looked like a thumb.

We then decided we were ready to go back to the truck and go to a different part of the river. It was a longer 4X4 road, but we found our way to a beautiful section of the river. Time to fish!

I found this little section where there were about 30 fish feeding. They looked at my fly and stuck at it time and time again, but I caught nothing. It was still fun. The cool water sure felt good.

On the way out we stopped at the trail head for the Sidewinder trail. I love this because it is single track only. Check out the gate. I would love to ride this on my dirt bike.

 

We drove the 4X4 road back to town and then back to our site at Crawford SP. We have been there for 9 days. One more day and time to move. We did have a cool nearly full moon in the daylight. I could not really catch it, but this is the best I could do.

We had one final adventure before we moved on. That one turned out to be a bit scary. Check out the next entry for what happened.