2010 July 19 401 Trail Crested Butte CO

July 19, 2010

Crested Butte 401 Trail from Judd Falls.

I heard water running outside of the window this morning and opened the blinds to find a person watering the flowers. Hey, we’re always up for a bit of local chatting, so we head outside on an information gathering mission. Addie is the sister of the person who owns the other half of the town house. She is in charge of watering the flowers whilst her sister and boyfriend are out on a camping trip. Addie is a 2nd grade teacher in CB. (The new school is at the end of our block. Everything in CB is close!). She of course knows lots of trails, but from a mountain biker’s perspective. Perhaps we should try the 401 trail, Copper Creek trail, or the Maroon Bells Passes. Surfer dude also mentioned these trails so perhaps we should give one of these a go today. Well, by the time I get to finish this conversation with Addie, it is getting late and I have gathered a few more details. Addie drives Gothic road with her Forester, so conceivably we could take our rental up there, a bit…but not too far.

We had planned on going up to Copper Creek today and over a couple of passes. Perhaps since we are a bit late due to the chatting session, we should do the shorter of the trails and not get caught above tree line. So we know we can drive at least as far as Gothic and perhaps a smidgen further. Gothic is a research town. College kids move in for the summer and carry out research on the plants, water, fish and whatever else they can get their hands on in the natural environment. There is one store in Gothic which is open to the public, but otherwise you cannot wander around town uninvited.

We parked just outside of Gothic at a trail head named Judd Falls. The road that we are on is a road designed for 4x4 driving; of course we have our AWD Edge so we drove about .5 mile on this road. We parked at the bottom of the trail head. We have no idea how good or bad this road is; but we shall soon find out!

Fire up the GPS and mark the location of the car. Started heading up the trailhead road with a full belly and heavy pack. I think my heart rate monitor was at 90% of max for the first 30 minutes. There was some major huffing and puffing, who the heck puts the trail straight up.... At the midpoint the mountain, the trail turns to the north and became level. We are now on a path along side of the mountain rather than straight up. And what a trail it was. Just imagine walking for hours and hours in wild flowers that are up to your chin for most of the trip! Now this is a trail that we will share with mountain bikes. Of course bikers are supposed to yield to hikers… We are headed into oncoming biking traffic, so we should be able to see them coming. What I mean to say is bikers should have ample time to pull over and yield to us…

The flowers that I can name include columbine, lupine, delphinium, bluebells, cow parsnips, aspen sunflowers, red bugle phlox, something that looks like little Dutch boy pant-a loons. Most of the flowers were 4 to 5 feet tall. This is truly a picturesque hike. Views of the mountains were fantastic. Of course we have been tainted by the expectation that a nice glacier fed lake would be just perfect to place along this hike. Perhaps a few falls…

We were about 2 miles into our hike when the gps said low on batteries. While changing out the batteries, the deer flies found us! We were surrounded like Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip! Only we were doing the swat, swat, kick, kick, stomp, stomp, slap, slap dance. If I remember correctly Pig Pen just ignored his whirling dirt. These flies were nothing to ignore. I decided to apply some mosquito repellent in hopes they would concede their quest to land and bite with amazing vengeance. Lucky for us they did not want to land on us after we applied some trusty mosquito repellent!

Back to the GPS… The trail has taken an unexpected turn to the west. We get the gps all fired back up and dig out the topo map. We do the coordinates and find we are exactly right where we are suppose to be. But we are again, at the edge of the topo map and will be off of the topo map shortly. These maps are about 13 or 14 bucks per map. To adequately have the entire area mapped we would have to have 3 National Geographic maps… During this battery changing time out we met our first Mt. Biker. He is happy to stop and chat as we are the first people he has met on the trail today. He also is on the 401 for the first time. He heads south and we head north.

I’m not exactly sure how many bikers we yielded to on the eight miles that we were on this trail. Since most were in groups of two, three, four, even six, I would have to guess the number to be closer to 25 Mt. bikers. We celebrated the first biker who yielded to us with a healthy and hearty thank-you! He was amazed when we told him he was the first to stop for us. He said, “ahh…bikers are to yield to hikers”. Yes, we had thought so too, but the idea had not gained any footing.

We met one couple in a deep ravine. The lady was standing next to the running creek with a six inch rock being held on her forearm. She said she took a little digger. When she lifted the cool wet rock off her arm I had a chance to see what was under the rock. I’m guessing 6 to 8 weeks in a cast was in her future. Ouch!

We did have one other biker yield to us. It was Surfer Dude from the Alpineer. He seemed rather impressed we were up on the trail. He was out on a two day expedition to figure out how he was going to put together his tent, bed roll, water and bike tools for a Mountain biking trip he was getting ready for. He seemed to have little of anything on his back and back of his bike. But I sense He is the type of person who just goes with whatever is happening.

Hiking on we make it to the pass where we need to make a descent down to the 4 x 4 road. We have hiked 8 miles along the 401 trail. Superb views of the valley, surrounding mountains, and flowers! We head down some insane trail that seems to go straight down. This trail is how the Mountain Bikers get themselves up to the 401. They pedal up this trail. I cannot for the life of me find any reason to try to pedal a bike up that steep trail! Albeit the thick woods had refreshing pine smells and full of bluebells; all of which must have gone unnoticed to anyone pedaling in their easiest gear huffing and puffing up a mountain side.

I am standing on a downed log that is about 20 inches tall off of the ground. 
There is another dead log behind me.  In front of me are blue bells and delphiniums

Standing at Schofield Pass on the 4x4 road, we are now going to initiate the car dodging portion of this hike. We have to hike 7 miles down a rutted road. We will get a close and in person look to see if we should be driving our rental on this road tomorrow. We thought we would be able to get the car up to Emerald lake and park there, but after watching a 4 wheel drive truck get hung up on a section that is only as wide as a truck is wide, we decide we will park a bit lower down the road. When we walk over this section of road there is a pick and shovel leaning against the side of the mountain. So imagine, solid rock vertical wall, road perhaps eight feet across, 300 foot drop to lake below. Hmmm, I think walking rather than driving this section will be fine, what is another couple of miles… We find a nice flat rock section to park the car at tomorrow.

As I said earlier we are into our car dodging portion of our hike. Cars were headed back from driving to the West Maroon Bells trail head. There were lots of cars pouring out of there. You might think that someone would offer us a ride…Nope; we just keep hoofing it down the road as fast as we can as a thunderstorm is headed over the pass. I’m betting those cars wanted to get off of that road before the road got wet and nasty. So they just kept dusting us. Oh heck, this is easy hiking now. We end up with a big mileage day, with only a few sprinkles. Storm slipped past us just to the next valley over. Our plans of doing a hike which was shorter today did not pan out. It was our biggest mileage day.

6 Hours 48 minutes

1700 feet of elevation gain

2202 calories burned

17 miles hiked today, total trip: 27.7 miles