Conquering Crag Crest

When we arrive at a new area, we try to find the best hike to take.  We ask fellow hikers and game rangers, and that’s how we discovered the Crag Crest Trail.  So again we made the hour-long trip to the Grand Mesa for this 10.3 mile hike.  We started the hike at Upper Eggleston Lake.

It was 63 degrees when we started hiking, and those long sleeves felt good.  We headed straight up towards the crest of the mesa, and that would include hiking through large boulder fields.

 We hiked through a grassy meadow and spotted a big beautiful mushroom.  We are pretty sure this is the king bolete mushroom that we have been searching for.  But we weren't sure enough to carry this hefty mushroom for the next 9 miles.

We had only hiked an hour and a half when we reached the first ridge and the trail that would follow the crest.

The view from the ridge was awesome!  As we looked to the south, we could look down on some of those 350 lakes that Grand Mesa is famous for.

We could actually look both north and south from the narrow ridge that we were hiking on.

That crest was indeed craggly.  Here's a shot of the narrow trail that follows the ridge, with Denisa just barely visible at the crest.

As we progressed along the crest, gray clouds started covering the blue skies.  Crag Crest would not be a good place to be in a lightning storm.

We reached the peak of the crest about 3.5 miles into the hike.  From one single point on the trail we could look down and see 16 different lakes below us.

We had to take the classic picture on the top of Crag Crest.  We had climbed from 10,150 at Eggleston Lake to 11,189 at the crest.

After reaching the climax of this loop hike, we still had seven miles to hike to get back to the car.  On the down-hill section of the crest we hiked through meadows and forests.  We decided this should be called the mushroom trail because we were entertained by a multitude of mushroom species.  Because we know nothing about their scientific classifications, we gave them names.  This would be the sesame-seed-bun mushroom.

We assumed this bright red mushroom was poisonous if it followed nature's rule of "Red means Dead."  Then Mark pointed out that Denisa had been snacking on the wild red raspberries she picked along the trail, and she was still feeling fine.

Compared to the views from the crest, the last seven miles were a little boring.  We spent a lot of time in the forest, dodging those showers that did appear in the afternoon.  In fact, some of the precipitation appeared as sleet at that high altitude.  It was interesting to be hiking in August with a cold nose and goose bumps, and ice on the trail.  But there were still plenty of wildflowers!

It was a six hour hike, and we were ready to head off this Grand Mesa towards home by the time we reached the car.  We took the gravel forest road down off the mesa towards Colbran.  As we traveled 19 miles down the road, we were also traveling 5000 feet down in elevation.  After a day in the 60's on the mesa, temperatures were in the 90's in the valley.  

We had been looking for wildlife all day on our hike, but only bunnies and chipmunks came out to entertain us.  So when we came upon a herd of elk in the valley we were pretty excited.  There was an entire herd of elk bulls with amazing racks, so we had to take a picture.

Then we saw another herd of elk, and another herd of elk, and another . . .  That's when we realized we had discovered Plateau Valley Elk Ranch near Colbran.

We were tired by the time we got to our home parked at Vega State Park.  This is our last day here, as we will be heading down the road towards new adventures.  After five days without phone service or internet, we are glad to be heading towards civilization once again.  On our last evening at Vega State Park we had a rain shower--followed by a pretty rainbow over the lake.