Hello?

Oh hey, we didn’t see you come in.

It’s been a while! Apologies for that.

This is not the first hike we’ve attempted in 2020. Though, through a series of not-so-fortunate events, it is the first hike this year worth being written about here.

With snow on the decline and temperatures on the rise, we made way for a hike in the foothills near Roxborough, CO. Our ultimate goal was to reach a small summit near the Platte River called Turkshead Peak. Waterton Canyon, the main access point for this area, had been closed to hikers for several months at this point. We instead opted to take an offshoot of the Colorado Trail in Roxborough called Trail 19 to get to our destination.

The trail started with that sometimes necessary evil: stairs. The long-forgotten railroad ties stretched up ahead just as the morning clouds were giving way to midday sun. Scrub oaks don’t do much in the way of shade, and we were grateful to finally reach the Pike National Forest boundary, and the evergreens beyond it.

The trees gave way for a short while to an open meadow intermingled with aspen stands, the remains of fields once used by a long-gone homestead. All that was left of said homestead was a handful of fence posts and a few beams that would have been part of a house. A stream trickled by nearby, lending a note of peacefulness to what would have otherwise been a solemn segment of this trail.

Beyond the stream we were back among the pines, and the trail forked right as we moved down towards the upper portions of Waterton Canyon. The flora shifted again to scrub oak as we approached the canyon floor, and Turkshead Peak became visible through the branches. We reached the juncture of the trail and the dirt road in the canyon. There was a large plastic sign with several paragraphs worth of writing in the middle of the trail. Our eyes went straight to the sentence that said “Hikers from Roxborough Trail 19 and Colorado Trail excepted,” and we carried on our merry way.

After passing a ranger’s house with a herd of big horn sheep in the front yard, we happened by some Denver Water employees, one of whom approached us. “You guys know this area is closed, right?”

“We hiked in from Roxborough.”

“Yeah, the sign said…”

The worker said what sounded like some other regulations he had just made up off the top of his head and asked us to turn around. Turkshead Peak was off the table. We decided to take the scenic route back to Roxborough and went the other direction up the canyon towards another offshoot of the Colorado Trail that would loop us around near Indian Creek. While resting in the shade near the next trailhead, another worker in a backhoe stopped. “You guys know this area is closed, right?”

“Yeah… Colorado Trail… We’re going that way…”

We made a bunch of hand gestures to get the idea across, which must have worked, because he drove off and left us alone. We carried on up the trail before anyone else stopped by, switchbacking up to the ridge of a large foothill.

With a destination no longer in mind except to return to our cars, the rest of the hike went by quickly. We followed by Indian Creek for a short time before reconnecting with the trail we had hiked in on. Once back in Roxborough, we found that we had still managed about 10 miles of trail and a couple thousand feet of gain. While we hadn’t been able to reach our summit goal, it had still been a good training hike for the season ahead.

~Ty & Sky