Friday, August 26, 2011

August 2 - Morning hike up Red Canyon

A fellow camper had ridden his mountain bike up one of the local trails and highly recommended it (he was so impressed, in fact, he liked it better than Yellowstone!  Can't say I agree with that!  But the flowers were pretty incredible in a few meadows).  I tried to get a fairly early start to beat the possibility of an afternoon thunderstorm - and also to allow for enough time for Bill and I to investigate some other recommended spots - ghost towns Virginia City and Nevada City (but those will be in the next blog entry).  The trailhead for Red Canyon was just about a mile away from our campground, in the mountains behind Hebgen Lake.  Here are some neat-looking old ranch buildings in front of the turn-off.

 Cow parnsip.  I'm familiar with these flowers as they are all over my favorite trails in CO.

  This hike was really all about the wildflowers!

 More cow parsnips. And you can also see the sky is changing its mind about all that sunshine...!

 A beautiful delphinium/larkspur in colors I hadn't seen in the wild before.

 Wild hollyhock.

 Lupine and sticky geranium.

 Another gorgeous larkspur.

 Woo-hoo!  FLOWERS!!!!

 LOTS of flowers!

 Indian Paintbrush.

 Columbine.

 Pretty nice trail, eh?!

Most of this hike was dry...  But like that last one, this one also ended with me getting rained on!  But again, no biggie - I LIKE rain!  And so do all those flowers I walked amongst! 

No bear sightings - although I was more bear-aware on this hike, since there was only one other car parked at the trailhead, and I never did see that other hiker.  And this was pretty densely vegetated (esp. flowered!), wild country.  Didn't see anything other than deer tracks.


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