Water falls on the south fork of Oh-be-Joyful Creek

August 1-3, 2014, Friday Oh-be-joyful Creek 10,115, north 38 55 40, west 107 05 42 3.7 miles, 721 Raggeds Wilderness, Gunnison National Forest Gunnison County, Colorado Elaine met at my house at 7 am. I was packing my stuff in the truck when she arrived. We left at about 7:30. I drove the truck to US-285 to US-24 to Chaffee County 306 over Cottonwood Pass, to Forest Service Road (FS) 742 to the Jacks Cabin Cutoff (FS-813) to CO-135 to Crested Butte, the Wildflower Capitol of Colorado. Then it was northwest on the gravel FS-734 to the Oh-be-joyful Campground along the Slate River, and then through Slate River and up a 4WD road about a mile to where the road got really 4WD and we parked. It took 5 hours. We started hiking at 12:30. It was cloudy. We hiked in for two hours along Oh-be-joyful Creek. It was a gradual uphill hike and relatively easy hiking on the good trail. We crossed into the Raggeds Wilderness about a half mile from where we parked the truck. We got rained on and stopped to put on rain gear. The rain stopped shortly after that. We found a place to camp at 10,115 along Oh-be-joyful Creek very close to its confluence with Blue Lake Creek, almost 800 in elevation higher than the truck. The skies did not look like they would clear up any time soon. We set up camp, including the kitchen tarp. The skies didn t clear up, but there was no more rain for the entire three days. In fact, the weather was great. After we set up and pumped water for cooking and drinking we did a little exploring up the trail. We walked the main trail (FS 836) past the confluence and found a couple of water falls on the Blue Lake Creek, at about 10,230. The creek, unnamed, flowed out of Blue Lake, about two miles from camp on the trail and a thousand feet higher. Water falls on the south fork of Oh-be-Joyful Creek 1

The area had obviously been receiving a lot of rain. The ground was lush with wild flowers and deep green bushes. By the water falls and at camp spruce and fir provided ample shade under the cloudy skies. The ground was moist. Timber line occurred there at about the ten thousand foot elevation, but in this part of the valley the conifers were thick up to over ten thousand five hundred feet. The Oh-bejoyful valley curved around the massif of Peeler and Garfield Peaks (12,227 and 12,005, respectively) on the south. On the north the valley rose to Schuylkill Mountain (12,146 ). The south facing slopes of Schuylkill Mountain were close to treeless, but still covered with green grass and brush. The north facing slopes of Peeler and Garfield were thick with spruce and fir up to timberline where green grass and brush covered the slopes up to the rock and tundra, even higher up. Numerous streams cascaded down the steep slopes from the higher basins on both sides of the valley into Oh-be-joyful Creek. The water in all the streams and creeks was crystal clear. Oh-be-joyful itself flowed down the valley through steep rocky canyons in the higher elevations to the west and into a mix of meadows and rocky canyons in the lower elevations to the east. We both started to photograph flowers and landscape. We explored and took pictures until about six PM. Then we started down toward camp. At the confluence of the two creeks the trail had been washed out more than a couple of times and more than a few trail options could be taken. We took one that involved an easier crossing of the shallow creek. It took us parallel to and a bit lower than the main trail. It came out on the main rail at a meadow. We followed the main trail about five minutes more before we realized we had already walked past camp. We turned around and walked back up and found camp again. The optional trail had skirted the point where we left the main trail and made camp, so we missed it. We made better mental notes of the area for the next time. We were back in camp at about 6:30 and prepared dinner. It was still cloudy but beginning to clear up. We ate Mountain House potatoes and cheese with broccoli, and a garlic flavored potato cup. We topped it off with a cutie (tangerine) and some apple crisps. Elaine had tea and I had some chicken broth. Clean up was a snap and well before dark we were watching deer in the meadow just east of our camp. We were tired though and I went to bed. Elaine took some more photos of the clouds and the sunset and then she retired to the tent. Saturday morning we were up by 7:30. While lying in the sleeping bag I heard an elk chirp, and it sounded close. I commented to Elaine that the sound was an elk. I wasn t sure if she heard the elk, if she heard me, or if she was even awake. I thought I should get up and see if I could see elk and I got up. The inside of the tent was damp from condensation of our breath on the tent walls. I thought to myself we would have to open more windows at night to alleviate that problem. I crawled out of the tent and put my boots on. That was about 7. I did a quick check of the area and saw nothing in the meadows on either side of the stand of trees we were camped in. I started water for coffee and breakfast and then I walked out from under the trees to the edge of the meadow just east of camp. I took more time checking out the north slope, across Oh-be-joyful Creek and below Garfield Peak. Up at the top of the slope in the thick brush and sparse trees I spied a couple of elk grazing. I went and got binoculars out of the tent for a better look. Elaine joined me just about then and we checked the two elk out for a while before they disappeared over the lip of the bench. They were not close to camp, but we got a good look through the binoculars. 2

The water was hot by the time the elk disappeared so we returned to the kitchen and had breakfast. We had oatmeal with some trail mix in it, coffee, tea and tang. Clean up was quick. By 9 am we had secured camp, packed goodies for the day and started up the trail toward Democrat Basin. We were hoping to see a lot of wildflowers and no people. Elaine had broken her leg earlier in the year and was not showing any sign of issues with that leg. In fact she was doing extra duty. Before she retired the evening before, she had marked out a path through the thick underbrush from the Oh-be-joyful Trail to camp. It was a lot easier to follow her markings to the main trail than to pick our way through the thick brush. Another of many small waterfalls on Oh-be-Joyful Creek A few hundred yards up the trail we veered off to the right, or north, toward the sound of a water fall. We easily found it and got some photos and took a GPS reading for future reference (UTM coordinates). The falls we had explored the evening before were on the Blue Lake Creek, or maybe the south fork of Oh-be-joyful Creek. The falls we found in the morning were on Oh-be-joyful Creek. Both creeks had numerous falls cascading over dark rock. Then we walked west on the trail up to the junction of trails 836 and 404. Trail 404 went south over the 11,840 Garfield Pass, just south of Garfield Peak. We took trail 836 north into Democrat Basin. Above tree line at the west end of the Oh-be-joyful valley included a couple of basins bounded on the west by the north-south Ruby Range. Ruby Range was formed by Ruby Peak (12,644 ), Mount Owen (13,058 ) and Purple Peak (12,810 ) on the south and Afley Peak (12,646 ), Oh-bejoyful Peak (12,325 ), Hancock Peak (12,410 ), and Richmond Mountain (12,501 ) to the north. All of the area after the trail junction to the peaks was above timberline. Wild strawberries grew in most of the lower elevation meadows. We ate a few. We spent most of the day on Saturday exploring Democrat Basin below Richmond Mountain and Hancock Democrat Basin, about 11,000 3

Peak. On the north ridge of the basin we could see the trail through the green tundra ascending to a small cut between Richmond Mountain and Schuylkill Mountain Daisy Pass at 11,640 above sea level. The basin to the south held Blue Lake at 11,055. The maps show the Trail 404 traversing the bowl 300 feet below Blue Lake. We wondered if folks had to make their own way up to the lake from the trail, or if there was a worn path up. We didn t go there so we would not find out. Over the rest of the weekend we would come to realize that a lot of hikers go to Blue Lake, at least relative to Democrat Basin. Apparently the fishing is good at Blue Lake. In Democrat Basin we saw one person, a trail runner, apparently running from either Daisy Pass or Garfield Pass. We encountered him just before we got up into the basin while walking north from the trail junction. We didn t see any large animals or many birds in the basin either, but we saw a 250 acre bouquet of wild flowers. When we had started our hike from the truck I had been thinking that there weren t many wild flowers in this Wildflower Capitol. But the higher we hiked the more abundant the colorful flowers became. In Democrat Basin we spent most of the day checking out and photographing wildflowers. There were so many in fact, that we could not possibly identify or photograph all of the different varieties. We did get a lot of photographs. Many of the photos would be required in order to identify the flowers later. The weather was perfect - bright blue skies with puffy cumulus clouds, some bright white, others with a hint of gray. Almost no wind blew. In the basin were a number of streams and waterfalls. We explored those on the south west side of the basin. We experimented with different methods and settings for photographing the flowers, and the landscape. It seems like a person walking around up there gets used to the landscape up in areas like that, but the colors and backdrops were just astounding. We did see some animals in the basin. Mosquitoes were not among them. After spending hours exploring the basin we started heading toward the trail to go down at about 12:30. In one of the creeks we came across a six point bull elk that had died naturally, probably in the fall of 2013. Animals had eaten almost all of the body, but the head, complete with antlers, was partially buried in the soft soil and grass next to the stream. We theorized that he got stuck in the creek or maybe broke a leg in the creek, and then lay there until he died. While walking in a marshy area around a few ponds we found a small (1½ ) frog hopping around in the grass and flowers. At about 1:30 we were on the trail again, walking down from the junction. On the main trail (836) we passed a handful of day-hikers. Most were on the way to Blue Lake. The first guy we passed was carrying a fly rod and on his way to Blue Lake with his female companion. He said the fishing at Blue Lake was pretty good, with a reminiscent chuckle. He also commented that Oh-be-joyful Creek was pretty good too. Before we got back to camp we had counted close to a dozen people out for a day-hike. We were going to stop at the water falls we had explored the day before and get a GPS reading, but we walked past it before we realized it. There was no trail or path to any of the falls. We had found them by their sound. Back at camp we proceeded to unlax. We boiled water for a cup of soup. It was good stuff, a Thai peanut soup and a Thai curry soup. We watched the slope across the creek for a while and then, individually, made our way over to the creek. Elaine was exploring and I was filling the water bottles. We met up by a couple of ponds in the meadow, crossed the creek, and climbed up to a small waterfall we could see from camp. There were no easy places to cross Oh-be-joyful Creek. Elaine accidently stepped in 4

some water deep enough to spill over the top of her boots. My boots were a lot taller, but my boots leaked. They had leaked a couple of hikes earlier in the year too. I was hoping to test them out again as part of this trip, and hoping they would not leak. When I stepped in the six or seven inch deep water one of the Rocky Sport Utility Max Insulated Waterproof Boots leaked apparently through the toe or tongue area. We both stopped to wring out socks. Two streams spilled out of a small 11,000 basin below Garfield Peak, one on the west side of what looked like an avalanche chute, and the other on the east side. We could tell that there had not been an avalanche in that chute for a number of winters because there were a lot of young trees, some ten or fifteen feet high. There were other evergreens that had been plowed over by a rumbling snow slide and had since grown around and up toward the life giving sun, yielding a half circle trunk. We got up to where the falls were but couldn t get to the falls because of the thick brush and steep slope. We think we were just below them and just above them, but we could not see them from up on the slope like we could from camp. We went back to camp, dejected - we did not get to the falls, and our socks were wet. I broke out a drawing tablet and drew what I thought I had correctly identified as an Actinella (it was actually an orange sneezeweed flower). I spent a half an hour drawing it. Elaine went to the tent to get her drawing pad and got stuck on the sleeping bag and it was lights out for her. I walked around the slope on the north side of Oh-be-joyful Creek near camp looking for a red flower to draw. I settled for a purple larkspur. I sat on a log right next to it and spent the 30 minutes sketching it, and then returned to the tent. Elaine was up. We heated water for dinner, a three-cheese lasagna dri-lite packaged meal. It was pretty good. We also had a potato cup, cuties and tea. Another good dinner, and easy to prepare and clean up. After dinner we sat on a log in the meadow next to camp and watched the slope beneath Garfield Peak and reviewed the photos we had taken. I spied a deer foraging from the west to the east in the big avalanche chute. For twenty minutes we watched it eat its way across the chute, stopping for a bite, moving a bit, and then munching some more grass. The slope across Oh-be-joyful had a few avalanche chutes. The big chute that we watched the most was directly across from camp. Two more, smaller, chutes to the east were separated by stands of huge evergreens. While we were trying to keep track of the deer in the big trees Elaine spotted a black bear in the middle of the big chute. The bear was foraging from west to east too, but a little lower on the slope than the deer, and moving much quicker. We watched the bear for about ten minutes before it disappeared into the trees to the east. I was glad to see it didn t come down to the creek - and closer to camp. It was starting to get dark. I decided to retire and Elaine took some more pictures, of clouds and the sunset and then joined me in the tent. We slept in on Sunday until almost 9 AM. Except for the wall that had no window, the tent had no condensation in it from the night. We slept in the opposite direction as the previous night, because that direction gave us maybe three extra inches. I crawled over Elaine to get out and put the water on the MSR propane stove. I checked out the slopes again, but saw no mammals. We had a repeat of Saturday s breakfast. We cleaned up and packed some gear so that we could walk up and check out the waterfalls again. I had not taken the GPS coordinates reading Friday evening and wanted to get a location reading for that water fall. We walked up the trail for maybe fifteen minutes and found the waterfalls. Again, we navigated off the trail by the sound of the falls. I took my readings. There were a bunch of waterfalls along that south fork of the Oh-be-joyful. After the guy we talked to Saturday afternoon had said that Oh-be-joyful had good fishing, I was watching the stream for fish. I didn t see any. We spent an hour exploring more and taking more photos. On the way back to camp we passed about six or nine day hikers on the way up. At camp we packed everything up and were ready to hike out by noon. We didn t hike directly to the truck. We stopped a number of times for even more photos. Some stretches of the trail had the flower shop aroma. We narrowed the aroma down to the abundant blooming lupines. We saw a garter snake, again. We saw a couple throughout the two days, but this one was not moving too fast. I suppose we could have snatched it up for a better look, but we left alone. We passed maybe fifteen day hikers, and a trail runner, all going up the trail. We got to the truck at about 1:45. We loaded our gear in the truck, and had refreshment. I had a cold Bud 5

and Elaine had a cold root beer. Then we started down the mile of rough road to Slate River. We used the outhouses in the campground at Slate River, checked the (free) campground out and then took off for home. We drove through a crowded Crested Butte. A couple of events were in progress so it was slow going through town. We drove home a different route. This would be a test if the US-50 Gunnison route was faster than the Cottonwood Pass route. The US-50 Gunnison route turned out to be a half hour faster, and we drove with a lot of traffic almost the whole way. We hit some rain in South Park and got the bugs off the windshield. We got home at 6:30. 6