Monday, January 15, 2018

Metberry/Longwater Gulches - 12/30/2017

Patrol 14 wanted to get out, but where can you go when the mountains are snowed in?  We had a few choices, we could just go play in the snow, which meant a lot of digging; OR, we could find trails at lower elevations.  Well, we decided to head to the gulches, lower elevations, and not difficult trails; and IF we did run into snow, any day away from the city can’t be bad.  We met at the Deckers store and headed down to the trail head about 9:30 on Saturday. Once we were off the highway, we found a nice wide spot near the trail head to air down.



Our goal for the day was to run Metberry and Longwater Gulches. If you have never been to the gulches, home of the Hayman fire, it is worth a trip to see the devastation that was left by some foolish human being. We encountered a number of downed trees across the trails. Of course, we took the time to remove these from the trails and placed them along the trailside to discourage the ATV’s in the area from going off-trail.  I think we will continue to see lots of trees across the roads in this area since the fire was in 2002, and many of the trees in that area are now starting to fall due to rot. In fact, a tree feel across the trail in the time between when we headed down the trail and returned to the trailhead.


Even though temps were in the 50’s and there was very little snow in the area, the river was covered with a significant amount of ice. 



A typical Patrol 14 tradition are Hot Dogs on Gary Boudreau’s grill.  Of course, what goes better on a Jeep run and a beautiful day than Hot Dogs, Chips and cookies? Thanks, as always, to Gary for bringing along the BBQ unit and grilling those dogs. Sweet treats were also plentiful.
 

Our group descended the one descent obstacle for the day.  Of course, this isn’t extremely difficult. It looked a lot more intimidating than it actually was.  In my opinion, coming up the rock was a lot more fun.







It was a great day to get out and enjoy some mid-winter wheeling.