Your Weekend Digital Muse

On a bench above Lovely Ouray, the return route for our twice-weekly (read: weakly) 8 mile walk-with-handweights, Bobbie and I take a break and rest our eyes on Lake Lenore. It's a bucolic, Mayberry-like setting, what with the rainbow of inverted canoes lying in repose near shore, leaves of quaking aspen fluttering in the breeze, and a Whitehouse massif backdrop that, lately, lives up to its name. About the only thing missing is "Opie," skipping stones on the lake's placid green surface, while Andy and Aunt Bee look on in admiration.


Slightly below Whitehouse, aspen groves are (finally) showing color; better tardy than truant, I suppose out loud. Bobbie suggests that we need to hike up Corbett Creek and have a look. So we do, in spite of uncooperative blah clouds and spits of rain that challenge and frustrate persnickety photographers. All one can do is minimize the skyline on such days...chop heads off peaks and focus on da glory.

The Corbett Creek Trailhead is only a couple miles from home, but, given the gloom and my pathos, we drive. Fifty feet into the woods is a traditional Forest Service sign-in/registry. In big bold print, the last hikers writes, "Trail is terrible... rocky, unsafe and unmaintained. Come on Forest Service, Do you jobs."  

Probably some flatlander who's ignorant of the fact that the Forest Service does not maintain trails nowadays due to budget constraints. At least around here, almost all trail work is done by volunteers, and they are pretty good at keeping them in satisfactory order. So I'm curious as to just how terrible the trail is. Besides that, these are backcountry trails...not exactly "National Park" status, yet, anyway.

Ok, judge for yourselves. Off we go...dreary day and all.
Now go take a hike,
Your Weekend Digital Muse,
mark and bobbie

FYI: The trail was fine...3 deadfall trees to stoop under or climb over, some loose rocks, and overgrown in a few places, all par for the course around here.