Short Hikes for Wild Flowers and Mountains

Martha and I took the Honda CR-V the 45 miles or so to Crested Butte, CO this morning.

Our first stop was the Brush Creek Trailhead, which is a few miles from the city of Crested Butte itself.  The skies were overcast while we were on the trail and the distant mountains and hills were quite hazy due to the Canadian Wildfires' smoke.

Here's Martha's point of view of the same trail's offerings:

As you can see, the flowers are a little bit past "peak" bloom.  The Crested Butte Wild Flower Festival was last week so I guess they timed it right this year.

We next drove through the traffic morass that was summer traffic in the cities of Crested Butte and Mount Crested Butte (Ski Resort) in order to get to the historic town of Gothic.

Crested Butte

The town used to be a ghost town I think, but now is quite revived with the operation of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.  Apparently started as a place for college kids to study in the 1900s, now more of a research effort.

We drove right through town and to a nearby trailhead overlooked by Mount Gothic's regal rock formations.

Mount Gothic

Martha's take on this trail:

On the way back, the Moose Cow and Calves we'd seen on the way into Gothic were still there.  I stopped safely off the road, unlike the idiots who decided to block the narrow road, to allow Martha to walk towards the moose's location about 2 tenths of a mile away.

Momma Moose

Can you spot the calf?

Once I could tell Martha was done with pictures, I drove up to her and picked her up.  The lane of traffic heading towards Gothic was blocked with parked cars while their Touron passengers continued viewing the moose.

Fortunately, the outbound to Crested Butte lane was open for us to leave the area.

We drove back to camp, to find we had new neighbors.  Oh well.

Then, the techno-crap music started.  We thought it was the new neighbors and tried to tolerate it for a while, no good.

We walked towards our new neighbor but it turned out the noisome bass noise was actually coming from further away!  So we continued onto that campsite and encountered a bunch of teenagers with no apparently adult supervision.

We asked the kid who walked up to us to please turn down the music.  Nurse Martha has her suspicions about the level of impairment evidenced in the kid's eyes.  Still he and a nearby girl agreed to lower the volume.

It took a few minutes for the noise levels to come down but they finally did.  We're hoping things will stay quiet but if not, we do have connectivity and the County Sheriff's number!  

So, an imperfect end to a good day of wild flower hunting.  Such is apparently camping in Colorado during the school summer vacation period.