We woke up and ate a pancake breakfast. Today we were going to Grays Peak! (My mountain!) Well, it wasn’t MY mountain but it had a similar name. On the way up to get to the trail head, the road was REALLY BUMPY. We were bouncing all around in the car! We stopped to look at some mule deer at the side of the road.
Mule deer on the side of the road!
Finally we got there and we started the hike. On the way up we saw this old abandoned mine from a distance. We continued the trail with Grays Peak ahead. On the trail, we saw some mountain goats on the side of a mountain next to us!
Mountain goats!
We got to a place that looked much like the print in the book. The perspective was not quite right so we had to cut off trail just a little bit. We walked over to this small pile of rocks, and it looked pretty close. Then we saw the small creek that was in the picture and one ahead of us. THIS WAS IT.
THE SPOT
SPOT
We had found the vantage point! We made a really AWESOME rock stack to mark the spot and made a cool design around it with dead limbs that were laying around.
Rock stack
We took the photo and headed further up the trail to get a picture of me on my mountain. We hiked along the lower spine of the mountain that was sloped on each side. On the way up to that it started to snow a little bit and we got to another place like Pika Pass!
PIKA CUTENESS
Pikas were running around everywhere chirping! One that we saw had grass in its mouth! We had to pass them pretty fast because we had to continue before it got dark. So we headed up faster and saw tons of marmots running around as we went up. Once on the spine, we had a small snack and took some photos of me in the middle of my mountain. I felt good, I was up pretty high and I was happy!
MARMOT O.O
On Grays Peak
We had to head back down to beat the sunset. On the way, Elias and I saw marmots wrestling! They were tumbling down the hill flipping all around down the cliff! It was pretty funny! The marmots kept doing this weird tail flip at us like they didn’t like us! Ha ha! We took some more pictures of pikas on the way back down and we did have one more view of Grays Peak to look for on the way down. We had to cut off trail again, but we were careful to not hurt the vegetation. We ended up finding a spot similar to it, but it wasn’t it. We looked around and went under a pine to check out a small clearing. It looked really close! We decided to just think that that was it because we could not get ANYWHERE else.
The second spot!
We snapped a photo and headed down to this creek to cross.
The creek
On the other side we climbed up to the abandoned mine. It was really creepy. There was a lot of old rusty pipes and metal and a dark mine shaft with its door busted down. It was very close to dark. Tons of old abandoned broken down things were around.
Mine
Broken Mine
A broken down thing.
We headed down to get to the parking lot, but along the way we met someone who was camping by the river. We told him about Preserving A Picturesque America and he was very interested. He also liked our hiking sticks and was an Eagle Scout. We had to head out because it was getting really dark. We made it to the car, drove back to our place for the night, and fell into our beds. Thoughts were running though my head about all the things that we had done, and about my family and friends.