Crested Butte - Part 2 of 4

The next day had a better weather forecast so we wanted to jump right into some hiking.  The mountains around this area are absolutely gorgeous.  Our first choice for a day hike was trying to drive over past the West Maroon trail head and park for a short hike to what's called Devil's Punch Bowl.  It was supposed to be a crazy waterfall that drops right into a mountain pond.  What we found after all the rain was an absolute zoo of a muddy dirt road trying to get there.  After a few miles on the road past where the pavement ended, we saw a few four wheel drive trucks spun out off the side of the road near this bridge that had been stuck for over an hour.  They said the road only got worse up ahead.  I was fairly confident that my driving skills were superior to those who were in the ditch, but we decided to turn around and retrace our tracks about a half mile to a new trail head.  This new trail head led to a hike past Judd Falls and toward Aspen to another small lake.  Luckily, we were one of the first people there, which was quite nice as it was more congested on the hike down and the limited parking spaces at the trail head.

This is a picture of some of the beautiful columbines we saw along the hike. It was just a short hike to the first destination point, which was Judd Falls.  After a little under a mile we soon arrived:

This is Judd Falls from across the canyon, but is about as close as you can get to the falls themselves without risking life and limb.  After staying a few minutes to take it all in, we started off toward the second destination.

This weathered sign indicates the start of the Maroon Bells Wilderness in Gunnison National Forest.  The trail would actually take you all the way to Aspen if you followed it far enough, but we were not looking for that serious of an adventure.  We did hike for a good several miles until making it to a river crossing.  We sized up the crossing (that was about 15 feet wide with a decent current that would be shin to ankle deep) and decided we might follow this very lightly trodden path that continued alongside the river rather than crossing it.  It was apparent after a bit more hiking down this path that it was probably not going to work back anytime soon to the main trail so we decided to turn around.  As it turns out, there were four more river crossings on the way to the lake we were aiming for and we probably had easily another hour or two to go if we had not turned around.  Maybe next trip we can try to get all the way to the lake, but it was a great hike.

After the hike and a shower we decided to relax on the nice leather furniture in our house.  What you can't quite see from this picture is that across from me is a view that looks out across the whole Crested Butte Basin and down onto the town.  There were wall to wall windows to capture every bit of the view.  Pretty amazing!