Snapshots from Eagle's Nest Colorado

6/9


To take the path less travelled in the case of Gore Creek vs. Deluge Creek turns out to be plenty worthwhile.  The Gore Creek trail is understandably one of the most used trails in the Vail valley, as it is easy access and shows the origin of the fierce namesake river that defines the valley and city.

Deluge is less travelled. It is a narrowly cut trail, no wider than the width of a hiker's walking gate and as pictures of previous years shows, the trail is often over run on either side by wildflowers; it is steep for the first two two miles, rising up through hardscrabble, not to mention the fact that it looks

something like a wild life playground...so close to the trail that your eyes have to be adjusted to a more immediate possible encounter from anything from deer, marmot, moose or bear.  And yet this side of the Gore valley is more verdant, sprawling by wider stretches of wildflower meadow, fir and aspen, as well as lodgepole pine.  Once up above the 2-mile mark, the trail evens out some, and one is

left with a view below that transports to visions of subalpine scenes of the Alps.  Like Gore, Deluge leads to a lake eventually, just over 11,000 feet up, where written descriptions have described seeing a mountain lion off in the distance near the lake, and where, one climbing party says, a band of mountain goats that chased the climbers off the ridge and back onto the trail.  In other words...this is a trail that gets the hiker about as close to walking up the raw side of a mountain as possible. The fact that there is less foot traffic here means that there is less disruption in the patterns of the wild and that it is important to stay in tune to each coming rocky peak around the bend. This seems to be a sure way that the trail becomes well imprinted on the imagination and one that is not easily forgettable.