East Buffalo Peak

Has it been almost a month since I last posted, geesh!  We’ve been doing quite a bit of hiking and have gotten a lot of elevation this summer and I don’t always get to posting a hiking report – I’ve been slacking.  But this peak was a good hike with trees, talus and skeletons, and a pure white arrowhead found by Tom.  J  We’ll be back for West Buffalo Peak, our time ran out and we had a long drive back to Denver.  So, this is the story of East Buffalo Peak, alone.

We got an early start, as usual, picked up our friends and drove down 285 past Fairplay and turned off on a forest road.  We arrived at the “trailhead” – I use this term loosely, it was a forest road that had been closed, not quite a trailhead.  We started off into the trees and headed in the direction of East Buffalo Peak.  This area is a maze of old forest roads, mostly overgrown and a bit difficult to navigate.  We realized that it was going to be very easy to overshoot the “path” we took, so we started leaving markers along the way – branches propped up, marks on the ground, etc.  We probably lost some time in those trees, figuring out the best way to get to the ridge we needed to gain, but we eventually popped out of the trees (for a minute) and got an eyeball on the target once again.

So, on and up we went.  I’m not sure if this area is a popular hunting area for man or beast, but elk and deer bones were EVERYWHERE in a few meadows we crossed.

Unfortunately, those two heads came back home with us, I’m just waiting for them to be on display in the front yard.  Ugh.

We finally emerged from the trees for good and had a steep grassy slope to climb to get on top of the ridge to the peak.

Taking a break on the saddle.

We tried to pose for a picture, but Tom decided to goof around instead, so we got a somewhat more candid shot.

From here, it was my favorite (not) talus.  This field was pretty stable, but it’s still unnerving at times when something shifts and you recall all the stories about rock slides triggered by hikers – some ending very badly.  You can see my friend Andi lower on the picture and Tom perched way on top, he took the high road and went up and over the ridge.

The final push up to the ridge was pretty steep, but grassy and easily navigable:

Taking another break before moving on – there were some snowball fights and general snow fun at this stop.

 

Then

Then we got down to climbing the last bit to the summit.  On top it was grassy, flat and had amazing views – simply fantastic.  And, of course, as on most 13ers, we had it all to ourselves:

We toyed with the idea of heading over to West Buffalo from this peak, but it would’ve added probably 2 hours onto our hike and put us back in Denver pretty late on a Sunday evening.  So, we opted to save that one for another day.

All in all, a great hike, not too difficult and we found plenty of solitude.  I snapped this just before we entered back into treeline on the way down.  These high meadows are one of my favorite things about off trail hiking – they are peaceful, green and filled with nothing but nature.

We’re hoping to hike again on Sunday, so look for another report!