Ft Collins - WIntersteen

I was looking for something down low, out of the snow, that I hadn't been to before.  I decided the Wintersteen trail from Seaman's Reservoir to Greyrock Mountain would be a good challenge.  I first encountered the Wintersteen trail on my last hike to Greyrock on the 'normal' trail.  Just before I got to the base of Greyrock, I saw a small lightly used trail heading east.  I noted this and looked on my maps to find out what it was.  The Wintersteen trail is not on all maps, in fact I only found it on one map.  The NATGEO quad maps only show a old pack trail for part of the way, so I knew this would be a bit of a route-finding effort.  I was not disappointed.

I left the Gateway Natural Area parking lot about 830a and headed toward Seaman's Reservoir.  Seaman's Reservoir and the North Fork of the Poudre River are both popular fishing destinations.  The hike to the dam was along a maintenance road.  Once I reached the dam there was an old road up the side of the hill to the top.

Seaman's Dam, the road to the top is around the ridge to the left

As I reached the bottom of the hill, I saw a person about 3/4 way up the hill pulling a small kayak on a wheeled carrier up the hill.  That looked like alot of work and required a dedicated fisherman.  I met the gentleman about a 100 yards from the top and helped him finish the hill.  We got to chatting.  It turns out he was 80 years old and fishes the lake several times a year, bringing his kayak.  He said he hopes to be able to do this for another three years.  I hope when I am 80 I can still do such things.

The trail meanders along the west hillside of the lake with some really nice views.

Reflections of jet contrails on the water

This area was full of well used fisherman trails that went off in all directions, so finding the right trail west was interesting.  I found the trail west soon after encountering this deadfall.

Take the left force after this dead fall

This was my first burned deadfall of the day, I would encounter more.  The trail is at the very northern end of the High Park Fire of 2012.  I would see lots of fire damaged landscapes today.

The initial part of the trail is in a Colorado Wildlife management area.  The trail continued west and up the various hills, soon reaching the edge of management area and entering the National Forest.  There was a sign letting me know I was entering/leaving the management area.  Clearly not too much signage maintenance has been done.

Poudre River Wildlife Management Area

As you can see from this picture, there isn't much of a trail to see.  It would get harder to find.  I continued along the faint trail until I lost it in some rocks.  After some searching I discovered a small cairn of rocks that helped.  If you look carefully you can see them in the picture below.

Find the rock cairn

Once past this area there really was no trail at all.  There were a few rock cairns along the way, but they were few and far between.  Periodically, through heavy deadfall, someone had cut a path by cutting the heavy limbs off of the burned deadfall.  So I could follow that for a while, but eventually, I even lost those.  I resorted to trying to estimate the trail by using a track I had copied onto my GPS and the NATGEO map pack trail.

I discovered this watering hole along the way.  My guess is that someone ran cows up here at some point.

Watering hole

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have considered the hike terribly steep, but with route-finding and managing through the worse deadfall/blowdown I've had to hike through the day was very strenuous.  A couple of pictures show the terrain.

Typical of the path I had to take

I had to work my way through this to the left

In spite of all the black, there are signs of spring.

Signs of spring

I eventually topped the ridge and got a good view of Greyrock from the east.

Greyrock

This was also the site of an old mine, the Brinkhoff Mine.

Brinkhoff mine

As you can see all there is left is a pile of rock and a small depression in the dirt.  I did a quick internet search, but couldn't find anything about the history of the mine; although I did find several things about a Brinkhoff family.  At this point I was almost four hours into the hike.  I knew I would have to route find my way back and still had a couple of miles and 5-600 feet of hard climb to the top of Greyrock, so I decided to turn and head home.

The track back took just as much work to route find back as the way out.  I got back to the truck, took a nap and headed home.  All in all, today was one of the more difficult and less satisfying hikes so far.  Here are a few more pictures of just how damaging a forest fire is, even after five years of recovery.

Overall Track Statistics for Ft. Collins - Wintersteen,   1706 data points

 Length 9.282 miles  :  Garmin Length 10.076 miles

 Start Elevation - 5419.03 feet

 Maximum Elevation - 6962.66 feet

 Minimum Elevation - 5244.16 feet

 Date of Hike - Apr 07, 2017

 Start Time - 08:22 AM

 End Time - 02:05 PM

 Total Duration -     5:43 hours:min

 Total Ascent - 2694.16 feet

 Total Descent - 2869.03 feet

 Net Ascent - -174.87 feet

 Maximum Grade - 19.16%

 Average Speed -  1.62 mph :  Garmin Average Speed  1.74 mph

 Maximum Ascent over Mile - 711.25 feet

 Maximum Speed over Mile -  3.19 mph

 Maximum Gain over Mile (%) - 12.54%