A Hike to the Cabin

My friend, Robert, came up with a wild proposal.
 
Several years ago he built himself a cabin on the mountain and it is one of his favorite places in the world to visit. Nestled with the quaking aspen and near an alpine pond it is an abode to hang and relax, and to bring the children and grandchildren. For Rob, it is heaven on earth. The possibility of creating an adventure that included his cabin added an extra allure. So what was this wild proposal?
 

Dawn in Fiddlers Canyon.

We parked the truck high up in the Fiddlers Canyon subdivision and walked in the dark past a gate and onto a dirt road that eventually dropped into the canyon. The mostly full moon had set just minutes ago. We passed an old rock dam covered in wire that had been built by the CCC's in the 30's or 40's.
 
Once in the canyon Rob walked ahead of me and used a flashlight for the first ten minutes. It was peaceful and quiet. Any sign of city life had truly been left behind. Here we found a trail that took us out of the wash and onto a parallel route above it on the bench. I don't know if the path was a recent construct, but I don't remember it when I hiked here twenty years ago.
 

For our entire hike we saw no other people. But along our initial stages of the canyon we spotted some boot prints and found a couple vacant camping spots.
 

The stream soon became frozen over with ice.

Along the bottom of the wash flowed a small stream. Much of the surface of the stream was frozen over with a sheet of ice thick enough to walk on. Sometimes it would crack, but rarely did we fall through. The further into the canyon we traveled, the more the wash stepped up in levels. We discovered that these small steps created beautiful ice-falls.
 
Some of the waterfalls became large and we had to carefully climb the rocks around them so as not to slip on the ice. Other ledges were so sheer that we had no choice but to circumvent the falls by climbing on the hillside.
 

Climbing up another level in the canyon.

One of the many spectacular frozen falls in Fiddlers Canyon.

Typical stretch of the canyon.

The walls of the canyon blocked any sunlight from reaching us. The first appearance of its warming rays came at 9:25, nearly three hours after we began.
 
For over four hours we navigated the canyon. The terrain became rougher as we went. Without any sort of GPS navigation tool, we didn't know exactly how far we had traveled and only had a printed version of Google Maps to make any sort of guess. We were hoping to follow a drainage coming in from the north, but hadn't found it.
 

Frozen waterfall.

Pine hen hiding in the trees.

At one point we came to another large dry-fall that prevented our passage forward. (At this place the stream had recently disappeared.) We decided to climb out of the canyon on the north side to get our bearings and to scope the canyon which appeared to only be getting rougher. This was a tangled mess climbing out. Thick, overgrown brush clogged the entire hillside and the climb up was very steep. We found several really old posts that had been cut with a saw. That gave us hope that maybe we were near an old road or trail, but we didn't find anything.
 

Finally exiting the canyon.

This was our view once we exited the canyon.

At last we made it over the lip of the canyon and into a small meadow. We still had a long climb until we were on top of the mountain, but from here Rob could pinpoint exactly where we were. On the peak in front and to our right was Windy Ridge, marked with a large antenna on top. Half a mile or so to the left, and lower in elevation was a pavilion.⸺We aimed our hike toward the pavilion.
 
This was no walk in the park. In fact, it was probably our roughest stretch of the day. Once again we walked through tangled oak brush. If we found a game trail, we were lucky. But usually our trajectory consisted of twenty to fifty-foot segments of whichever direction seemed to have the least obstructed path. Our hands and arms received many scrapes from the branches. Rob somehow cut his hand and had blood smeared all over the side of his shirt. In some places we had to crouch low, nearly crawling on the ground. Some of the bushes had thorns like a rose bush.⸺All this while moving on a persistent upward slope that gained several hundred feet in elevation.
 

It was refreshing to at last walk on a road.

Refrigerator Canyon.

At 2:00 p.m. we finally arrived at the pavilion. What a relief! We now believed we had the hardest part of the hike behind us. The pavilion was a wooden structure built many years ago to entice buyers to purchase lots. Some developer had envisioned a subdivision at 8,500 feet on a mountain and even paved a road to get there. The entire plan fell through and hardly a single dwelling was ever built. Even the pavement is now cracking.
 
For two miles we walked on a series of high-mountain roads, the first stretch paved, but the rest dirt or gravel. We crested near 9,000 feet, then worked our way down toward the cabin. Like I stated earlier, we didn't see another soul. This section was by far the easiest stretch of our entire hike.
 

The cabin.

We arrived at the cabin at 3:38⸺much later than we had hoped. It would have been nice to sit down at the table to have a bite to eat, then lay on the sofa and take a nap. That didn't happen. Daylight was running out.
 
But our brief visit was nonetheless pleasant. The cabin had a one-room design with the exception of a bathroom and bedroom. The wood-burning stove and furniture gave a rustic feel. We replenished our water and Gatorade, and found snacks in the cupboard. Since the water was turned off for the winter we had to flush the toilet by dumping a mixture of water and antifreeze from 10-gallon jugs.
 
After our all-to-short visit to the cabin, we donned our packs once again and continued our hike. A narrow four-wheeling trail leads from the cabin past a pond, and a few hundred yards later arrives at the rim of Braffits Canyon.
 

After entering Braffits Canyon, it didn't take long for the stream to transform from this . . .

. . . into this!

A path leads into the canyon, which is very beautiful. A stream two-feet wide is flanked on both sides by high mountain grass, pine trees and fallen leaves. Much of the stream was covered in a sheet of ice. The small waterfalls looked like stretched out cotton candy.
 
We would have loved to enjoy the scenery, but we had a task to accomplish, and that was to hike as far as we could while we still had daylight. The day had already taken it's toll on our bodies, especially for Rob, whose thighs were giving out on him. The canyon continued to tumble downward in a rugged fashion, with twelve-foot drop-offs becoming frequent. Luckily, there was always a way down.
 
When the alpenglow came, our hearts raced with anxiety. We knew this was the golden sunlight before it became dark. We took advantage of our last bit of light, knowing we were still deep in the canyon. I wasn't too excited about climbing down ledges with a flashlight.
 

One of the many ledges we had to climb down.

Well . . . guess what? The sun went down and we found ourselves picking our way in the dark with a flashlight. The going was much slower now. We stopped several times for Rob to take a break. I turned off my flashlight and ate a Milky Way bar in the dark, listening to the gurgle of the stream and the soft breeze on the cliffs. We both worried about mountain lions lurking along the ledges.
 
The terrain didn't become any easier. About every five minutes we came to another ledge, forcing us to navigate a way down. We were very grateful to have always found a way down, because it was my worry that we would get ledged up and have to spend a cold night in the canyon.
 
As we got lower into the canyon, thick vegetation began to grow around the stream. At one point I had to crawl on all-fours just to make it through. And all this in the dark! The willows became so thick that we soon found it necessary to exit the canyon and walk on the side-slopes. Here we found the relics of an old mine. We hoped that might mean there would be an old road also, but no such luck. We were still bush-whacking through the scrub oak.
 
So we decided to drop back down into the stream bed and cross to the other side where the growth might not be as thick. This proved not to be so easy. I slid four feet down a grassy embankment and into a foot of water. A couple minutes later I fell into the water again before crawling up the steep bank to the other side.
 

Nightfall.

Now our luck began to change. I could see we were getting close to the end. In the distance we observed the lights of traffic on I-15 and could hear the hum of the rigs. And as luck would have it, we came across a path through the trees that led us to a dirt road on the other side of Braffits Creek. From here it was a pleasant walk in the moonlight to Rob's truck that he had left the night before.
 
We felt a sigh of relief as we sat in the cab of the truck. We knew for sure that we would now spend the night in the comfort of our own beds rather than on the dirt floor of a canyon (without a fire because we forgot matches)!
 
We also felt a sense of accomplishment. Our hike lasted thirteen hours and I suspect we traveled thirteen miles, most of it without any kind of path. We started in the dark and ended in the dark. We climbed over 3,000 feet in elevation. We both agreed that we were glad to have done it.⸺But we also agreed that we would never do it again! ♠ 

And this is what we dreamed about all night long!