Sept 15 Sept 22 Oct 1 Oct 6 Oct 20 Oct 27 Nov 3 Nov 17 Nov 23	Wednesday, November 3 It was a beautiful day and the forecast looked good, so we headed out to Caribou Ranch Open Space, where we had planned to hike last week. It was a pleasant, hour long drive to get to this trailhead, which is part of the Boulder Open Spaces system. The hike is a 4.6 mile “lollipop” route - 1.2 miles to a loop trail. A good portion of the trail is along a former train bed, so it’s relatively level. The train used to run from Boulder to Ward and was nicknamed the Switzerland Road. It was heavily used by tourists wanting to get away to the mountains. We arrived at the trailhead about 9:30 and the skies were overcast! That wasn’t in the forecast. And it was a brisk 34 degrees, according to the car’s thermometer. So, we bundled up and headed down the trail. The first part of this trail winds through the woods before connecting with the former train bed. The elevation change is so gradual that we’ve made a note not to bring our hiking sticks when we return to this one... The trail had some snow along portions of it from the storm that kept us from hiking here last week. It didn’t block the trail, but it was fun to see some already. About a mile and a half down the trail, we arrived at the DeLonde homestead. The buildings here have been preserved (possibly rebuilt) over the years. There’s a barn and a ranch house (photo to the right). The homestead was established by some miners around 1920, but soon turned to raising Arabian horses. The photo on the left shows Carl approaching the porch of the ranch house. At one time, a nearby barn (not the one still there) was used as a recording studio for such artists as Blood, Sweat and Tears, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and John Denver. This burned to the ground in the 1980s and no longer exists. The ranch house and barn (as well as the nearby Blue Bird Mine) were used as sets for the 1960s remake of Stagecoach. We’ve added this movie to our Netflix queue to see how they were used. Unfortunately, it’s not yet available on dvd, so we may have a bit of a wait to see this film. There’s an “overlook” near the ranch house with a picnic table that overlooks a couple of beaver ponds. The photo on the left above shows me taking a picture of this pond. The center photo is the pond. There was a stack of wood at the edge of one of them (photo on the right), but whether this was a real beaver den or just a pile of sticks is something we couldn’t tell from the overlook. From the ranch, the trail continued along the mountainside. Not far from the ranch house, we spotted this fence and pond across the way. The edge of the pond had a nice snowbank on it (photos to the left and right). . . . The trail continued through the woods. We stopped at one point because I could hear running water. Sure enough, the trail encountered North Boulder Creek. The stopping point here had some nice cascades. By now, the sun had come out, of course, so the pictures aren’t the best cascade photos I’ve taken (center and right above)... The photo on the left shows me taking these photos. Another 0.2 miles along the trail brought us to the Blue Bird Mine complex. They’ve restored some of the buildings here and left others in rubble. This mine produced silver from about 1880 until around 1960, but never found the “mother lode”. It was called the Blue Bird Mine because the ore here contained a large amount of azurite, a blue mineral. They’ve restored most of the former bunkhouse on this site (photo on the left). The center photo shows one of the windows of the bunkhouse, possibly a pay window? The mine entrance was barricaded for safety, however and is shown in the photo on the right. Also on this site was a mine foreman’s house which was built in the 1940's and included a “swimming pool”. The pool might have been used for wading, but not swimming. According to the sign on site, the pool wasn’t even used for wading, as the temperatures never got warm enough here to make it appealing. Instead, it was usually used to warehouse trout caught in the nearby creek until they were wanted for dinner... We had a lot of fun poking around these old buildings (obeying the rules about what not to enter, of course), then sat on the steps of the bunkhouse for our lunch. After lunch, we headed down a wide road that we thought would meet the trail. Well, after a short distance, there was a gate across it with no easy way to get to the other side. There was a sign on the other side stating that this was used for emergency access to the site, hikers please stay on the trail. It seemed odd that the sign was on the other side of this gate, but we turned back and retraced our steps to where the spur to the mine met the main trail to continue our way along the loop. We hadn’t walked far when it became obvious this trail was going to come very close to the road we had taken. Gee, we could have just walked 20 feet through the woods to catch the trail. A few feet further, well, we came out on the other side of the gate... Little had we known... The photo to the left shows the gate from a little further down the trail. This was the train bed we had been walking along earlier!!! After a laugh, we continued along the trail. Along the side of the trail here, we spotted an old iron bedframe (right) that looked like someone had tossed over the side of the hill above. It was definitely old... The train bed looped around the side of the meadow we had walked across earlier and soon rejoined our original path. The three photos above show the barn at the DeLonde homestead from across this meadow. The loop portion of the trail was over. This trail has some really nice aspen groves along it. We’ll have to come back in the autumn when the leaves are turning. Should be some nice photography then. We soon returned to the trailhead. After packing our stuff back in the car, we drove back to Nederland and decided to visit the nearby ski area of Eldora, just to check it out. It’s a fair sized ski area, but not on the scale of the major areas. It was interesting, but Carl still prefers Copper Mountain. Our return drive took us through Boulder Canyon and the town of Boulder near where a wildfire has been burning most of the week. We didn’t see any signs of it, however. We had taken a different route this morning to avoid the rush hour traffic in and around Boulder. We liked the other route better... Next...