Goose Creek Loop

Nick, Brett, Chad

Moat to island uncrossable by scouts

Overlooking a canyon, rocks in back ground typical of area

Chad, Nick and I headed off Friday to the Goose Creek Trailhead Friday to take advantage of the long weekend.  Our plan was to camp Friday near the trailhead and hike about 20 miles Saturday and Sunday.  We ate dinner on the way to the trail at Zoka's in Pine Colorado.  From the outside, it looks like a hole, but it is an amazing restaurant.  We each had their Zoka burger, and it was amazing.  Once we got to the trail parking lot, we set up camp and attempted to make a fire.  Dry wood was hard to come by.  Despite using 22 ounces of fuel and a lot of other stuff, we could not make a fire.  Saturday morning came, and we were off.  We hiked about 9 miles at a pretty good pace in four hours.  We got to our pre determined campsite ,which was on an island, at about 12:30.  This gave us plenty of time to hang out.  During the next three hours we had some sporadic rain.  After that, some pesky boy scouts tried getting to our island.  Thankfully our moat was uncrossable by the scouts.  Saturdays fire attempt was very successful.  Our fire lasted from 4:30 to 9:30.   Sundays route was quite a bit more taxing.  There were 11 miles to go to finish our loop.  The weather was comfortable despite the overcast appearance.  There were three notable climbs during the hike.  The second climb took us from 9,000 ft. to 11,000 ft.  The scenery was amazing.  Everywhere we looked we saw tall aspens and pine trees, slab style rocks and canyons, and we seemed to follow a river and even crossed it several times on log bridges.  Rain broke during the last two hours of our hike back to the car.  The loop was pretty nice, different from what I typically see in the mountain ranges of Colorado.  Despite periods of bad weather we had a lot of fun.