My friend Skyler and I decided to take a shot at a bit of a longer hike this weekend. I did a bit of hunting and came across Long Scraggy Peak. I based the decision to check out that hike using this site. I probably should have noticed that the information was almost a decade out of date. Most of the roads and landmarks used to find the trail no longer exist. Additionally, the potential fishing promised by the pictures on the article never manifested. We didn’t see any water at all except on the drive in.
We drove up to where I had guessed the trailhead would be thinking, once in the area, finding the trailhead wouldn’t be too hard. The area was beautiful and the recent rains made the drive up very scenic. Once we were in our destination zone we found a parking lot. $6 and you could park and use that section of the Colorado trail. We asked around about Long Scraggy Peak Trail but most people we encountered had never heard of it. We initially ended up on the Colorado trail thinking perhaps the trail branched off of that. We went about a mile through burned forest before turning back as the map we had showed no trails coming off the Colorado trail.
A second try took us across the street from the $6 parking. A closed gate to a road looked promising and was more inline with the initial description we were following. I’m pretty sure this also was not the way to the trail, but it ended up being a nice walk nonetheless. We ended up walking about 2.75 miles down a dirt road when the road finally turned away from Long Scraggy Peak and didn’t seem to return. I now think that had we followed the road it may have gotten us there, but we ended up leaving the road to walk directly toward the peak. This approach took us directly in from the West. We ended up hitting a barbed wire fence and opted not to cross it as we’d heard stories of upset landowners unhappy with trespassing hikers.
We turned around and went back at that point but not before getting a few good views. If I go back to this area it will be to take my mountain bike on the Colorado Trail. The riding looked quite easy singletrack but there’s a lot of trail there to explore.
http://www.theflume.com/free_content/article_1d9b53a0-1431-11e4-8f77-001a4bcf6878.html