Got another fishing and trail riding trip on the books. Probably the last one for 2014. This area is near Westcliffe, CO. The trail to the lakes is not a difficult or challenging trail. It’s just steep and narrow with decent size boulders just about everywhere. It's just rough enough to keep the Subaru and mountain bike type rifraff away and not bad enough to be too interesting for the Rock Crawler crowd.
Lead in road from CO Hwy 69.
First stop Balman Lake. This lake is about an hour up the trail form the trail head.
The water so incredibly clear. I could see fish everywhere but they wanted no part of whatever I had to offer. I tried worms, power bait, fireballs, and several different types of lures. Finally caught on Rainbow on a Panther Martin lure.
Me fishin way over there in that corner
After fishing at Balman for a few hours we headed on up the trail for another hour and a half to Rainbow Lake where we spent the night. Totally got skunked at this lake. Not even a bite, didn’t even see fish rising but I did see four swim by as I was fishing. If it wasn’t for those 4 I would have thought there were no fish in this lake. A few years ago my buddy Rob (zoomad75) and I fished up here where I caught two nice ones over in that corner on the other side where the black rock slide is. Not this year! Although there were some mountain goats up behind me at one point that scared the hell out of me as I could hear something clacking around up there then rocks started sliding down and I saw one looking down at me.
You can see the truck stashed up in the corner. This turns out to be a great place to set up camp as it is the last corner to get dark in the evening and the first to gain sunlight in the morning. You don’t find many places like that but it just works out that way this time of year and the way the mountains cast shadows. The best part about lakes like these is there isn’t a sole around. The trail is just rough enough to keep the riffraff out. Even ATVers find the trail too rocky to have an enjoyable ride. The entire weekend we only saw 2 ATVs, two horses and new Jeep Rubicon with Iowa plates head up as we were leaving.
Got to have a beauty shot
I’m not one of those truck camper guys that carry leveling blocks. Just use natures leveling rocks!
After breakfast and more unsuccessful fishing we headed on up the trail to see if we could get to the mine at the top. The trail gets pretty narrow from Rainbow Lake on up
Lots of overgrowth. Definitely added to the pin striping on the truck
There were countless trees laying over the road pretty much the entire trip from when we left the main dirt road at the bottom of the mountain. We were able to barely squeak under or move most but not this big guy. We ended up backing down the steep and narrow trail for about 1/8 mile. What a PITA!
On the way back down we decided to stop at this old cabin and take a look around. Tried to fish in the stream behind it but didn’t have any luck
The sign on the door says the cabin is for the Mine use. Public not allowed.
Neat old stove
Really nice little stream behind the cabin. Saw a few little trout hiding in the corners
The downed trees everywhere were crazy. We squeaked by this one pretty easy on the way up but coming down was a different story. My MIL had to drive the truck will I got on top and lifted the tree out of the way. Funny, just before this picture was taken we saw some ole cowboy and his wife on horses that were on the Rainbow trail that crosses the 4x4 trail. The ole cowboy with a chew stained beard and a pistol on his belt tells me “boy, I wouldn’t bring my truck up here” then I replied, “yeah, I just thinking that I wouldn’t ride my horse up here. He might trip and fall and kill us both”. He didn’t think that was funny. Sure enough, we got to the bottom of the trail there was a Ford Stupid Duty with a horse trailer hitched up to it. No wonder he wouldn’t take his truck up there.
That’s pretty much it. We continue on down the mountain and stopped at the first lake where we started the day before (Balman) where I continue to get humiliated by the fish for a few more hours. After that we took the long bouncy trail down to the dirt road to air up and hit the highway. From air up to home is about an hour and 10 minutes.