Last weekend, I picked up a few 8000-foot peaks near Bailey, near and including Redskin Mountain. The weather was nice and the hiking was mostly decent.
First, there was still a little aspen color left, although it’s probably gone now with the snow a few days ago:
Redskin Mountain has a trail of sorts that goes partway up the gully in the middle of this picture, but it seemed to disappear. Thus, I ended up on the left branch of the horseshoe and had to work through a section of steep boulders partway up:
That photo was taken from the other side of the road on an unnamed 8659-foot peak, which is accessed from a small parking turnout at the edge of the obvious burn area near the junction of what the maps show as Forest Roads 553 and 554. The actual summit is another third of a mile or so beyond the top of the slope:
The burn extended up there, too, but there are a few trees:
If you look closely in the previous picture, I had a little company up there:
It didn’t quite cooperate for me as well as I might have hoped, but I did get this neat picture (cropped and shown at half-resolution as compared to the normal one-third-resolution of most of my pictures here):
And, a full-resolution enhanced section of a shot that shows the raven best:
(For the photo nerds out there, I don’t leave the EXIF data on my blog photos, but this shot was in the Landscape mode of my Canon Powershot; 1/500th of a second; just short of 4x zoom of the available 12x optical zoom, i.e., 18.3 mm effective focal length; and at ISO 80. The Moon shot was the same except 1/200th of a second.)
I’m always happy to see ravens up in the mountain, and recently read the book “Gifts of the Crow” which is about how ravens, crows, and other corvids interact with humans. They’re highly intelligent and fascinating creatures.
Total hiking stats (October 21st, 2012): 3 peaks, 5.7 miles, 1950 vertical feet
Peakbagging and Pixels 