McINTYRE HILLS
January 27, 2003
By Tim Briese
The McIntyre Hills is a wild tract of land about fifteen miles west of Canon City on the south side of Highway 50 that is being considered for federal wilderness status. I read a brief note about it in Trail and Timberline a couple of months before and thought it would be interesting to explore this vast roadless area of mountains, ridges, and canyons. A low elevation hike in shirtsleeves at this time of year appealed to me, too, since it offered a welcome break from the wind and snow up in the high country. I liked the idea of leaving my snowshoes and ice ax home this time.
I called the BLM office in Canon City the week before and asked about access into this rugged area. A helpful man suggested that I could approach the area from the north by parking along Highway 50 and bushwhacking up one of the canyons above the highway, or alternatively, I could approach from the south by following the Copper Gulch Road past Poverty Mountain and then taking an old dirt road past a few houses up onto the public land. As usual, I selected the road less traveled, and opted for the southern approach.
It was a partly cloudy and mild morning as I drove west of Canon City with my two labs toward my destination. Just after crossing the Arkansas River at Parkdale I turned south and followed Fremont County Road 3 about two miles and then went right on the Copper Gulch Road. It was a pleasant surprise to find this route paved. My Trails Illustrated map showed only a couple of four wheel drive routes that left this road and went to the right up toward the McIntyre Hills, but after going a few miles I came upon several side roads and numerous homes in a rural subdivision dotting the nearby slopes. I suppose I should not have been surprised by all this development, for I knew full well the lengths to which people will go to live at the threshold of wilderness. Unfortunately I was unable to identify Poverty Mountain or the road that would take me where I wanted to go. To complicate matters, I presently drove off the edge of my Trails Illustrated map, so to speak, and had to resort to a less detailed National Forest map I had along. After driving back and forth on the road for a few minutes and consulting my maps further I selected a dirt road that headed up along a drainage to the north and began to follow it. At first there were real estate signs along the road but they presently gave way to a BLM boundary sign, which was what I had hoped to see. I fourwheeled up the road a mile to the crest of a ridge at about 8000 feet and gazed down upon a vast and rugged drainage on the other side that sloped away to the north toward the Arkansas River, hidden in a canyon somewhere in the distance. I stood at the threshold of the McIntyre Hills. I thought it would be interesting to try to find my way down through the canyons that twisted through this interminable wilderness, perhaps following them all the way to the Arkansas, which lay 2000 feet lower and several miles away.
With this objective in mind I parked my truck and struck off downhill at 8:20 into a wooded gulch to the northwest. Allie and Jorie ran about excitedly, eager to be off on another adventure. This hike would be the opposite of a mountain climb in some sense, for I would descend first and then ascend on the return, a feature which I did not mind. I was concerned about routefinding in this rugged place, though, for there were no trails to follow. It is simple enough following canyons downstream, even in a vast labyrinth such as this, for at a fork one merely heads downhill, but coming back is another matter, for the correct fork must be selected in order to avoid getting lost! My routefinding skills are well-seasoned but I knew this would be a challenge.
I followed an ORV track a short distance down the first drainage until the track went uphill into the woods somewhere out of sight. I proceeded to bushwhack down the canyon below without the assistance of any trail. At times the going was easy, as I strolled down across grassy meadows or gravelly beds in the canyon bottom, and at other times I scrambled around downed trees or boulders, or climbed down rocky steps or pushed my way through bushes or trees. The canyon bottoms that I followed ranged from ten to a hundred feet in width, and were generally dry except for intermittent patches of snow in shady places in the upper elevations of the drainage. The canyons twisted and turned for mile after mile, with steep wooded or rocky slopes towering up to a few hundred feet above, preventing any general views that would help in gaining a feel for the lay of the land.
I came to numerous junctions where tributary canyons joined and I tried to carefully study these places to enable me to find the correct way on my return. At times it was not easy to even notice these junctions in densely wooded places. I marked about a half dozen such places with small piles of sticks to point out the way back, for I knew that it would look different and perhaps seem unrecognizable going the other direction. I hoped that my piles of sticks, my dogs’ noses, and my GPS, if it worked in these canyon bottoms, would provide adequate guidance.
In some places I came across flows of ice lying in the canyon bottoms where water seeped out of the ground. Many of these were 50 to 200 feet long, and lay like silent glaciers intent on carving out the landscape, in imitation of their elder brothers high up in the shadowy upper reaches of mountains around the globe. The dogs nimbly trotted across their slippery surfaces, but I cautiously skirted around their edges wherever possible, wanting to avoid an injurious fall in this remote place. The crux of the entire route was an interesting place where the canyon floor narrowed to a ten foot gap bounded by high cliffs on each side, with an icy flow that filled the gap and treacherously sloped downhill as it went through. I sat down and slid on the ice down through the gap to the gravel below, but I wondered how I would be able to get back up such a slippery surface on my return!
When I approached a bend in the canyon I heard a crashing in the trees and the sound of rocks rolling and saw a bighorn sheep standing on a rocky ledge about a hundred feet away. His massive curved horns glinted in the sunlight as he stood motionless. Jorie began to charge up after him but I called her back. He scrambled up the slope and joined a companion standing on a cliff high above, and they watched us pass by in review as we proceeded on down the canyon. I wondered if any mountain lions watched us today, too, for this was prime habitat for them as well. I began to rehearse in my mind what I would do if I encountered one, and then quickly moved on to more pleasant musings.
Eventually the canyon floor became wider in the lower part of the canyon, and I began to notice many cacti along the way. It had been quite a while since I had hiked in a place where these spiny plants grew. A trail finally began to appear, apparently created by hikers who had come up the canyon from Highway 50 along the Arkansas River. I continued around a few more bends and a little after 11:00 finally reached the end of this vast maze when the highway abruptly appeared. I walked beneath a bridge under the highway and strolled into the Five Points Recreation Site along the river. I realized with some surprise that I had not sat down for a single break on the six and a half mile hike from my truck. It was quite a pleasure to sit down on a rock and eat my lunch beside the Arkansas in the calm and pleasant air.
After this refreshing break I got up and began to retrace my steps back up the canyon. Although the grades were not steep I could definitely tell that I was now hiking uphill. My progress gradually slowed as I became tired. I was certainly glad I marked several of the canyon junctions with sticks, for it would have been easy to go the wrong way. At one junction I nearly walked right past my marker, but the dogs guided me the right way. When I reached the crux point on the sloping ice I desperately tried to pull my way up by grabbing some bushes along the right side of the ice next to the rock wall. That effort failed, however, and I resorted to getting down on my hands and knees and digging the points of my trekking poles into the ice to slowly and tediously advance to the top of the icy slope. Jorie was able to claw her way up but I had to assist Allie with a push. Perhaps I could have gotten around this obstacle by scaling over the cliffs above, if necessary, but I preferred to save that difficult option for a last resort.
As I became more tired the terrain became less recognizable. At one of the last canyon junctions, one which I had not marked, I lost sight of my footprints in the dirt and was truly baffled about which way to go. I went a short distance up the left fork to check it out but noticed that the dogs were wandering about in a manner that seemed to ask “What are we doing here?” so I retraced my steps and went the other way, which turned out to be the correct route.
At 2:45 I finally regained the crest of the ridge and walked up to my truck, concluding this interesting adventure. On this thirteen mile outing I bushwhacked all the way across the McIntyre Hills Wilderness Study Area, observing much fascinating and rugged scenery along the way.
--- “An hour spent in the wilderness is restorative in ways that health-club workouts, alcohol, or prescription drugs never can be. This is because wilderness touches the soul and the heart.” --- author unknown
