Colorado Trail Day 3
June 27, 2026
We slept a little better as it was substantially cooler than the night before. We got up a little before six and decided to just strike camp and head to a trailhead with a toilet, getting us on trail at 6:30. About a mile down the trail at the Little Scraggy trailhead we took care of “business” and then made hot drinks and had some protein pucks for breakfast. The bathroom here was surprisingly popular, with several people driving in just to use the bathroom and others using it before heading out with their mountain bikes.
Our walk from the trailhead started through a nice Ponderosa forest with interesting large rocks scattered here and there. Eventually, it dropped down into a little valley with some aspen trees along a creek.
The little valley was underneath some very large and impressive rock formations. We went about 3 miles and took a break to have a snack and some drinks. We found a tick here on Julie’s sleeve.
We finished the break around 10 and it started feeling very warm. We crossed paths with a lot of bicyclists on this trail or, really, they crossed paths with us. But they were almost all very polite and a few stopped to talk with us.
The trail climbed a small ridge out of the valley and crossed rolling hills of Ponderosa Pines.
We met three ladies hiking near the turn off to the Buffalo Campground. They were really nice and offered to give us some water, even though the campground does not have water. It turns out that they had filled large containers at the same firehouse that we had yesterday. We took a liter just to make sure that we could make it to our planned crossing of (and filtering at) Buffalo Creek.
We also were able to dump half a pound of trash in the dumpster at the campground and use the vault toilet there. Then there was a quarter mile hike back up the hill to the Colorado Trail.
We arrived at Buffalo Creek about a mile later. We checked out several of the many campsites on either side of the road and creek before choosing one. We stopped here for the day after about nine miles of progress at about 1:00 because the trail will climb almost a thousand feet over the next four and a half miles - we needed to give our legs some rest and it would be better to do the climb in the cool of morning.
We ate lunch, filtered water in the creek, set up the tent, washed ourselves a little and washed socks and underwear. Some other through-hikers began appearing, looking for campsites, around 4:30.
We were worried that the afternoon would seem overly long, especially since there is no cell service in this area. But with all of the tasks and some journaling and reading, the afternoon passed quickly. We had another dinner that Julie had prepared, this one with powdered black beans, rice, dehydrated vegetables, and mole which was very tasty.
9.5 miles over five hours with only 600 feet elevation gain.