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Tag: mack ridge

Kokopelli Loops: Steve’s Loop & Mary’s Loop

After Work Adventures | Tuesday, June 3, 2025

This afternoon I returned to the Kokopelli Trails right after work since I hadn’t been back to this area since March of last year and there are only a few short trail segments remaining that I haven’t hiked yet. This time I was going to hike Steve’s Loop because the west end of the loop has been rerouted sometime since my last hike on the trail back in 2016, plus I had never hiked the connector trail from Steve’s to Mary’s Loop. Thankfully it wasn’t quite as warm out today as it has been the last few days and there was a strong wind blowing during most of the hike, especially when I was closer to the river, which helped keep me feeling cool. At the end it turned out to be a nice 6-mile loop that took me about two hours to complete and I didn’t see anyone else on the trails. Here are a few photos I took during the short hike.

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Gore Trail Loop & West Fork of Pollock Canyon

Canyons of the Black Ridge Wilderness | Friday – Sunday, May 2-4, 2025

Since I have another week-long river trip coming up very soon that I need to start getting ready for, I stayed local this weekend and decided to go on a pair of backcountry hikes that are located within the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness. These are two hikes that I’ve been thinking about doing for a number of years at this point, but I have never made them a priority to get around to before and figured it was finally time to give them a go! The first hike I wanted to try follows an old 4×4 road that shows up on some maps as the Gore Trail and encircles a mesa located between the heads of Knowles Canyon and Jones Canyon. It looked like this loop was going to be around 16 miles in length, which includes a couple miles on BS Road to close the loop, and since I wanted to get an early start on Saturday morning I headed up to Glade Park later on Friday afternoon and spent the night on the edge of Sieber Canyon.

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Kokopelli Trails: Hawkeye Trail to Mack Ridge

After Work Adventures | Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Well, it’s been almost a full month since I went on my last After Work Adventure, delayed because of weather interruptions and extended weekend trips, so I was looking forward to getting back out to the Kokopelli Trails this afternoon. I’m getting very close to completing my project of hiking all of the trails in the system and the Hawkeye Trail is the only complete trail left that I have not hiked before, mainly because it wasn’t opened until April of 2017. I left straight from work and made my way over to the Hawkeye Trailhead near Mack and started hiking up the trail. Although there were two unexpected overnight snowstorms this past weekend, the trail had just enough time to dry out by this afternoon and wasn’t muddy. Here are a couple of photos from the hike…

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Kokopelli Loops: Moore Fun Loop

After Work Adventures | Wednesday, February 7, 2024

Well, I was originally planning to go hiking after work yesterday, but the weather didn’t cooperate with those plans and today was looking no better, but as I was leaving work this afternoon the conditions seemed to be pretty nice for a short hike, so I took my chances and headed back over to the Kokopelli Trails near Loma. I returned to the Lions Trailhead so I could hike a four-mile loop of the upper and lower Moore Fun Trail. Although I have hiked the main Moore Fun Trail from both sides before, I had never hiked the shorter Lower Moore Fun Trail, which was my main objective today. But since it’s only a short trail of less than a mile, I figured it would be nice to combine the upper and lower trails into a loop. Although wet weather had been threatening all day across the valley, it seems that the precipitation had completely missed this area as the trails and roads were completely dry, but I did encounter some sprinkles of rain, flurries of snow and plenty of wind during the hike. Here are a couple of photos from my afternoon jaunt.

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Kokopelli Loops: Western End of Mack Ridge

After Work Adventures | Tuesday, January 30, 2024

After taking the winter off from my After Work Adventures it’s finally starting to feel like the days are getting a little bit longer, and since the temperature has been in the low 60’s for the past two days, which set a record high for todays date, I decided to head out after work for a little hike. I headed back over to the Kokopelli Trails near Mack so I could continue working on the project I had started in the fall of hiking the remainder of the trails in the area that I had not been on before. This afternoon I set out to hike a couple of segments of trails at the western end of Mack Ridge by creating two short loops out of them.

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