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Flume Creek Canyon Loop

Canyons of the Black Ridge Wilderness | Wednesday, May 7, 2025

While hiking over the Pollock Bench on my way to the West Fork of Pollock Canyon on Sunday morning I noticed a well-used trail below the rim on the west side of Flume Creek Canyon that I had never hiked before and which wasn’t on any of the maps I looked at. After waiting out some wet weather over the past two days I decided to return after work this afternoon so I could check this trail out. I left from the Pollock Bench Trailhead and followed the trail which contoured below the rim on the west side of Flume Creek Canyon until it joined back up with the Flume 1 Trail a couple of miles up the canyon. Then I followed the main trail back along the rim of the narrows until I was able to descend to the Inner Canyon Trail and follow that back to the trailhead. This turned out to make a nice little 5.5 mile loop that I completed in just under two hours before heading home.

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.

Return to the High Trail & Opal Hill

Canyons of the Black Ridge Wilderness | Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Well, just like last year it appears that I’ve been slacking on my After Work Adventures again this spring, but part of the reason for that is the wet weather we had been having around here for a while. To remedy this situation I decided to head out after work this afternoon for a repeat hike of the High Trail in the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness since it’s one I’ve been wanting to get back to for a while now. During the day I almost cancelled the hike since the weather hadn’t been cooperating as it had been raining and snowing off and on, but as I was leaving work I checked the forecast one last time and thought it looked like it might finally be clearing up, so I decided to go for it. This turned out to be a good decision since the weather held out and it was a great evening for a local hike!

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The High Trail of Flume Creek Canyon

Canyons of the Black Ridge Wilderness
Tuesday, April 28, 2020

The ledge varies in width, 10 to 20 feet at the wider places, less than 30 inches at the narrowest. Yet this precarious shelf is a well-traveled road… Over the High Trail, great bands of sheep, herds of white-faced cattle, packers and camp movers, with their strings of loaded pack horses, pass on their migrations between the Black Ridge country and the lowlands along the Colorado River.

-Will C. Minor

This evening after work I headed back into the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness in search of a historic route known as the High Trail which is located in upper Flume Creek Canyon. After visiting Will Minor Arch on a bench above Mee Canyon last weekend I was interested to find out more about who Will Minor was, so I did a little searching to see what I could dig up. I didn’t find much information online, but I did come across this article from the Daily Sentinel written by Bob Silbernagel in 2013. My interest was very piqued as I read about the High Trail and I knew instantly that I had to go looking for this route! Using the two photos from the article as reference and Google Earth, I was quickly able to figure out what I thought was the location of the trail in upper Flume Creek Canyon, and I wanted to get out there as quickly as I could to find out if I was correct!

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Pollock Canyon

New Year’s Eve | Saturday, December 31, 2016

Diane and I headed out to the McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area early this morning for our final hike of 2016. We started our hike from the Rattlesnake Canyon Trailhead near Fruita and hiked up to the top of the Pollock Bench before dropping down a steep trail into Upper Pollock Canyon so we could visit Liberty Bell Arch (Pollock Arch). After checking out the arch from a few different vantage points we decided to continue down Pollock Canyon instead of returning the way had come to create a ten mile loop. While I had hiked all of this route on different trips before, it was all new for Diane.

Tag: pollock bench

Flume Creek Canyon Loop

Gore Trail Loop & West Fork of Pollock Canyon

Return to the High Trail & Opal Hill

The High Trail of Flume Creek Canyon

Pollock Canyon