Earlier in the week I was able to spend an afternoon riding our 4 wheelers with my sister-in-law Kerry riding with me and my brother Darwin riding the other ATV with my niece Erin on the back of it. We ran up a couple miles from camp and hit the Snowbank Campground ATV trail that is about a 20 mile loop through a big chunk of country that has been logged and then burned. With all the snow and rain this year it was as green as I can remember.
Barely a mile into the ride we spotted a nice bear feeding in the grass. I thought it was a brown colored black bear, but my brother Darwin thought it was a young grizzly bear. We watched it for a few minutes and it took off when it saw us. Picture quality isn't that great as it was taken zoomed in on my iPhone, but you can get the general idea.
It was a pretty dreary day with rain off and on for pretty much the entire ride. The flowers were just starting to bloom and we saw deer, elk, rabbits, grouse and the one bear. It is a very pretty ride.
Most of the trail is on old logging roads, but there is a mile or two back in the very back that is a new ATV trail that connects the 2 main logged areas. It doesn't look like it in the picture and even while you are riding them it doesn't look that bad, but there is a little over a 1/2 mile of trail where it constantly feels like you are about to tip over on your side. Here's a picture of my brother in one of these spots. If you look close you can see he is actually holding the right handlebar with both hands steering it into the side of the mountain.
In several areas on this trail if you did roll it off the trail it would keep going for a LONG, LONG way.
You can't see the panoramic pictures very well in the blogging software, but when you click on the picture the full size image should pop up.
It really is beautiful country. It's unusual for that area because with the logging the subsequent fires it is very open and you can actually see the countryside very well. In a lot of the other areas around, it is so timbered up that you can't see anything but the trees all around you.
Some more beautiful country. At the very bottom left you can see the creek that we started out on when we began the ride.
Looking from another vantage point later in the ride.
This next picture has several features that are familiar to several of you that may actually read this blog. In the green area you can see the ATV trail as it heads back down near toward the bottom. On the far left of the picture in the middle you can see Knowles Peak or 4th Peak as we tend to call it from the Bible Camp that is below it. I'll be posting a blog post on climbing up there in the next couple days. In the far background the mountains with the snow on them are actually the backdrop for Elbow Lake. I'll be posting a blog post on our hike there as well.
Overall it is a great loop to ride and other than about 1/2 mile at the very back it is pretty easy riding. Lots of wildlife if you stay on the lookout. I've still got 2 or 3 more posts to make, I might as well stretch them out a bit instead of trying to post them all on the same day.
Missing the cool clean mountain air!
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