WOW Mill Creek Hike

From WP Wiki

Welcome to Western State!

This year’s Week of Welcome hiking trip to Mill Creek was a short but incredible experience. New students Melissa and Daniel joined Wilderness Pursuits instructors Kevin Plowman and Rob Rouse on an eight mile roundtrip excursion into the West Elk Wilderness, journeying from sagebrush hills to a forested mountain valley. We followed Mill Creek along a well built trail underneath and eventually through a fantastic landscape of oddly eroded cliffs, geologic evidence of a turbulent time.

Thirty five million years ago, the massive West Elk Volcano hurled massive amounts of super-hot molten ash from its 18,000 ft summit, melting snowfields and causing giant mudflows that radiated out from its center. These mudflows, or lahars, solidified into a crumbly matrix of mud, ash, and rock which we call breccia. The remnants of these lahar flows are visible in several other places near Gunnison, at the Dillon Pinnacles off highway 50 as well as across town at the Palisades. Here, the melt off of the Pleistocene glaciers 12,000 years ago down Mill Creek carved thousand foot tall cliffs aptly named “The Castles”, which we were able to see up close and personal.

Along the way, we encountered a lovable little runaway dog named Rascal, traveled through an old burn, saw a lumbering porcupine, a pair of frightened baby snakes, ate wild raspberries, fireweed flowers, and rose hips, all of which were blooming in a wild riot of colors. After a lunch near Storm Pass, we were chased down by lightning and rain, which followed us back to the van. It was a great day spent in the wilderness, contemplating our place in nature in front of the backdrop of billions of years of geologic time, indifferent weather, and animals with no concept of what it means to be human.

Wilderness Areas

The National Wilderness Preservation System was created on September 3, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act. The original bill established 9.1 million acres of federally protected wilderness in national forests. The law did not increase the amount of land under federal control, nor did it mandate acquisition of additional lands.

A wilderness area has the highest form of protection out of any federal land. They include: no roads or permanent structures, and activities like logging, mining, and vehicular traffic are prohibited.

In the Gunnison River basin we have 8 different wilderness areas, making up 33% of our 1.3 million acre Gunnison National Forest: West Elks, Maroon Bells/Snowmass, Raggeds, Collegiate Peaks, Fossil Ridge, La Garita, Uncompaghre, and Powderhorn.