The Devil's Towelette

Another day off, another item checked off my to-do list.

I did a seven-mile hike (round-trip, so nothing crazy) entirely above timberline to a geologic feature right on the Continental Divide. It's sort of a miniature version of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and I meant to type The Devil's Towerette for the title of the post, but I found the typo so amusing I left it as is.

Wiley, by the way, was a little stiff this morning so after a brief walkies up to the rodeo grounds I left him snoozing on his bed.

The trailhead was at the former site of Corona, a hotel that once stood at the spot where the old railroad came over the Divide. The road that leads up to it now is based on the old railroad grade, and traveling it in my Ford Focus, dodging potholes the size of Wiley and even bigger rocks, cringeing every time I scraped bottom, I couldn't stop thinking about the men who built and maintained the thing (until they realized hey, maybe we should just bore a big-ass tunnel straight through the mountain).

I mean, winter brought snow up to 30 feet deep, and here, winter is October through June!

The Corona hotel and other buildings are long gone, but here's a shot of the approach to the trailhead, with the Divide I'd be walking along looming in the background:




From the trail itself, here's a shot looking west into the valley where I live and work. My apartment is roughly in the center of the photo, though no amount of "embiggening" would let you see any detail. On the near horizon, that big mountain on the left that's taller than all the others is Byers Peak, the 12,804-footer I climbed a couple weeks ago:

One nice thing about The Devil's Towelette hike was that it started at 11,664 feet and ended at 12,235 feet, so there wasn't much elevation gain, and most of it was right at the beginning, up a series of steep switchbacks. From there it was relatively level walking along the Divide itself, which tickled me silly.

Here's a shot of the trail heading north:

I knew from my guidebook and from people at work who've done the hike that there wouldn't be much of a payoff. Although The Devil's Towelette can be seen from nearly anywhere in the valley and looks rather imposing, from the Divide it blends into the cliffs behind it, as shown below:

In case you're going "Towelette? What Towelette? I don't see no stinkin' towelette!" here's the same photo with it outlined in red:

To be able to see it without the cliffs behind it, you have to go all the way down the saddle and get almost to its base. Quite frankly, I see it (from a distance) every morning from my bedroom window, and thunderclouds were moving in, so I decided to turn back without getting a better shot.

While I was on The Devil's Towelette Trail, the real fun of the hike for me was not the destination but being above timberline without having killed myself to get there (like the Byers climb) so I could actually appreciate its beauty without gasping for breath. Also very cool: seeing the pikas. Usually I just hear them squeaking to each other around the rocks, but today I saw a few of them with their mouths stuffed full of vegetation for winter (just around the corner!). They are adorable.

I also saw what I think were northern pocket gophers and a long-tailed weasel... I'm not too sure about the weasel, because I didn't think they hung out above treeline, but it was too skinny and fast to be a yellow belly marmot and too, well, weaselly lookin' to be anything else I know. Whatever it was, like the gophers and the pikas it was frantically gathering food. By this time next month, the trail likely will be impassable with snow.