When I first moved to Granby I bought a hiking book for Grand County.  The book is horrible.  Almost every time I’ve tried a trail in there, it gave me old or false information and the whole hike I wondered if I was on the right trail.

The worst one of these was a trail that went along Stillwater Creek up to a lake.  The lake was not named in the book.  It wasn’t named on google maps or in my gps either.  The first time I tried the trail, I barely found the start of the trail.  It was winter so the trail was not obvious.  I hiked for about an hour crawling over logs and shuffling though the deep snow.  I thought I was on the trail, then I wasn’t, then I was.  Is this a trail?  It was one of the most beautiful winter forests I’ve been in, but maybe not a trail.  I gave up after an hour.  I tried two more times in winter, but never got near the lake.  The trail must only be visible when the ground isn’t covered in snow.

So I tried it twice in fall.  The second time I went, my roommate came with me.  Almost immediately we had to climb over downed trees.  Where did the trail go?  Then we’d think we found the trail again only to come to a place where there was so much dead fall that the trail was lost.  Then it got steeper with a drop off on one side hundreds of feet down to the river.  We kept the river to our right.  I was on hands and knees crawling over and under downed trees.  We were both concerned with falling toward the river, but the slope above was too steep to hike.  We crawled and fought our way through the mess of trees for about an hour and a half and both my hand and my face were bleeding.  We gave up and turned around to head back.  Obviously, who ever wrote this book never actually did this trail.  It probably was a trail at some point, but no one has hiked it in 5 – 10 years (except me).

I took a closer look a map when we got home and it looked like we could reach the lake from a different direction even though there did not appear to be any trails in that area either.  But no trail couldn’t possibly be worse than the one I had been trying.  At this point my roommate was about as obsessed with finding this lake as I was so we headed out to wander around in a different part of the wilderness.  I parked the car near an atv trail.  Good thing I didn’t try to drive down it.  I would have gotten stuck with no way to turn around.  It was so rough with huge convolutions in the ground that I couldn’t even imagine how you would drive an atv down it with out tipping the atv over.  It was a short trail that ended abruptly at a cliff.  Below the cliff was a valley that probably had been carved by the Stillwater creek.  The creek was not visible.  It was all marshy and wetland like.  This was the upper part of the creek that would flow into the lake.  We couldn’t get down the cliff and it looked like a trail went to the right along the top of the cliff so we followed that.  It was one of the steepest trails I’ve ever been on so we got quite the workout.  When the trail mellowed out it looked like it was going away from the lake so we left the trail to head downhill again toward the lake.  It was steep and there were more downed trees than the other day.  The trees were bigger and almost impossible to crawl over.  About an hour of this and my roommate was cussing up a storm.  There was no turning back now, though. We were both determined to find the lake. Then we could see a clearing in the distance that had to be the lake.  Just 10 minutes more and we’d be at the edge of the trees.  There was no lake.  You can tell there might have been a lake a long time ago.  Now it was just brown marshy land.  I am all scratched up for this.  I bled for this.  And I still have to hike back up through the steep forest of twisted unforgiving dead trees.  I don’t know what the name of this dead lake is, but I’m naming it Fuck You Lake.  We both yelled at it for a little bit.  And then cried a little when we realized there was no easy way back to the car.  We had to go the way we came in.  It was a tough hike out, but we will never wonder what Fuck You Lake would have been like if only there was a trail there.