Oldham Trail

Well Rachel and I went hiking again yesterday for the first time since late September. The reason for the delay isn't that we are lazy, just that we were told the weather would change in October and we wouldn't be able to hike again. The weather has been great here lately so we went to Buffalo Park and hiked along the U.S. Forest Service trails which are only accessible from this location.

Oldham Trail is not a particularly difficult trail, at least we didn't think so, but we have been walking an awful lot lately (about 33 miles a week on average). There were a couple of up and down sections of the trail but nothing akin to the experience we had climbing Mt. Elden.

At a certain point along the trail, as you meander along the base of Mt. Elden, you come to a series of caves.
And another:

Both of these caves are some distance off the path. In the case of the cave pictured above, it is the same very long cave system in two photos. We had to climb the "boulder mountain" a distance of about 20 feet up to gain access to these caves. I won't lie, we were both scared shitless that there would be sleeping bears in these caves. There were shapes that we couldn't identify, so who knows.

After exploring these caves, we continued our 8 mile hike with little to do, save for the brief period when we got lost on the way back, but this has much more to do with how poorly labeled the trails are in some areas.

Here are the rest of the photos from our hike:


In this photograph of Rachel, you can see what I mean by "the boulder mountain". Along the base of Mt. Elden there are several of these formations that look like huge piles of boulders. You can climb through these and explore the cave systems that are found everywhere throughout the area.