Greenhorn Gulch and Imperial Gulch Trails (August 17, 2010)

Greenhorn Gulch, the start of the trail. It looks innocent from this point of view. Little do you realize how high you are to begin with, and much you are going to climb from this point of view. The trailhead started at over 5,000ft and climbed to just over 7,000ft.

This view is from the parking lot for the trailhead. This trail is not very far from town and yet you do not see anything but the trail and the mountains, very cool place.

This trailhead area is where multiple trails begin and end. We had to cross the creek here in the beginning multiple times before it started to climb up, up, and up...

We had stopped in to the local bike shop and they recommended these trails and we were glad we listened to their advice.

This trail system, like many in the area, is multi-user friendly. Which includes allowing motorcycles on the trail system. This might not sound like a good thing, but the motorcyclist actually play a huge role in maintaining many of the trails here in Idaho.

We stopped for a snack and a map check here at the point where the three main trails in this area meet up. Greenhorn, Imperial and Mahoney Gulch Trails. The map was a little bit deceptive, we thought that at this point that there was only a little bit of climbing left, but oh no...

And trust me I was tired here from the climbing, and hoping that the hills were going to relent to the anticipated downhill fun.

So we get out from the trees and looked around to see what looked like an easy section of the trail, before what we thought was the ascent. Derek was tired, but the trail being so much fun took his mind off of that!

This was me...

Before...

And then this climb showed up... It was not a horrible climb, but the trail was really sandy in this section, making a hill climb like this into a hike-a-bike section.

It wasn't bad to begin, but I only made it a little further before I lost traction and had to step off the bike.

Oh how sweet the downhill was though when it started. At that point unfortunately the pictures stopped, because of the fun we were having! We went down Imperial Gulch, and about a couple of miles from the end crossed back over to Greenhorn Gulch. Which meant that there was a little climb at the end, but worth it.