Author: Frank Konsella

We started by going up Canyon Creek, which was pretty easy outside of the first climb. The Waunita trail started off as a steep hike-a-bike, so our first thought was “oh boy, looks like another one of those days…”. But just as quickly, it started heading downhill. Not only that, it was a sweet downhill,

We’ve been exploring a lot this summer. Sometimes, we haven’t exactly been planning our next visit to certain trails. But this route? It’s on our list, hopefully every summer.

When my buddy Jon and I looked at this trail, we assumed it would be a giant downhill from near treeline all the way down to the Rocky Brook road which connect Spring Creek and Taylor Park. That is not how the Star trail works, however. This is one of those trails that somehow seems to go up more than it goes down. When we were done after a long, long day, Jon dubbed the route “The Crippler”.

Maybe I wasn’t “on it” after two crashes, or maybe it was just that the final descent was getting highly technical, but either way I decided that a third and final crash would be a good way to end the ride. I wasn’t going all that fast, but I did go over the bars and down a steep embankment headfirst into a tree.

With a full closure of Cottonwood Pass, both this summer and next, however, we needed to find another way to access Texas Ridge. While we could have navigated a series of roads near Cottonwood to access Timberline, we decided it would be more interesting to ride the Timberline Trail from the northern terminus at Red Mountain Creek through the old Pieplant town site.