Home»All Photographs»2021 Hikes»Prairie Bluff 08-23-21

On day three of our Castle trip, David and I chose to do Prairie Bluff (also called Corner Mountain). We rolled up our tents early in the morning and drove the long and convoluted gravel road to the trailhead. A lot of the roads in the area are used to access gas wells, and as such, we saw more commercial pickup trucks than other hikers.
After parking by a locked gate, we hiked up a road and then a cutline which took us to another road. Here, we hiked along a field that had many cows, all of them very curious about our presence. The path deteriorated and we ended up bushwacking through a lush gully filled with very tall, dense vegetation. The wierd part was that this area was also full of cows! We heard a large animal crashing through dense bush only to see a black cow with her calf - weird in this setting indeed.
After the cows, we emerged on the open slopes of Prairie Bluff and huffed and puffed our way to the bluff.
The summit was quite cool and windy, so we headed down to a thicket of trees for lunch. After, we looped our way back along a gas well road and then a steep little gully which took us back to the cutline. This was a scenic loop with solitude almost guaranteed.