Don has a new motto. It’s an old Scandinavian saying: “There is no such thing as bad weather; there is only bad clothing.” It is curious that his adoption of this motto coincides with his recent purchase of some snazzy new rain pants. And probably the reason we found ourselves checking out the Cloverdale Trails in BLM’s Clear Creek Greenway on a rainy St. Valentine’s Day.
The Cloverdale Trails consist of two adjacent and connected loop trails: the 1.73-mile Cloverdale Loop Trail, and the 3.85-mile Piety Hill Loop Trail. In addition, there are two trails, both marked simply “Trail,” that transect the larger Piety Hill Loop Trail. One runs north–south; the other, longer one runs east–west. Both loop trails include vista points over Clear Creek, which are definitely worth a gander. There is also a trail at the far eastern point of Piety Hill Loop Trail that connects to the trails at Horsetown-Clear Creek Preserve.
Photo by Don Burk.
All of these trails run though hard-used land in open blue oak–gray pine habitat. Remnants of mining, in the form of ditches, rock work, and tailings, are evident everywhere.
While the landscape does seem pretty beat up and has seen fire more than once, there remain many very pretty sights: little creeks and waterfalls, beautiful rock cliffs, and a native plant community that is slowly coming back.
Songbirds were numerous and very active that cool, misty-rainy day, and we found a total of 12 pre-spring blooms, including that most definite herald of spring: Henderson’s shootingstar.
To access Cloverdale Trails, take Clear Creek Road from Highway 273, about 8 miles west to Cloverdale Road. Turn right (northwest) onto Cloverdale Road; in about 0.75 miles, you’ll see the sign for the very large trailhead, complete with pit toilets.
These are very popular trails; even on this rainy Sunday, we still passed 10 hikers and two bikers, but nearly all of them were on the shorter, Cloverdale Loop Trail. Piety Hill Loop Trail seems less used, and the transect trails least used of all. While we hiked all of the trails on this particular hike (which necessitated traversing the transect trails twice to get everything in, making for an ~8-mile, moderately easy hike), hikers have many options for much shorter hikes.
In fact, if you just want to see the greatest number of blooms in the shortest distance, the first mile of the section of Piety Hill Loop Trail that parallels Cloverdale Road has an amazing diversity of just-starting-to-bloom plants compared with all the other trails combined. Here’s a short slideshow of some of our favorites. All photos by Don Burk. Enjoy! ~Laurie & Don Burk
