It was a beautiful weekend for hiking. Calm weather that wasn't too hot, even at lower elevations. We didn't get up too high but stayed a little lower hoping to find some wildflowers. The Lyons area has always been good for wildflowers but we weren't sure if it was too early for that elevation. And although it was indeed early, there were still a handful of flowers on this hike at the beginning as we were hiking along the forest road. But I would not consider this a hike for wildflowers. The main trail soil conditions didn't seem right for wildflowers to thrive here. But even without the wildflowers, this was a great hike with wide open views at Big John Mountain that were perfect for eating lunch.

The last time we hiked this, forest road 3301 was open allowing us to drive up 3/4 of a mile to make the hike shorter. The gate was still closed from winter so this was a little longer of a hike than last time, but we were expecting that so it was ok.

There was only one other car when we got to the trailhead, and right as we were starting our hike that person was heading back from camping that night before. So we were the only ones up there for the majority of the hike. On our descent we came across a handful of people, but overall it was a very quiet hike. This area has a ton of small off shoot trails that we need to explore some time. But since it isn't well known, the trails a very overgrown making it a real adventure getting lost in the forest and finding your own way.

This is the last weekend until after Labor Day that parking is free in Chautauqua park so that's where we headed. Knowing it would be busy, we got to the parking area a little after 8am and found some parking spots still available. Had we gotten there 30 minutes later, parking would have been challenging, so I think we timed this one well. We met up with some friends at the trailhead and started our hike to the first and second flatirons.

Our main goal for this hike was to find lots of wildflowers. This area is nearing the peak for wildflowers, so we found quite a bit of them. Another couple of weeks and it will be perfect, but no free parking. The wildflowers were great on this hike. We saw a lot more wild Iris than we thought we would, as well as a lot of other varieties of wildflowers covering the many meadows in this area.

We have been seeing reports of wild orchids in the Glen Haven area so we decided to go hunt for them ourselves. Glen Haven only has a handful of hikes, so we picked the main one - hiking to the summit of Crosier Mountain. For an area with so little trails, this summit odly has 3 different trailheads. We chose to hike this from the second most difficult trail, the one from the Gravel Pit trailhead.

The hike to Crosier was challenging, but there were lots of wildflowers which made it very exciting. We've only ever hiked this in late June (when all the wildflowers would have been mostly dead) and in December (when all the wildflowers would have been long dead). So it was nice to have seen this area filled with nearly perfectly peak wildflowers.

We found 2 areas that had Orchids. The first was a singular orchid about a half mile into the hike right off the side of the trail. It was very exciting to find the thing we went out there for so early in the hike. Around 2.5 miles in, after the junction with one of the other trails, we found a handful more patches, all within about 200ft from one another also right next to the trail. We successfully went hunting for wild orchids and found them!

The weather over the weekend wasn't great. It was forecasted to be rainy all weekend, but Saturday morning had a bit of relief. We had no rain and it wasn't muddy on the hike which was great. At the summit, I decided to eat lunch first and take photos later, but that was a mistake because the fog rolled in and we couldn't see much by the time I started taking photos. But even before the fog, the views were not that clear from all the moisture in the air. Even though the summit views weren't the best, we weren't disappointed. After all, the summit wasn't the reason for doing this hike.

I had some new gear for this hike, a new Osprey Pack. It's a little bigger than my older pack but in the winter my pack was often stuffed to the brim. Using this in the summer will be a little overkill (size-wise), but it'll be worth it to have some more space in the winter. REI was having a Memorial day sale so I was able to snag it for $160. I'm mostly including this information in the post because I frequently want to know when I bought certain gear. I think I got my last pack in 2018 (ish) so I expect this new pack to last a good 5+. My old pack had a few broken plastic buckles on it and there were some elastic spots no longer acting elastic. So it was time for a new pack.