Saddle between Deer Creek and Miller Creek

January 2, 2022

Saddle between Deer Creek and Miller Creek

This was a hybrid trip with Thursday Night Mountain Bike group members and Rocky Mountaineers members, so I didn’t require Rocky Mountaineers membership.  We left the Pattee Canyon Picnic area parking lot at about 12:15 pm and skied up the steeper trail headed south.  It looked like the ski club had rolled the lower part of this trail since it was level and smooth and easy to snow-plow down.  We skied up the trail to where the logging road cuts over to the Deer Creek road  which we skied up to the saddle.  There was a good skier-packed trail up the road.  At the saddle to the Miller Creek drainage, we found an abandoned not very old Subaru which you can see in one of the photographs.  Sometime next summer the new House of Sky trail which goes from close to this saddle to Dean Stone Mountain will open.  As of 2021, there are a number of new hiking/biking trails in the area https://www.trailforks.com/trails/pattee-to-dean-stone-area/.  Skiing down was fairly fast and fun but not so fast as to be dangerous even to me (I had a robotic laproscopic hernia operation 1 ½ weeks ago).  On the way down, we stopped at the decrepit ski shelter which I remember from my first ski outing with my parents and brother about 69 years ago when I was 11.  The shelter might have been in a little better condition then but had already been abandoned as a ski shelter.  Participants:  Peter Difurio, Laurie Stalling, Ed Stalling, Neil Simpson, and Alden Wright (leader).  Trip report by Alden Wright.