Catamount Falls Trail

This weekend we decided to head to Green Mountain Falls, which is about 30ish minutes west of Colorado Springs. I'm a sucker for waterfalls and water overall so I was excited to see what this hike had to offer. 

The drive to Green Mountain Falls is pretty easy with good roads the entire time, however once you get to Green Mountain Falls, it gets a tad confusing. You actually park in the city by a little pond with an island in the middle of it with no sign of a trail around. You have to hike through a few local streets to get to the actual start of the trail and Verizon had 0 service there, so we did a lot of wandering around. I would highly recommend downloading a map before going there so you don't waste 15 minutes like we did.

Once we got our bearings, or so we thought, we were off. We were originally going to do the Crystal Falls hike but ended up starting out on the Dewey Mountain hike. It's a fairly steep climb to a little mountain overlooking Green Mountain Falls. The views weren't bad but overall I wouldn't waste your time on this one. Below is a quick picture from the top. From there, you could continue to Horseshoe Mountain and link up with the Catamount trail but we decided to backtrack and go down Hondo Ave to the start of Catamount.

Once we finally got on the correct trail, we started our upward climb again. At this point in time we were already 3 miles in from randomly roaming around other trails so it was a little tiring with all of the switchbacks. However the first mile or so of this trail was very pretty with a lot of smaller waterfalls

 After you make it to the top of the mountain, you then go on the backside of it to the "Garden of Eden". This was a pretty meadow area with a few more creeks and a path winding through pretty thick bushes. Overall I really enjoyed this area as it was completely different from the first part of the hike.

Once you get to the end of this trail, it then goes onto a gravel road where you can go right to the reservoir or left to the Ring the Peak trail and end up back at Crystal Falls. We're not big fans of hiking on a road so we backtracked down Catamount and then took Thomas Trail to Crystal Falls. Thomas Trail goes along the side of the mountain with sporadic views of the town. You then get to Crystal Falls right before you start heading back down the mountain into the town. The falls were very pretty and the short hike down followed the stream the entire time.

Minus the getting lost and roaming around a trail we weren't supposed to, I enjoyed this hike. I would say it's on the moderate side as there is a decent amount of elevation gain as soon as you get on the Catamount Trail and you have to cross at least 1 creek when you link up to the Thomas Trail.  As you can see from my GPS below, we were all over the place.