Gore Creek Trail to Buffalo Pass

It's finally starting to feel like Fall in the mountains here in CO, which also means the trees are starting to turn. For this week's hike, Ali and I headed to Gore Creek Trail which is a few minutes from East Vail.  According to AllTrails, it's around 12.8 miles with a 3,172 feet vertical. After doing a little more roaming around/taking the wrong path one time, we were right at 14 miles with a 3,294 vertical.

From the trail head, you start going uphill pretty fast. For the first 10 minutes or so you hear some interstate noise but that fades out quickly and you are encompassed by Aspen trees. Below are a few pictures after the initial climb with the sun rising.

From there, the trail has some ups and downs, but overall it's a fairly gradual climb for the most part with a few sections being more intense than others. It's a very pretty hike since you follow the Gore Creek the majority of the time and you get views water, forest, and mountain peeks in both directions.

The last .75 mile or so is pretty brutal after hiking 6 miles to get there. It's a steady climb of ~900 feet until you get to the top of Buffalo Pass. From the top of the pass you can see Silverthorne on the other side as well as the valley you just hiked through from East Vail. As you can see from the picture below, Ali was a tad tired.

Since the sun was in our eyes the majority of the hike there, I took a few more pictures coming back to show the creek and a view of East Vail.

Overall I would highly recommend this hike. It's definitely on the more on the strenuous side due to the elevation gain and length, but the variety of views that it provided was well worth it.