Round Trip Distance: 1.8 miles
Difficulty: Easy
MTB Skill level:
Elevation: 6658 -6777 feet
Cellphone: 2-4 bars
Time: 1 hr. 30 mins.
Trailhead: Dave Wood Road
Fee: none
Attractions: Overlook
The Dakota Rim trail is part of the Buzzard Gulch Trails in the Dry Creek Recreation Area near Montrose, Colorado. The trail begins off of the Dave Wood Road a short distance from the Lower Spring Canyon trailhead. From there it travels over to the rim above Spring Creek Canyon before paralleling it down to a junction with the Broken Antler and Rusty Buckets trails. Enroute there are several overlooks of the lower area of Spring Creek Canyon.
For this post we are starting at the upper end of the trail where it connects to the Dave Wood Road. This is near what would be mile marker 2.9. The Lower Spring Creek trailhead is at mile marker 3 so if you reach that point you went a little too far. There is barely enough room for one vehicle to pull over off the pavement so parking at the Lower Spring Creek trailhead would be a good option anyway.
The Dakota Rim trail follows an old jeep road as it heads away from the Dave Wood Road.
Judging from all the bones on both sides of the trail as it starts out the area looks like it was a popular place for ranchers to dump dead cattle.
As the trail gets close to the rim of Spring Creek Canyon it reaches its highest point. From here the trail turns and begins paralleling the canyon rim as it heads gradually downhill toward the rest of the Buzzard Gulch trails.
There are plenty of rocks to navigate for much of the way.
At some point the old jeep road becomes more of a singletrack.
There are several good spots to venture over to the rim and get a look at Spring Creek Canyon. Near the end of the trail there is one spot that is designated as the official overlook.
The view up the canyon toward the Uncompahgre Plateau stretches out for quite a ways. There is what appears to be an unofficial trail that continues along the rim from the overlook. It doesn't have any signage and it isn't on the official map but it does show up in places like MapBuilder. We used the MapBuilder overlay for our map so it shows the route that we are talking about.
It is only another 500 feet or so from the turnoff to the overlook before the Dakota Rim trail meets up with Broken Antler and Rusty Buckets and comes to an end. A map comes in handy in deciding where to go from here. For this post we turned around and returned the way that we came.
