A Successful Second Try

Determined to get to the summit, my friend and I decided to head back to the mountain the day after we failed. This time I picked him up at 9 am since the forescast for the day was sunny and we didn't have to worry about rain or lightning. We arrive at the trailhead at 10 am and began the hike with a clear sky above us. We made excellent time to the creek crossing and plit up to see where the other trail went in relation to the one we took the day before. after a couple hundred feet my friend was significantly higher than me so we chose to take the other trail. We stopped a the oak grove and went west from there, except we took a left at a fork a short distance into the brush. We labored through thick patches of oak to another meadow adn stopped to check the GPS. We were directly east of the summit so we made a beeline for it through the thorns and rough bushes with a machete in hand. We crossed the crest trail soon after and continued through the aspen beyond it. We wlaked beneath a few ponderosas and made our way into the expansive meadow. We fund a trail immediately and followed it to the summit area. After a successful search for the summit, we took a stroll to the western edge of the mountain to check out the view. We looked to the northwest and saw the tempting summit of North Bosque Peak, so we took the machete and bushwhacked a passage through the dense oak. We got to the end of the ridge and absorbed the tremendous views of the entire central New Mexican mountain chain. Once we got our fill, we doubled back to the main meadow east of Bosque Peak. We cut north several hundred feet from the middle of the meadow and went in aline to the east past the most bug-infested part of the forest. Thousands of gnats, ants, and flies fell on us like rain from the tree limbs above. The crest trail wasn't too far beyond the bug fall so we cleaned ourselves off there and followed the trail north to the intersection with Bosque Trail just south of the main canyon from which we came. After a pretty steep descent, we arried at the oak grove and followed the trail without any stops or problems all the way to the car.