Glorious summer is slowly dying away with fall looming on the horizon, poised to steal away fun times on the mountain trails for the year. A long cold wait lies ahead as the leaves drop and the snow flies for months. At least until April.

Maybe we'll head to Moab again this year for an early season opener. Perhaps this year I'll make it to the Grand Canyon for the first time in my life (despite being a native Tucsonan and resident for two decades). At the end of this summer, my thoughts weave and dart around opportunities taken and missed, about the tentative promise of the future, and about ways to thwart winter with a little outdoor activity. Ice fishing? Snowshoeing?

But neither fall nor winter are quite here yet and there's at least one more trip to be taken, one more camping excursion: Iron Chest trail and Tincup Pass and fishing at Mirror Lake.

We arrived in St. Elmo around 9:45 after a late start thanks to me. I was fiddling around too long in the morning and then had to go all the way back home for something I forgot. Embarrassing (and typical). Oh well, we made up the time ok. No one else was there, which we kind of expected. Paul and his gang were to be up at Mirror Lake, skipping out on the wheeling. Not Scott and I. We pointed our rigs up the trail to Iron Chest, which leads up to an old abandoned mine of the same name.

The hardest part of this difficult trail is right at the start. The picture doesn't even begin to do justice to the long field of large, loose boulders that one must bounce and flog one's rig through in a most ungainly dance of metal crunching, diff banging, and all around jostling.

Oh to have lower gearing for more control. Slowly up one rock with all the finesse one can muster then wham, the truck falls off the other side. No chance to use the brakes to slow the decent. This carried on for what seemed like an hour until finally the trail mellowed out and became a relatively easy climb to the top. I sure hope buckboards and mule trains didn't have to endure that.

Finally, at the top, we started to catch glimpses of the wooden treasures that awaited. Many of the old Iron Chest Mine buildings were still standing, some had crumbled to piles of timber. Old tram towers fought to stay upright down the hill.

One building was an impromptu museum of found artifacts like soles from shoes, all neatly arranged on an ancient weatherbeaten table. In this building the shelving and bunk beds remained hinting at the feeling of the miners' meager comfort; a feeling surely magnified by the mountain's harsh conditions just outside timber doors. How thankful would you be to live in a lumber shed if the alternative were life on the slope of a moutain peak?

After a lunch at the top consisting of yummy meats and cheese wrapped in tortillas, the four-wheeler's bread, we explored the tailings pile near the mine building for awhile to see if, by any chance, we could find a rock with some gold in it to help subsidize the cost of maintaining our rickety rigs but to no avail. Of course I'm kidding. I'm sure the miners did a fine job of picking anything valuable out of the pile of rock. And there's more valuable stuff to be found here.

Corny as it sounds, the glimpses we get of Colorado's mining past, of old buildings and machinery, of hard life on a hard rocky slope are the real treasure, one that you can take with you and enjoy for a long time in your memories. The wheeling is fun, sure, but so is the discovery and exploration of new, or even familiar places.

Pretty soon it was time to head back down where we encountered a large group coming up (they had the right of way), so we ended up having to back up the narrow trail about a mile before finding a place to pull over. Eventually we were able to head down and bounce and lurch our way through the rock garden and head up to Mirror Lake via Tin Cup Pass trail. That's where things took a bit of a sour turn.