Blixt Trail toward Oscar’s Pass-Ophir

The Blixt Trail starts as a side road off of the Ophir Pass Road in southwest Colorado. Ophir is a mountain hamlet in a scenic canyon south of Telluride and east off of Highway 145. The Ophir Pass Road is one of many spectacular high mountain 4WD routes in the Telluride area.

The Ophir Canyon has many obvious signs of past mining activity. I started my hike just past the last group of houses in Ophir where the Ophir Pass Road starts to get rough and the elevation is about 9800 feet. About 1.5 miles further along the road, the second of two side roads on the left leads uphill for 0.4 miles or so to a green gate. The gate ends all motorized travel.

There aren’t any signs that advertize the trail. A good map is advisable. The trail past the gate is the remains of an old road that leads steeply uphill to Oscar’s Pass and the Bridal Veil Basin. The trail is eroded in places and the surface is mostly large gravel. The steepness and the gravel combine to make the descent the type where my feet start to skid and slip out from under me. I hiked the first 1.5 miles to the turnoff but it is drivable in a high clearance vehicle.

As the trail climbs, there are higher and higher views up and down the Ophir Canyon, including high angle views of the Ophir Pass Road. The pass road is also a good hike, easier than this one. The road appears to be very narrow and the traffic I could see was moving very slowly. There seemed to always be a vehicle in sight, sometimes several.

Back to the west there were views down into Ophir and the mountains beyond. The Lizard Head was visible in the distance. On the way into Ophir, there are rock climbing opportunities. I saw a mountain school van stopped by the Ophir Needles, near the junction with Highway 145. There is also a somewhat comical closet sized Post Office along the way.

I didn’t make it to the top of Oscar’s Pass. I hiked for 2:20 hours and got to a point a couple of hundred yards short of the final switchbacks. I think I got as high as 12,500 feet but needed about another 1 mile of walking and 600 more feet of elevation to get to the top. There are two lakes in the basin above including Blue Lake that can also be reached from the top of Bridal Veil Falls east of Telluride.

There isn’t very much posted on-line about the Blixt Trail. I found a short report with some short videos posted by an Ultra-Marathoner. I suppose this was an easy hike for him, but the relentless steepness was too much for me. His hike was in early July and there were still large patches of snow in the highest area. I didn’t see any snow above in mid August.

About 0.5 miles below my turn around there was an apparent trail junction, with a westward leading trail crossing a scree area. The map I had made it appear that this route would loop back down to Ophir. I crossed the scree area, with good views to the area where I had just hiked, but this route started to climb again, and I didn’t want to do any more climbing. I returned by retracing the route up.

My total hike was 4:30 hours for about 7.5 miles. The temperature was about 60 F degrees at 10:00 AM. It felt cooler and there was some wind at my highest point 2 hours later. It was a blue sky day with no thunder clouds. I carried 3 liters of water.

On the way to Ophir I saw two moose with antlers cross Highway 145 from west to east a little south of the Matterhorn Campground. Several cars slowed to let them cross and they hurriedly and awkwardly dived into the brush. These were first moose I’ve spotted in this area.