Every trailhead holds the promise of delivery: an honest trail whisks you away, and returns you. The drive into Ninety Cent Gulch approaches a passage both physical and primal. The trail itself is a conduit. The hike up a low flank of the Elkhorn Range shunts you on a scenic capillary from the heart at Turnley Meadows, the source of departure and arrival.
Following Elkhorn Creek, the main road that penetrates the historic Elkhorn mining district branches left one mile below the Elkhorn townsite. This unnamed diversion delivers you up Turnley Creek instead into the lush palm of confluence at the head of Turnley Meadows. Named for a judge who brought the first quartz mill to Montana near Helena in the late 1860s before setting up a sawmill in his namesake meadows, the creek corridor probes the overgrown fringes of Elkhorn’s past. Willow bottoms open gradually over a mile and a half onto the converging mouths of gulches (Greyback, Sourdough, Turnley, Ninety Cent, and Seven Up) that once harbored the lives of prospectors, miners, and woodcutters.
The end of the road kinks left to deposit you at the trailhead. You might end your day here. In this meadow cradle carved by water from wooded depths unseen, there is a sense of destination. Or rebirth: A two-mile climb up Ninety Cent Gulch will usher you from parkland womb into the light of an unassuming divide. The summit perch northeast of Boulder offers a bridge, from tectonic uplift back down toward civilized spread by way of Rawhide trail.
