[Sadie's Driver]

Happy Mother's Day. Fortunately, I can say that I survived this one! Like they say, if it can go wrong, it will. After a perfectly lovely hike yesterday in the Teanaways up to Iron Peak, today's hike was less than auspicious! It started out well enough - Sadie and I were to meet Trail Pair at the Baring Store to head up to Barclay Lake and on into Eagle Lake and Mt. Townsend. But I got a call about 1/2 hour before the agreed to time and they were stuck outside of Start-Up due to a head-on collision on Rt. 2 and eastbound traffic was being turned back around. It didn't look like there was reasonable way for them to avoid it - so we scratched our plans and they decided to go on down to Mt. Dickerman. And then, the black cat ran across my path! OK - so things happen in threes. Sadie and I decided to head on up to Barclay and see if we could make it to Townsend. Sadie had her crampons. I had snowshoes, ice ax and crampons. We were ready. There was one other car at the trailhead on this lovely Sunday morning - 9:00 a.m. We would discover that it belonged to a dad and his son who had camped overnight at the lake. Otherwise, we had the place to ourselves! Amazing. It's a lovely trail to Barclay - so incredibly gentle (after yesterday, that was a welcome change!). We got to the lake in a little under an hour. Sadie had already stopped at the swimming hole under the bridge that crosses the creek before the lake - but she took in a few more swims at Barclay. One happy dog - at least for now.

We passed the overnight campers - who had a campfire going - causing some low-hanging smoke on the lake. We kept on until we got almost to the end of the lake and I saw the trail headed straight up - the infamous trail to Stone and Eagle Lakes.

It was reminiscent of the trail to Mailbox - that is, until some "helpful" soul decided to spray paint the route up! Anyway, no spray paint on this trail, but pink/orange flags every so often that were most helpful.

Somehow, however, we managed to lose the flags. We got well off-course.! I kept saying, "we are headed too far east." But, oh no, my companion was certain there was a clearing ahead that would lead us to the break we were looking for. Mind you, the book clearly says, "you climb 1400" to get to Paradise Meadows and Eagle Lake is at 1500' above Barclay. Well, sure enough, this "clearing" was a boulder field - no mention of that in the book.

So we pondered what next to do. Up the boulder field we headed.

Did I mention that there were a LOT of rocks??? Straight up????

We climbed and we climbed and we climbed until we got to some trees - - , now what? More climbing and hanging onto vegetation belays to get us up to, guess what? More rocks!!! Only these rocks were semi-covered in rapidly melting snow at 3700'. That meant post-holing frequently.

Meanwhile -we were faced with climbing up and over this 4200' peak that we had managed to get ourselves on - that is IF we planned to get to Eagle Lake - forget Stone Lake!!! Did I mention boulders? Oh yes, there were plenty of those to scale!

Lunch break on the boulders

Well, since we had gone too far East,we decided to try heading back West/Northwest in the hopes of re-connecting with the "trail" - which was sketchy at best to begin with back down at Barclay. Well, we never did see any evidence of a trail. And we were bush-whacking and post-holing and slipping all over this slope!

Trail(?) up

It was after 2:00 p.m. We managed to drop down fairly rapidly - found this creek and just followed the creek bed pretty much almost back to where we started earlier at Barclay. The water went underground at some point, but we had the dry bed to walk down without running into any cliffs or anything. By the time we got back to the lake, there were all sorts of people. Sadie managed yet another swim - we sat for a minute (that was a very, very steep drop pretty rapidly). We headed back towards the car - of course, Sadie had to have one last swim at the swimming hole under the bridge.

Last dip by the bridge

- where there was a bit of a traffic jam with all of the people and dogs -

Traffic jam at the bridge

Note, there are a few blow-downs, one at about a mile into the trail and then a few more - but nothing that you can't make it across or around. Given what we had climbed up, over and under on the way (supposedly) to Eagle, the blow-downs were a piece of cake. Also, note, the black flies and mosquitos are out and they are very hungry! There's no snow at Barclay - the lake is totally melted out (nice and cool) - snow is up high, above 3700'. We got back to the car about 4:00 p.m. I counted 20 cars at the trailhead and along the road. Even though I complained constantly (did I mention the boulders and rocks?), it was a lovely day - a reminder that summer hikes aren't far off. Sadie collapsed when we got home - a very strenuous weekend for the 4-legged summiting Sadie. She is resting comfortably now.

Mt. Baring across the lake

[TrailPair]

Wow, there appears to be a few bloulders on your route. To bad you missed Mt Townsend. I would hae guessed there would be some great views from there. Anyway, we had a good outing on Mt Dickerman and some "knock-your-sox-off" scenery ....but it wasn't quite the adventure you had.