[ranger rock]

camp

Phil's tube tent

view into the heart of the wilderness

a sloppy pano

The steep meadow

Wonder tarn we camped at

heading back into the woods

scaly chanterelles, don't eat them!

The Wonder Mountain Wilderness, I’ve had my eyes on it since about 2007. The Wonder Mountain Wilderness is close to home, but it's a rugged place that has no roads and no trails. I was afraid to try going there alone. Finally this year it all came together for me; I’m in good hiking condition and I found a hiking partner who was game to try to tackle this hike with me. I tried to cut and past my entire report here but none of the line breaks were included. It's way too many line breaks for me to put in manually. Is there a way to cut and paste text into this form and have the line breaks show up? The entire report including the track log and all the pictures is formatted nicely here http://mosswalks.blogspot.com/2014/09/wonder-mountain-wilderness-and-wonder.html Anyway the trip up to the Wonder Ponds was easy as could be, until suddely it was not. Then suddenly it was one of the toughest hikes I have ever been on. I would not want to do this as a day hike, that's for sure.. We could not even find the lake we were aiming for until the next morning, but at least we did find it. Niether of us had been in the Wonder Mountain Wilderness before, so I think we did pretty good just to make it up to a tarn on the first day.

Wonder tarn reflections

Deerguy's coffee perker?

I thought long and hard before I took Patches up there. She is a bit old for the trip, but she really loves to hike and she is heart broken when I go hiking without her. So I took her and she did okay, but she sure is suffering for it today. Before and after pictures of Patches:

Patches before

Patches after

I think I would like to go back but I'd like to spend two nights up there and I'd like NOT to have to hike out of there in the rain.

would you like to hike down this in the rain with a full pack on your back?

The meadow was wet and slick on the way back

_______________________________________________________ Here is the whole report cut and pasted.. just an ureadable block of text: It's best viewed here http://mosswalks.blogspot.com/2014/09/wonder-mountain-wilderness-and-wonder.html The Wonder Mountain Wilderness, I’ve had my eyes on it since about 2007. The Wonder Mountain Wilderness is close to home but it has no roads and not trails. It’s a rugged place and I am afraid to try going there alone. Finally this year it all came together for me; I’m in good hiking condition and I found a hiker partner who only likes to hike off trail. I was not sure about bringing Patches on this hike. She is getting old and I knew the trip would be hard on her and she might stir up the hornets during hornet season. But I also knew that she really wanted to go hiking. She did manage to step in one hornets’ nest on the way up and I got stung while dragging her away from it. She also needed help in several spots since she can’t crawl up and over big logs very well anymore. Now the next day, she is really suffering, but I’m glad I brought her, because she had lots of fun and she did pretty well for her age. Patches is about 11 years old. My Brooks Cascadia running shoes were perfect for this hike; the traction never once failed me. But I did wear a brace on both ankles so I would be sure not the sprain them. Hiking in running shoes and T2 brand active ankle braces is more comfortable than hiking in boots. I’ve had surgery on both of my ankles and I always wear a brace on my right ankle but never on my left ankle. But my left ankle was still tired and hurting from my PCT hike and I knew this was going to be a rough “trail”, so I opted to brace both of my ankles. That turned out to be a good call. My left ankle felt much better for being braced. We were going to do this as a day hike but a local told us that it was better done as a two night trip. We did not have two nights free to do the trip so we opted for a one nighter. We started our hike at 10:30 in the morning on Labor Day. We were going to hike to the end of the Steel Creek road but the same local told me about a better route that starts at the end of one of the switchbacks. We hiked about a mile down the road and then we went off the road and onto the “trail”. As soon as we hit the trail we found Deerguy's coffee percolator.  We followed the trail as it side hilled towards a creek. The creek was listed as seasonal on my map but it seemed to have a pretty good flow rate for a seasonal stream. I think my map got the creek backwards. The next creek was just a trickle but it was harder to cross as we had to cross on a logjam that had notches hacked into it. The trail was not too bad, it was easy enough to follow and even though I was groggy I felt like we had an easy time reaching the meadow. Once I saw the meadow I thought we had it made, this wasn’t such a tough hike after all! No more brush crashing, no more route finding, and just follow the meadow up to the ridge and then drop right off the ridge and into the lakes. Was I ever wrong. For one thing the meadow was tough going and farther up than it looked. Then when we topped the meadow there was no view of the lakes, there was only trees. So more route finding and brush crashing would be required. We followed a very clear animal path toward the lake, then the path ended at a precipice. Uh oh! How the heck were we going to get down to the lakes? We had to back track and then drop below a ridge to get to another saddle. We could not walk the ridge due the difficulty of the terrain so we dipped down and then came back up to a saddle. We looked down into the woods from the saddle. The hill was steep, very, very steep and the lake was down there somewhere and there seemed to be no way down to it. We could find no trace of any trail and it was starting to get late. We kept creeping down the hill hoping to find a way and knowing that at some point we would be committed to going down that hill and maybe hitting a sheer cliff and having to go back up. We were both a bit un-nerved by this. Then we both remembered the route to another secret lake and how it was very much the same. So downward we plunged weaving back and forth down the hill trying to avoid the cliff bands and the worst of the brush. Finally we found a meadow and a ravine and we saw a little lake. So I figured that this little lake must be above the bigger lake we are trying to reach. Getting down to the little lake from the ravine was slippery and Phil fell a few times but we both made it down to the little lake that I will refer to as a tarn for the rest of this post. It was good to reach the lake because we were nearly out of water. We then began to look for the big lake. The little lake was set in a ledge with a sheer drop to the North. We thought that the lake we were looking for was to the North of the little lake, but could see no good way down into the ravine and now it was just two hours until sunset. We looked and looked and could see no sign of the big lake. My GPS kept flipping around and a few times it showed that the big lake was behind us but I figured that was just my GPS acting up. We had a paper map too and it showed that the big lake was just one or two contours away from us. So we tried to go to the big lake but all we saw was a rather steep drop. At that point it was just one hour until sunset and nothing was making any sense, so we decided to set up our camp at the tarn and maybe look for the big lake in the morning. We were just too tired to be able to make sense of anything. We both had a GPS and a paper map and Phil had two compasses but we could not find that big lake. We were both just too tired and my GPS, it turned out was not working well because the battery was low. I knew the battery was low, but I forgot how bad the GPS can skip around when the battery is low. We set up camp at the tarn and cooked our dinners. I had a beef and pasta soup that Sonya had left for me at Olallie Lake and Phil had an MRE. Patches had dry dog food and blueberries. She picked the blue berries herself. Our camp was on top of heather and blueberries. I don’t like to camp on top of heather, but there was no place else. There were no clearings of any kind at this tarn. My bed was lumpy and bumpy and I was really hungry, so I was not sure how I was going to sleep. Then I remembered my blackberry wine. Two swallows of the wine made my stomach stop hurting and made me forget the lumps and fall asleep. Too bad it also made me wake up two hours later to answer the call of nature. Patches slept in a sweetie pie sleeping bag extender, it zipped up into a perfect little sleeping bag for her. The sky was mostly overcast , so it was not very cold. It took a lot of love for me to haul a sleeping bag all the way up to the Wonder ponds just for my dog to sleep in. Phil slept in an emergency tube tent. It was quite a sight to see. In the morning Phil said that he did not feel well at all, so we took our time packing up. When were we were almost done packing up I put new batteries in my GPS and tried once again to figure out where the lake was. Phil pulled out his paper map and he also tried to figure it out. With both of us fresh from sleeping overnight finding the big lake was a breeze. We could tell that we were just 400 some feet away from it! Yes, we had spent the night about 400 feet away from the lake we had been looking for! We felt kind of silly but mostly relieved to have figured out where the big lake was after working so hard to get there. We were also very glad that we had not kept going north down the giant hill one hour before sunset. Calling it a night at the tarn was the right thing to do. We finished packing up and then set our packs to the side and headed up to where we decided the big lake was and….. there it was, just like that. We wandered around the big lake for about half an hour and then it was time to go. It was going to be a long hike out and it looked like it was going to rain. The first thing we had to do was hike 500 feet back up the saddle on the brushy hill side. We found some trail blazes on the hill side maybe, but we never found anything that actually looked like a trail. I think the actual trail goes to the big lake and not the little lake. The climb up took its toll on me because I was still a bit tired from hiking in the day before, but it was not too bad. Next we had to find our way through the brush and back to the top of the meadow. I was going to take a break at the meadow to make some coffee and feed one of Phil’s extra MRE’s to Patches. But when we reached the notch above the meadow the wind was blowing and the rain had started. It was my wish to get down out of the meadow while it was still dry. The meadow was sure to be very slippery when soaked with rain. We were both a bit surprised at just how steep that meadow was too. In fact the entire way down was much steeper than the entire way up. That happens sometimes, going down can be harder, it’s so easy to slip and fall going down and then there was the rain to deal with. Everything was wet and slippery for the rest of the hike out and we were not as fresh as we had been the day before. The hike out was long, very long and we got wet and cold. I wore my rain jacket all the way out but I opted to let my pants get wet. My rain pants would have been shredded by brush crashing and crawling over logs. My pants got soaking wet. When we got back to the top of the hogs back it was 3pm and I had to stop because I was hungry. So I stopped there and shared my MRE with Patches. I gave her all of the meat because it looked and tasted really scary. I did not make coffee. It was too cold to sit around and make coffee. One the way out route finding was actually harder, it should have been easier but since we were so tired it was actually harder. Also climbing over blow downs and into ravines started to feel very dangerous. Everything was wet and slippery and we were tired and cold and clumsy. Yep, I was ready for this hike to end before one of us got hurt. Phil kept slipping and falling about twice every mile. I was lucky, I only fell down one time. At about 5:30 we reached our parking area and headed home. It had taken us 6 hours just to hike down 4 miles from the lake, that’s once crazy tough trail. Will I ever go back to the Wonder Ponds? Ask me next week. One thing I know for sure is that if I ever do go back I’ll spend more than one night out there. 7.5 miles with about 2,500 feet elevation gain going in and about 500 feet elevation gain going out.

[Chico]

[ranger rock]

[Chico]

Looks like it was a "true wilderness experience". Quite rare these days. Sounds like an interesting little corner to visit.

[Chico]

[Magellan]

Unreadable here. (FF) Just fine on the blog.

[Ski]

[ranger rock]

A few more pictures.. I'm pretty sure that there was a much better way to do this. Maybe Deerguy can set us straight when he gets home..

It was a steep route but there was no snow when we did it

I have a feeling there was a better way to do this

Phil takes the high road and nearly falls off of it. A tree saved him from death. I took the low road.

[Deereguy]

Ranger, Congrats to the both of you. You made it in the first attempt. Exploring that area for over 40 years, we ,never saw a girl. Actually, we've seen few people except some loggers many years ago that got helicoptered in. They left a mess. Yes, you're right. There is a game trail down after you circle the hump to the left. It was pretty grown over in July. Many berries on the way up the meadow? Seems like you may be getting, already have the off trail fever.

[ranger rock]

[reststep]

Thanks for the report. Are there some good camp spots at the larger lake?

[ranger rock]

Yes there were a couple of really good campspots. A high spot on the North end of the lake looked nice. I did not explore the low spot on the South end of the lake, I suspect that is where the way trail comes out to the lake.

[BackwoodsDrifter]

Epic hiking for me, if I went alone I might've given up before getting out of the Skoke valley! But having Patches kept me going, I couldn't give up when she was always in front. Coming back out was the other way around though, Patches kept under my feet a lot. All my gear is car camping stuff, many thanks to the Mossy Mom for setting me straight! I was still short a packable tent for this hike and with no time to shop around so I spent $12 on a emergency tent. On the plus side, that tent weighs 14.75 ounces with it's string. But next time I think I'll be upgrading to a contractor-grade lawn & leaf bag...or better! Got to go to work, but I'll throw some pics up here later tonight.

[BackwoodsDrifter]

I had just a week before this trip, hiked up the old road just because it was there. I had no idea I would be coming back to this road so soon! At the time, I didn't know about the way trail cutting across the hillside so I went right through the first switchback without seeing any sign of a trail there. At least I did pause to look at that switchback and considered how it looked like an overgrown landing that I could potentially explore. I did make it up all the way to the upper end of the road, and then saw a well established foot path continuing on up. I wanted to go up that, but it was late and I was only dayhiking that time. So I was talking to Shauna about having made this minor little hike, when all of a sudden she's asking me to go on a real hike, into the area up above that I've been wondering about. And she's got all kinds of trip reports, routes, secret trails, lakes - everything all laid out and just waiting for someone to team up with & go. So of course I went for it! Cool secret trail, getting up & over a ridge I've been looking at for a while = fix the car some other time, I'm a goin' hikin'! Once you know there's a trail at the switchback, that's all you need to know to find it. Just look for an easy way into the bushes, and your already doing it right. You will see a hiker shaped hole cut right through all the branches on the uphill side of the landing. The other thing you need to know is the GPS coordinate for where to turn and start going up. Between the trail start at the landing and the point to go up, the sidehill route going in just follows a constant slope upwards. There are several places on this sidehill section where you will lose sight of the trail. There's trees blown down across the trail, burying it. Some other places are just a bit overgrown, and a few spots that are just not dug in enough to leave much of a path to follow. I just decided whoever cut this trail was keeping it as simple as possible and took the straight & narrow line of travel. Every time I lost the path, I just looked forwards along the line of travel, and after another 10 or 15 feet I was always picking the pathway up again. I kept telling myself, so far this path just doesn't up & jump upslope or down, so just go forwards where it looked like the trail was going to go before you lost sight of it. There's lots of really old blazes along this section, as well as up above along this entire hike. So it's worth the time to always look at the trees every step of the way. Sometimes you just need to go up past a tree that's blocking your view forwards, to see the path again. Having a GPS track already laid out in advance, hand drawn at home was a nice touch. I could compare my progress to that track on my GPS in order to see how the path was crossing the slope at my position, that helped to keep picking the path up. This is looking down the first creek:

Finally, a view out from inside this forest! This narrow slice of Skoke valley will soon be left behind. I'm showing this pic to people and saying things like, "see how clearly obvious the trail is at this spot?" And they keep saying "what trail?"

The notches in the logs of course! What more do you need to know? Big trees, trail like your just strolling around in a park:

Second Creek, looking down at - "Soooo, just where's that trail again?"

But you can see that the easiest thing to do is get to that rock wall, and from there, even if it's brush-busting, you will want to go up those logs. But take a few more steps and you will see a 'path' down into this mess! She's standing right in the middle of the trail, cant you tell?

Once you're down there, you'll see a lot of steps cut into the logs. And a nail that's sticking up where you really don't want to go sliding! Slippery logs alert! I have a 3 liter that started with an even 2 at the Jeep, I decided to refill here back to 2 liters. The water jumps off the rock wall in a nice little streamer that dumps neatly into the bladder. Very nifty! No pics of the really big blow down. But there's a place where you will really need to push around in the bushes for a ways, just try to stay on the same elevation as where the path fades, go a few feet higher from that and forwards! After making the waypoint to go upslope, and after some rocky stuff I finally get my breath back enough to bother with pulling the camera out:

Rest break, looking back down at the trail:

And then I see my GPS tracklog is acting funny. It's not following my route, the onscreen track is just a line coming from the second creek straight to my current position. I've been setting waypoints after making the turn uphill, so I can see where I was. I decided to turn of the stupid track logging and just start setting lots of waypoints from here on out. I think I was only getting two satellites, but I can't remember where in all those darn menus is hidden the ability to show the satellite page. Ignore it & continue. Another rest break, looking back down. Trail is easy to spot here:

The bees nest is just a little further up from here. There's a section where the trail cuts to the left through open forest, jumping from one ridgeline to another. That bees nest is right where you turn & cut hard left at about 30 degress upslope. Lots of alternate routes 20 feet below that nest! And then the hogsback. I really wanted to go right up that, but I couldn't see where the trail was and I knew that rocky knife might turn into too much adventure. But I just had to go up there to look at it. At this point, you have just made the leftwards ridgeline, the path has climbed up onto a saddle and appears to drop off the other side into nothing. There's a nice little knoll downslope in the trees to take a break on. I learned later that the trail is dropping sharply down the backside of this saddle, but at this point you just can't see it. There's a few saplings growing across it. So I decide I need some adventure, I just haven't been having any near death experiences yet! So if you like almost dying, do like me and go right straight up that rock knife, veer to the left to see what things are like way down below a cliff. You'll likely spot the trail like I did. I could see it from above, while standing on the tip of a outcrop. And then I see there's a way to go down right there, to rejoin the trail. Between that outcrop and the cliff is a narrow gap of death. If it wasn't for a big tree in that gap to use for a slide check, I probably would've turned back like a smart fellow and made my way back to where I ought to have been. But nope, just got to do this. It's a guy thing or something right? Moment my foot touches dirt and I let go of the rocks, I'm sliding down that gap. I hit the tree hard enough to make some noise, so I say 'I meant to do that!' out loud but really what I meant to say can't be said here. There's a 3 inch goat path of tippyness to get down out of that gap by, or could just choose suicide and slide down the slope 30 feet before there's anything to grab. I'm not brave enough to choose suicide yet, so I try to keep my balance & tippy-toe the hell out of that spot. Ok, so now my heads straight. I'm back on trail and I'm trying to avoid any further bonus points because suddenly a boring hike sounds like a fun thing! This pic is skirting the hogsback on it's lefthand side:

And that too. So, after the 'go left of the hogsback' section you finally get out of the trees and into the bottom of the 'Big Meadow' Looking downhill:

Along the trail, you need to cross a small grassy area, get on the other side of the boulders, then you're ready to go up:

And up means 'up there':

Like, all the way up there to the skyline, up there! Before leaving the treeline, I tied a yellow ribbon. This is looking back at the trail:

Contemplating how all these car sized rocks came to rest at the bottom of a steep slope:

Yay! No more route finding! Just go up this and finally just enjoy the day, right?

Ok, that trail is over there somewhere. I have a waypoint on it, got ribbon on it and now I'm photographing it so I can get this layout in my head. I also decided to tie another ribbon where I can see the one at the treeline.

Uhh, say these rocks are like, about ready to continue rolling downwards. All they need for action is an unwary boot!

Still looking around down here while getting left behind:

As you climb, you get pummeled by these little critters:

Rest break, just trying not to start sliding & die is all...

A little higher up, another rest break:

Finally, at the top! Looking at Rule Creek with Capitol Peak hiding in the clouds to the right:

And looking east from the top:

Looking east, out at the Four Stream basin:

Done resting at the top of the meadow, now we're heading towards that saddle we're supposed to drop down from:

On the way across the top is a well established game trail:

Game trail seems to end at this patch of blueberries:

In hindsight, I can tell that this was looking out above the steep area to the right hand side from where the game trail drops down. At the bottom of the blueberry patch, looking back up and just not 'getting it'

Ok, we really lost the trail at this point. In hindsight, I see my big mistake is in not keeping my main compass where I can grab it on a moments notice. I tucked it into a rear pouch on my pack for an emergency backup. I didn't feel like taking the pack off to get the compass, I was a bit tired & not thinking it out clearly. I didn't have my GPS oriented on north like I would do with a paper map, so I didn't know that the easy looking route on-screen wasn't actually where I was looking downslope. Here's my position & the direction I was looking:

This is the clearest view through the trees, but it's looking right over the steepest portion of the other side! Deerguy said it, just above on this thread. We should've cut left through the bushes and continued forwards. The yellow dotted line is what I wanted to do, the black cone is what I was looking at. My lack of compass led me to assume that I was looking at the dotted route, and I could see that what I was looking at was way too steep, so I decided the map was wrong and that we needed to find another route. This wont be the last time my lack of compass leads me astray.... If you decide the easy route is just not your thing and it's really just not taking long enough to get to the lakes, then follow along here because we have a nice route for you to follow! First, go back up the game trail. Then go back to the top of the meadow. Now look at that Four Stream basin. Pretty isn't it? We both agreed that if we don't find the route down to the Five Stream lake, we'll just lame out on some Four Stream stuff instead. We saw a mud puddle down below in the Four Stream basin, so we know where water is at the moment. But I'm trying to forget about that mud puddle! I got yellow flags marking the bushier parts of this. You'll drop down the Four Stream side in a small clearing and go sidehill to the left, staying out of the bushes for the moment. Go as far as possible in the clear, with your mind set on reaching that northern saddle. Eventually, no choice but to bushwhack down & northwards. Eventually you'll drop onto a shelf that brings you out under the saddle in a nice open meadow. No easy way up, so go past the saddle to the edge of the clearing under it. Now go up the treeline, skirting the righthand side of the clearing. You'll find some old blazes just inside the trees, so that proves we weren't the first to go this way. At the top, go forwards along the ridgeline to reach the saddle. It looks like it makes sense at this point, and there's been blazes spotted, so we're not worried about that dead end at the first saddle. Dropping down, always angling to the left, I managed to finally spot our goal:

It's also at this point that I clearly hear two people talking to each other down at that lake. I told Shauna but she didn't hear it. She yells out anyways, and it seems like those voices suddenly quit. I think there's someone down there trying not to be noticed! Or maybe it's bears that just happen to sound like people talking? But other than a candybar wrapper that doesn't really look all that fresh, we never ran into anyone or bears either. Oh well, just call me crazy. I'm hearing voices 'out there' in the wilderness and we're getting more & more committed to dropping down this slope with no sign of a trail. So of course I completely lose track of where that lake is and just assume we're heading to it. Finally, break out of the trees at the top of another one of those steep slippery rocky meadows:

Lake must be at the bottom of this, I don't need that GPS now!

There's some little pond, must be some extra little bit of water right next to the lake. I still don't need that GPS anymore, we just need to get down there and stroll right past that little bit of water. Piece of cake!

Looking back up where we broke through. I don't think this needs any ribbons marking it. It looks pretty obvious to me:

No Patches! Stay out of the water!

We don't need a soaking wet dog for the rest of the night! So, lets move on and get to the lake, right? Or maybe we'll just stand at the edge of a seriously steep drop off and look out across a whole lot of Five Stream basin wondering just where in the heck did that upper lake go? I'm still too tired to bother with that stupid compass, and besides, I already know that lake is just 'over there', must be on the other side of a ravine? Don't know why there's a ravine right there in my way, some sort of creek or something. But that lake must be further away than I thought! It's getting late, one hour to go before it becomes nice to have already gotten our tents pitched. And we both are ready to bust another half mile down this slope! But it's really too steep over there, so we circle around like lost sheep and I still refuse to use that stupid compass. Finally, we both admit it, we gotta look for the lake in the morning. It's just about sunset and we both have our packs on. I got a feeling I might need to give up and maybe compromise a little. Ok, back to a marginally flatish area and throw the packs down. Shauna picks some bushy spot, apparently because she likes that coil spring mattress she left behind at home. I'm going for this bear trail with no bushy in the way, because I like having bears lick my face in the middle of the night while they try to get to their watering hole. Next morning:

You call that a tent? Nope, I don't either! But isn't this why I'm here?

Looks like a wet dog alright:

Funny things you only see in the morning, like this:

I can skip breakfast after feasting my eyes on this:

But after a night of a constant migraine & waking up all night, then spending the early hours with chills & sweating at the same time. I'm not really hungry. I had a hernia surgery not too long ago, maybe two months, and I'm thinking maybe I overdid things a bit. But after some coffee, and then some tea, and then a coffee mocha hit, I'm starting to feel a little better and maybe eat something. And now that all my stuff is spread out on the ground I can finally casually unfold this paper map, break out the compass and try zoning out on some mappy time. Compass tells me to rotate the map, ok. Map tells me I'm an idiot, ok. Ah crap! That lake was right behind us! Gear up, hike 100 yards. Drop our packs and look up the side of that ravine, up a clear open slope that looks like a lot of animals been travelling here. Uhm, that ravine is the outlet stream isn't it? From that lake? Ok, upslope! Here I am:

Finally! And several really nice campsites, all around the shoreline here. Too bad we didn't use one of those! But at least we get to stroll around in this:

And all around the lake are views like this:

So, been there. Done that. Do I want to go back? Of course I do! I think there's a route north from the upper lake, skirting clockwise around the Five Stream basin that can reach down to the other lakes up north. I'd like to test that theory out, but maybe Deerguy or somebody could say something about this? Anyways, going back out did not go faster like expected. It started to sprinkle heavily, not really raining. But enough that the Big Meadow became a death slide that needed very careful footwork to get down. I stayed focused on falling down smoothly, even once made a stumble turn into a graceful leg stretch. Yeah, I meant to do that! The yellow ribbon at the bottom of the Big Meadow was really much appreciated. My boots were soaked & getting loose, feet getting sore spots. Delayed re-tying my boots a little too long. I still have a blister on the bottom of my foot to show for it. Everything seemed to take longer than when we came in. The sidehill section was twice as long going back out! Everytime we stopped to negotiate a log or other trailness, Patches started to dig a hole to sleep in and call it a day. I started to worry if I was going to have to make a stretcher & drag Patches out. I slowed down a tiny bit and just tried not to stop too long anywhere. Crossing the streams was more treacherous than on the way in, due in part to that rain. The banks on the streams are a bit steep & loose. Precise care is needed, so I'm glad I had plenty of power bars! We started to see signs of more casual hikers who turned back. At the trailhead were a set of burnouts from another car. Jeep was a-ok, still had all it's glass intact and started right up on the first try. So get that heater cranked up and call it a day!

[ranger rock]

Great trip report Phil, funny too! I wondered if you were getting blisters in those giant boots. It's nice to have a hiking partner who does not whine and who knows how to use a compass. What about it Deerguy, where exactly is that animal trail that we missed? Maybe you better guide us up there next time. Phil wants to see the lake with the island in the middle of it.