[Bluebird]

Jake and I hiked this loop on Sunday, hoping for better weather than farther west and weren't disappointed in the experience and views. It was pleasantly cool with a beautiful mix of clouds and sunshine. We parked at the Navaho pass TH and started hiking around 9am. There is a good water source about 2500+ elevation up the trail, a couple switchbacks beyond the meadow campsites. We took advantage as there is little available water until the last 2 miles of the Miller Peak trail by filling up with 3 liters each. From the pass, continue on the County Line trail, then at a cairned junction stay left towards the summit of Navaho Peak. My GPS watch showed about 6.75 miles/4100 gain at the summit.

From the Navaho summit, continue directly down the other side of the peak on the ridge. It's easy open going. At the saddle, you could continue directly to Freedom along the ridge, but we wanted to visit the Three Brothers, so dropped down at the first connecting ridge on dirt and scree towards where the County Line trail supposedly was.

We found a bit of the trail, but there isn't much of it here. We then went up the 1300 vert on intermittent boot paths to the Three Brothers, which has a really commanding view of the eastern Enchantment Peaks. Stunning.

There were two registers on the summit, perhaps to help make up for there being no registers many other Teanaway peaks. We retraced our steps down the Three Brothers, stopping on the ridge to look at route options back to the Navaho/Freedom ridge. I haven't learned my steep sidehilling lesson yet, even though you'd think I should have by now... so I suggested we contour around to our left and try to reach the saddle directly below Freedom. We did this but it was pretty nasty hard dirt/scree at points with a very bad runout. You can see it as the dark area in the second photo here. I'd recommend going back to the ridge more directly from the Three Brothers/Navaho saddle, perhaps along the County Line Trail route or just up the ridgeline above the nasty bits.

Freedom summit is simple easy scrambling, both up and down the other side towards Miller.

You'll want to check out the route in detail from Freedom since it's easily visible and may help with routefinding. As you hike there are some views along the way.

Along the ridge to Miller, here are some high points that are a bit annoying to get around/over and we did find intermittent trail along the way as well as some campsites complete with wood that appears to have come from a tree cut for it rather than blowdowns Trail mostly bypasses the high points to the climber's right, finally trending in meadows and ending at a nondescript minor junction with the Miller Peak trail, a couple of switchbacks above the junction with the eastbound County Line trail, which is much more major and i didn't see a sign at. At the summit of Miller, we met Candy (NWHiker) who encouraged us to write a report of this trip. Hi Candy! The summit register cap was screwed on so tight there was no hope of opening it. Lame. There was a backpacking couple searching for the County Line trail for an ambitious sounding trip ending at Lake Ingalls. We escorted them to the very vague junction with the County Line towards Freedom on our way downhill. I hope they were successful! After an uneventful hike down the Miller Peak trail switchbacks, the trail is more rolling with several stream crossings and some significant mud. We ended up with wet trail runners. I have run this before earlier in the summer and had to take my running shoes off 6 times to ford streams. It's a dusty trail that will cake your wet sneakers in mud. Right now most of these are rock hoppable without a big deal it's not as wet as it could be I have a theory that trails that are open to cyclists cross streams just for the entertainment and not because they need to. Ha, ha. We ran about 3/4 a mile of trail just for fun and finished up with the mile-ish road walk to the car at Navaho Pass TH. Based on our GPS and best estimates this loop is about 19.5/20 miles and 7000 gain, approximately 11 miles of this is on good trail and ~1 mile of road. It took 9.5 hours, including breaks.

[olderthanIusedtobe]

[Bluebird]

yes, gorgeous flower display at the navaho/theee brothers saddle and partway up the three brothers 😍

[puzzlr]