My fiancé really enjoys backpacking so I decided to try it since I’ve been enjoying all of our car camping so much, I also want to get in to hammock camping and I think backpacking would be more enjoyable to pair with it. Since I don’t have great knees, I told Micah to find something somewhat short and not too steep because I wanted my first trip to go as well as possible. He found what he thought was a 1.1 mile ‘easy’ trail up to a couple lakes near tree line. I was a bit nervous because I have never hiked with anything more than a daypack. The morning we’re going to leave he looked up more information about the trail and lo and behold once the trail forks it is a mere 1.1 miles. He didn’t realize that there was another trail and that overall it was going to be about 5.5 miles with 2500 ft of gain … this is where I started getting a little nervous. I didn’t know how well my knees were going to handle that much gain with a heavy pack, however Micah said that about 2.7 miles in there’s a campground that we can stop at if my knees were having problems, so that made me feel a lot better.
The parking lot was pretty full which wasn’t surprising for a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of August, however we only saw maybe 10 other groups the whole trip and there was only one other couple by the lakes where we camped. The hike actually went surprisingly well other than my boots being too tight (they’ve always been snug but I have never had problems before) and I got blisters about a half mile in … 5 miles later and 2000+ ft in gain and my heels were missing several layers of skin. The elevation gain on the trail is very subtle. It is a constant gentle slope so you are always gaining but there aren’t a lot of switchbacks or stairs so you barely noticed it. The whole way up I kept harassing Micah about all of the great spots I could camp however there weren’t any flat places for him to put the tent so he would grumble and we would keep walking. It sprinkled / misted for a majority of our hike up which was nice since we started in the afternoon and it helped to keep us cool. At the beginning it is mostly aspens that you are hiking through and eventually they start turning into more pines as you climb further up the mountain. There were several stream crossings on boards or fallen trees that I really enjoyed. In one section many of the lower branches on the pine trees are dead but they have moss hanging from them so there’s light wispy green on the trees and some of the flowers in that stretch were 5ft tall so we called it the fairy garden. The hardest part of the hike is the last stretch because it is steep and chilly. The river we were hiking by had about 4 ft of snow on its banks and the trail at this point doesn’t even have switch backs, it just goes up. After that last summit the scenery opens up considerably and you have reached the lakes. There are some good trees to hang from but a lot of them at this point are fairly short because of the altitude.
I slept in my ENO DN with bug net, pro fly tarp, blue CCF pad, 0* sleeping bag, down coat by my feet, gore-tex coat around the foot of my sleeping bag, backpack under my feet, and a bed buddy. My pad kept sticking to the hammock so I couldn’t adjust it and I couldn’t lay on my side because then my bottom and knees were cold against the hammock so I got comfortable on my back and fell asleep. I woke up around 5:30 with lower back pain only to discover that in all of my shifting around earlier I had ended up with my head lamp under me. Once I moved that I was able to fall right back asleep. I already knew that I wanted an UQ, but this definitely solidified that decision for me.
The hike down the next day was painfully slow, it probably took us about 5 hours because my heels hurt so bad, I even had one couple stop and ask if I had broken or sprained anything. On the plus side other than the heels I had a great time and I now have a new pair of boots I will be breaking in this weekend! This trip also convinced my fiancé that maybe there are places to hang a hammock in the mountains and that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad. This weekend will be his first time trying to sleep in a hammock.
I would highly recommend this hike for anybody who is looking for an easier hike or an overnighter. It is also part of a larger loop if you are interested in a longer trip. The setting is very nice, you don’t need a permit and there are a lot of options for hanging your hammock (at least in the stretch that we did).
I apologize for the length of this but I’m a somewhat verbose person and I wanted to include details that I look for when scouting out new places to go.
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