Hike #104 2020

November 22

This was yet another chilly start to a hike, there’s nothing quite like hiking in 10 degrees to wake you up in the morning. The sun was just starting to come up as we hit the trail, but it wouldn’t reach us until we were up at the lake. This hike required us to trek uphill on a relatively long snowy road for a couple miles before reaching the summer trailhead, then hiking an additional mile up switchbacks to our destination.

After hiking up the road for a couple miles we reached a meadow with great views of the surrounding mountains.

There were numerous downed trees on our way up the switchbacks. Some we were able to make a path around or high enough off the ground for the dogs to squeeze under, but others required us to climb over, something which can prove difficult with large dogs. Zeus is agile and can jump up and over most downed trees and rocks without difficulty, Maxi on the other hand turns into dead weight and needs a little bit of extra assistance to get over obstacles on the trail. Usually we can tell him “two paws” and he’ll put his front paws on the higher ground and we can give his back end a boost, other times it requires two of us to get all 100 lbs of him over safely. Another issue we had was finding and creating the correct trail up to the lake. On this particular trail there are markers on trees to show winter hikers and skiers the correct trail, though the people who hiked previous to us (probably the day before) seemed to ignore these signs and created their own track through brush and icy rocks. As Scott and I know this trail very well we broke through the fresh foot of snow to create the better (and correct) route, making it much safer and easier to get up to the lake. Nevertheless, we were able to conquer all trees and deep snow on the trail and made it up to the lake a few minutes before the sun started to peak over the mountains.

During winter months this lake freezes over and you’ll find people walking to the middle of it. Though we won’t be doing that until January or February when we know the lake has an ice layer that is a few feet deep we did walk around the shore admiring the frozen cracks in the ice.

After a few minutes the sun started to make an appearance. It’s crazy how much of a temperature difference there was when the sun finally hit us. We guessed it made it a good 15 degrees warmer allowing us to shed a couple layers. An added bonus was that there was no wind at the lake, something we’ve found to be quite rare in this area, it’s usually always windy!

We headed back down the trail after watching the sun rise a bit more. We hiked a total of 7.33 miles with 1205 feet of elevation gain.