high uinta adventure

back in august, brian, william, brian's dad, and i spent four full days up in the high uintas. we backpacked in to a beautiful and secluded lake and then spent the next three days fishing, eating fish, relaxing, hiking, and enjoying the solitude of nature and each other's company.

me, willie, and roland near the beginning of the hike in. we still haven't realized how hard the hike will be.

this is the nice part of the hike in--where there's a bit of a trail, things are flat, and you're not climbing over boulders.

a nice ground squirrel we saw.

this is when the trail became difficult. this is what we had to climb up, over, and through with 35 pound packs on. one nice thing about losing your balance and falling down was that your backpack could really cushion the blow. i think we all (except brian) fell over at least once.

w admiring a dead deer's remains. seeing this on the way in, though, made us wonder if we would win and make it to the lake alive, or if nature would win. sometimes it was hard to know how things would go.

after hiking over very rough terrain with our heavy packs, this was our first view of the lake we camped by. what a beautiful site.

once we got to the lakeside area, we found a camping spot and relaxed for awhile.

we couldn't even think of putting up the tents and "making camp" yet.

i love how lying on a rock is deemed comfortable.

willie quickly recovered and went fishing that evening. w with his first catch.

the next morning, we all went out fishing and had some good luck around the lake we were camping at. we stayed there for the day and caught quite a few fish. unfortunately, though, we didn't see any pikas.

on day three, we decided to hike up to a couple even more remote lakes. but since we didn't have to carry our big packs, you felt sprightly rock hopping through the talus flows.

we found one of the lakes we were looking for. we caught three good-size trout there. this is one i caught that b's holding. a little confusing, but i swear it was my fish!

here you can see the rain clouds rolling in. it was beautiful blue skies until those dark clouds came over the mountain.

we ended up needing to actually put on our ponchos. we decided to wait out the rain until it seemed clear that it wasn't going to stop raining anytime soon. it was about that time that i realized i had been sitting in a low spot on a large rock. the low spot had gathered water during the storm, and i had a completely wet booty.

i believe this is a not-so-clear picture of the White-tailed Ptarmigan we saw while hiking back.

here i am with our bear bag. b did a really good job of fashioning this so no bear could possibly get it!

william carrying the three fish we got at that far-flung lake. it was a challenging hike back since we were walking over the rock flows and everything was wet. but, thankfully, no one slipped and got hurt. and we made it back with these three gems.

when b cleaned the fish, he discovered that two of them were florescent orange inside. this picture doesn't capture how vibrant they were--they were almost glowing. we ate these fish for dinner, and it was actually so much fish that we couldn't quite eat it all.

on day four, we decided to break up camp and leave. we had a big weekend coming up and didn't want to find ourselves in the position of not making it out in one day. it had taken us about 7 hours to hike in to the lake...so we weren't sure how long it would take to hike out.

this shows what it was like for a lot of the way back. when it wasn't big rocks, it was fallen trees all over the place.

a sign posted to a tree. we weren't quite sure what this meant.

we're taking a quick breather.

but something was apparently really funny. too bad we can't remember what it was.

this was a beautiful site--our car! we had finally made it back. although i would have enjoyed staying in the high uintas longer, it was really nice to get that pack off.

on our way out, we stopped to fish at the yellowstone river and had such a good time. fishing there was one of those rare treats when everything is golden. the fishing was good, the river was gorgeous, the sun was out and warm. i will always look back fondly at our fishing there.

our trip to the high uintas was hard, but really a lot of fun. it was great to get away from day-to-day life, and the four of us had a really good time together. w was a true champ and hardly complained at all (he even--with the help of brian--pulled out a loose tooth). roland had a lot of big blisters, but powered through. i caught the biggest fish of the week (not to brag!). and brian seemed to have the most energy of all of us. he seemed to be a true spartan man, and with his sleeves rolled up, he could do twice the work of some tan-bed tanning man (or the rest of us for that matter). it was a great time!