Turns Out Mid-June Was Too Early for White Pine Lake This Year

Posted on: 14 June 2019 /
Categories: Other

I was kind of worried it might be, but I was supposed to be going on an overnighter to White Pine next week with the church kids, and, as the responsible adult, I thought it might be wise to check it out and make sure that was going to be doable.

It probably wasn’t (isn’t?).

OTOH, I got some nice-looking photos during that .7 of a mile that I made it up the trail before hitting the snowfield (it’s a 4.5-mile hike with 1,200ish feet of elevation gain — there was still another 800 feet of elevation yet to gain though).

Photos, here:

^^ That’s where I stopped. The trail continues kind of that way, but it was located under the snow somewhere, and — yeah. It was really pretty like this, though. Too bad there’s nothing that’s ever been invented that could have helped me hike across that snow and achieve my (and the dog’s) objective.

So we turned around. This is what giving up looked like:

And then, once we were back to the parking lot, I made the curious decision to head around Tony Grove Lake on the nature trail, which was fine except that on the steep side of the lake the trail was completely under snow, but I kept going anyway. Survived it. Kind of a better workout that way. Got to watch the dog scale an almost vertical rock at one point. Brave little girl-dog, so proud of her.

Anyway. Here’s a sense of what all that looked like.

Not the vertical rock, just the nature trail (somewhere on the left side of that picture is where the trail is supposed to be). I’m way too slow with the camera to get photos of dogs spontaneously deciding to scale vertical surfaces. It’s a failing of mine.

  • It’s kind of pretty up there though.
  • Added bonus: since apparently it’s too early in the season to do anything at Tony Grove, parking/admission was free.
  • Plus there weren’t a lot of people around. I mean, not zero, but only four cars in the parking lot has to be some sort of win.

I swear that one of these days I’ll post something that’s not a rehash of some hike no one cares about. TBH, though, I’m really my own target audience with all this, and I’m just not sure what I’ll eventually care about. Maybe this?

bkd