Steam Mill Lake Hike

I did this hike a couple times in July. The first was on The Fourth and was sort of a scouting trip I undertook on the premise that there has to be another reasonable overnighter destination in Logan Canyon other than just White Pine Lake every time. It was also a destination of considerable curiosity, given that no one I talked to in Logan had ever been there, and it’s hard to find a lot of info on it online. The second was an overnighter (!) with the kids from church.

So!:

The Summary

Scenery-to-Effort Ratio: 1.3? The first mile and half is uphill and ugly. The rest is pretty good.

Elevation Gain: IIRC, it’s around 1,200′, most of which you’re gaining during that first mile and a half. The rest of it is between the mill site and the lake.

Obstacles: A few creek crossings, a couple of which have logs (including the one right at the trailhead if you look hard enough); the trail up to the lake might be a little faint and/or look like a creek, depending on the time of year.

Popularity: Apparently low. Saw two other parties the first time I hiked it and maybe four the second time.

Distance: About 9.2 miles to the lake and back. Add another mile if you want to walk around the lake. (Probably. I didn’t do that.)

Location: Logan Canyon, just off Franklin Basin Road. Turn left on Franklin Basin, then go left on the first dirt road after the first bridge. The trailhead is off to the right somewhere.

Pros

• Really nice scenery once you get past the ridge.
• Beautiful creeks and a box canyon lake (although I’m guessing these are best seen as early in the season as possible).
• Some steam mill machinery.
• Not a lot of people.

Cons

• The first mile and a half is a long slog uphill through trees.
• No water on the bottom half of the hike.
• Kind of a difficult trailhead to locate.
• A lot of horse manure and cow pies.

The Rest

And then the first thing you do is cross a slow-moving stream, which is maybe more bog than spring. There’s a log there if you look for it, which I didn’t the first time out. OTOH, it was a good place to see if the dog could swim (she can).

Then you reach the creek and things get more interesting despite the relative lack of trailside snowmobiles.

Then you reach the steam mill site itself. I’m guessing it was a sawmill and not a place where steam was milled.

There are a lot of good campsites between the mill and the lake. Or, if you wanted, you could take a left at the Steam Mill and somehow end up at White Pine Lake. I didn’t do that.

There’s a small pond that comes before the lake. The small pond is not the lake. The lake looks like this:

And then, the way back looks a lot like the way there.

bkd

Summiting Mt. Naomi

It’s also called Naomi Peak. It’s the highest peak in the entire Bear River Range (!). You know, if you sub-divide your mountain ranges thoroughly enough, every peak can be the highest peak in something.

So I had this one student last spring whom I saw at the dog park last summer and we talked about, hey, we should take our dogs hiking some time. And then he followed up, and then we ended up taking our dogs hiking up to Mt. Naomi Peak. I don’t know if Peak should be capitalized. Or included.

The hike was fun, a little steep, not much shade, and that’s most of the details. Was good to also have non-canid company on a hike for once.

A lot of the scenery looked like this:

Dog of Danger at the peak:

Pano from peak:

I think we might try to hit Jardine Juniper this summer before he moves back to Arizona. Hopefully the dogs get along okay in the car if so.

bkd

Oregon Tourist Hike II: Green Lakes Hike

Next up on the Bend-area tourist hike agenda was the Green Lakes hike that, somewhat predictably, leads to Green Lakes. This would be the longest hike my dog had ever attempted. Would she make it?

Whatever, here’s a little commentary and some photos from the hike.

Started at the Green Lakes Trailhead (!). The hike follows Creek of Angry Badger Fall Creek and offers good views of Broken Top and South Sister before eventually arriving at a massive backcountry campground (22 sites!) around the Lakes of Froggish Talus Green Lakes.

Right.

Trailhead warning:

FWIW, she was on-leash the one time we passed by a ranger.

That one was of Fall Creek. I think this next one is South Sister.

This is what the trail looked like after we crossed a bridge and the creek was on the left side instead of the right.

I think this is Broken Top. We’ll see if the ol’ blog ever gets enough traffic that someone bothers to correct me.

I think we were basically at the Lakes of Green at this point:

Definitely by this point:

Anyway. We did it as an out-and-back hike. A lot of the trail is exposed, and my dog has a pretty warm coat. About a hundred yards from the trailhead and in view of the parking lot, she found a shady spot, laid down, and refused to go any further. So I got to carry her the last hundred yards.

She was tired when we got back to the AirB&B.

It’s a really pretty hike. As with everything in Bend, it gets crowded though. As with every hike that gets crowded, it was good to have gotten onto the trail by 8 AM so that at least the out-leg offered a little wilderness solitude.

Also, this would be a great place for an easy overnighter/basecamp situation. Some day maybe.

bkd

Hiking Logan Canyon: White Pine Lake

If you look up “best hike in northern Utah” in the dictionary, everyone agrees that that’s the High Creek Lake hike. I didn’t go on that one though.

White Pine Lake is a pretty great hike, particularly considering its trailhead is 30 minutes from my house, right next to Tony Grove Lake. It’s possibly #2.

View of Tony Grove Lake (and parking lot!). This is about a half-hour from my house.

~The Lake~

Heading back.

I don’t love the shirt.

<fishing-related story>I took my fishing pole up there with me. When I got to the lake, I went through the jam-knot marathon to tie my bubble  on behind the swivel, the leader to the swivel, then the fly to the leader. Went down to the lake side and filled up the bubble. Opened up the bail, cocked the rod behind my head, threw forward to cast, and my bubble, leader, and fly all went flying off into the water, detached from the rest of my line. I only brought the one swivel. My bad.</fishing-related story>

• It’s about an eight-mile round-trip.
• There are some decent-looking campsites at the lake.
• It’s a pretty well-used trail.
• The two mountains seen above are, I think, Mt. Gog and Mt. Magog. (Gog is the one seen most frequently above.)
• I don’t think there are actually all that many fish in that lake.

bkd

Ozark Weekend

So when you live in Oklahoma, the prospect of traveling to Arkansas is seen as a positive thing. Arkansas has mountains, trees, and rivers. I mean, “mountains”. It has Ozarks. Don’t mean to denigrate. They are what they are and that’s good for them and way better than, you know, what’s in Oklahoma.

On a pleasant-enough Friday a few weeks back, I got into the Jeep and headed east out of Indian Territory. I took Sooner Road up to I-40 if you were curious. There were a lot of cops on I-40. It’s interesting how much nicer the road conditions seem once you hit the state line. From the freeway, Fort Smith, Ark. looks like a city that would have a lot of strip malls in it.

From the 40, headed up the 49, eventually exiting somewhere and heading to Devil’s Den State Park, a park created in 1973 to placate local satanists. Not really. Anyway, I found some website that purported to list the “five best hikes in Arkansas”, although I think their methodology was flawed. One of the Top 5 was the Devil’s Den loop. It was a tourist hike and there were some very overweight people on the trail — which, good for them, right? They weren’t very self aware about blocking the way forward though. Just for the record. I wore actual hiking boots, which made me feel like I’d brought a gun to a knife fight.

I believe the “Devil’s Den” to be some sort of cave. But there were iron bars and a closed sign on the cave that I found alongside the trail. The trail goes under this waterfall.

It doesn’t hurt, it trickles.

I worry a little about a state park that feels it also has to have water slides to justify its existence. They also appeared to have had a fire in the (closed, but not obviously under repair) restaurant. It only took 3.5 hours to get here.

And for all that, it was still nice to be somewhere with trees, water, and any amount of topography.

Then I got back on the road, intent to take the scenic route from Devil’s Den to Harrison, Ark. (which someone from Little Rock later told me was the Klan capital of the state — the grand wizard lives there!). Anyway, the drive was very nice, the roads were good, and I wished I would’ve brought the M Coupe. One day, I need to take the Coupe out to Arkansas, just for the roads. Curvy, hilly, lightly trafficked, and generally well-paved.

Later, I would accidentally arrive at what was billed as The Grand Canyon of Arkansas.

It’s probably on par with the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania and, I dunno, Shenandoah National Park?

Yeah, so, stayed the night in Harrison, then got up bright and early for free* hotel breakfast and drove off to find the Compton trailhead to gain entry into the Buffalo National River area. From here, I hiked down into the river valley toward a destination called Hemmed-in-Hollow Falls. At 250 feet, it’s the tallest waterfall between the Rockies and the Pyrenees or something. Tall enough to be hard to fit into the frame of a photograph, and low-volume enough to be hard to see once you do.

There are people wearing day glow colors to give some size perspective. Some of them had never experienced echoes before (apparently).

Might have to click on that one a couple times to see it in portrait orientation. It’s a prettier location than that photo would lead you to assume and, especially once the kids leave, exceptionally serene. The photo from behind the fall turned out more interesting.

And if you squint hard enough, you can just make out the dead armadillo floating in the pool.

Since I was mostly all the way down to the bottom of the valley anyway, I figured I might as well go to the river. So I went to the river, which prides itself on not being dammed — until it converges with some other river, which has had the heck dammed right out of it. But it’s free-flowing for 150 miles from its source till it gets there.

Born free.

From there, I waded, then walked up the trail to Goat Bluff, so named because it’s possible to fall off parts of it and die. It wasn’t that photogenic. I mean, nice, just:

View from the bluff.

And then I took some other trail back to the trailhead to avoid making this an out-and-back hike. The other trail was kind of more interesting than the way down. It followed Sneeds Creek for about half the way, which was a shallow, but interesting (undammed!) creek with a number of pretty little cascades.

This was also about where the timber rattler came in, rattled, then eventually decided to get off the trail so I could go home. Spent another night in Harrison, then the next day drove home. Some nice views of and from the road:

Would’ve been so fun at 65 with the coupe.

Also, on the way home, I stopped in Tahlequah, the Cherokee Nation capital. Unfortunately everything was closed (it was Sunday), except for an oddly good pizza place that had the word “chicken” in its name. Tahlequah has a lot of signs up around town that use the Cherokee alphabet. Frex this one:

In case you ever wondered what that might look like engraved into concrete.

Other notes:

• – Need to not forget my real camera. The iPhone doesn’t always cut it (plus battery life).
• – This all probably would have been brutally hot+humid in summer. I went mid-May — great weather for it.
• – Harrison was kind of a weird little town; not much there to recommend it, although the checkout person at Walgreens was attentive.
• – Harrison’s crayfish festival was disappointing; I expected more crayfish.
• – When I got back, I felt like I needed to watch Straight Outta Compton (the movie). It was just okay.

bkd

* Free when you pay for hotel room.

Glacier Lake Fishing (Beartooths, Montana)

It all starts looking the same. I should probably delay publication of this one for two weeks just to get a little air between this post and the last one. Fine, there, I’ve done that: an artificial two-week delay. Now maybe these photos will look exciting, fresh, or, whatever it is that they otherwise wouldn’t look.

So there’s a miraculous story here that explains how I ended up going to Glacier Lake at all. My cell phone (with Virgin) gets no reception between Minnesota and Spokane. That is to say, it doesn’t work in Idaho, Montana, or the Dakotas. When I was heading from Tacoma to Montana, I stopped in Spokane to call my brother in South Dakota to see if he wanted to join me for fishing in Montana. He said he couldn’t make it, so I figured I’d leave Montana Saturday after finishing the Lake Fork hike.

But then when I got to Butte or so, I checked my phone and it had received a text message. Somehow, *somehow*, despite being in coverage no-man’s land, my phone had gotten a text message from my brother saying he could make it after all. And then I found a pay phone and confirmed plans. Yes, they still have pay phones. Everyone who saw me using it was also surprised.

(And: I said the story was miraculous, not that it was interesting.)

Fishing at Glacier Lake was great. The guy at the hotel in Red Lodge recommended it. Good job, guy!

Garry crossing a creek.

Elevation: 10,000′.

Ibid.

Glacier Lake shoreline.

Fishing was, as said, good. Used dry flies trailing behind a plastic float. Mostly 12- to 15-inch cutts. Caught one 12-inch brookie. All were good fighters. Also caught this:

The largest trout I’ve ever seen.

Two pounds? Two and a half maybe? It was a big trout. Caught it on four-pound line and apparently my knots don’t suck. Took probably 10-15 minutes to get him ashore. He took a lot of line. Awesome fish, mad respect.

Gebrüder (I’m not really six inches shorter than him).

Emerald Lake (in Wyoming!), just below Glacier Lake.

• This is a short hike, btw. Two miles each way.
• But steep (ca. 1,500 feet in elevation gain).
• And at high altitude.
• Glacier Lake is a perfect fishing lake: no grass, plenty of shoreline, lots of places to sit.