High In the Uintas

As far as I can tell, I never posted this from Algonquin last year. I’ll have to do that sometime. This year I hardly had a chance to write while we were out in the wild, but here’s all of it, plus a recap from tonight.

7/9/10 2344 MST
We’re here at J’Ann and Scott’s palace in Par City, Utah. 30 ft ceilings, granite everything, just high quality. We drove here from the airport in a marginally terrifying Chevy Rickshaw (Aveo) which can barely do 65 mph on flat roads. The rental car guy was full of glad tidings – “it’ll rain on you every day. I saw a grizzly. They’ll open your car like a tin can. But you’ll love it.” It has been thundering intermittently since we got here – interesting weather and sporadic storms are in the forecast for our future as well.

We’re already at 7000 ft – good for adjusting slowly to tomorrow’s altitudes. Should be an adventure.

7/11/10 1610 MST
I’m currently sitting in the shade at Lightning Lake, having just submerged for the sake of cleaning myself. The lake is at something like 10,700 and the water, ringed with occasional snow, is somewhere near 50F. I had intended to write earlier, but things have been a little crazy. Right before we were supposed to leave, we noticed the tire on the rental was flat. We fixed it, then left for Kamas, where we were to pick up the last minute supplies. For some ridiculous reason, none of the three places we went had butane for ultralight campstoves. Somewhat daunted, we shrugged and left without it. All food would be prepared on fire. Turns out that at 10,500 ft, cooking food on a fire is more easily said than done.

We proceeded to the Grandview trailhead. Chevy Rickshaws are not designed to climb 3000 ft up narrow, lumpy dirt roads. After 7 perilous miles, which Scott was kind enough to lead us through, we were there. 9500 ft and on our way at around 1 PM.

Two general comments on the Uintas. First, the mosquitoes, who are hounding me as we speak, are maddeningly awful and omnipresent. Second, the shelf life of any given weather pattern is about 30 minutes. When I started writing it was sunny, 70. Now a cloudy 60. It was a windy and rainy 45 this morning. 2 hrs into the first day, it hailed on us. Or snow pellets, or some thing in between

Day one drove me to exhaustion. I didn’t eat enough, didn’t drink enough, and got a mild bout of altitude sickness. It was 7 PM before we got to where we would set up camp – an obvious wildlife refuge at 10,500 beyond the Four Lakes Basin, about 12 miles out. By the time Steve, with much difficulty, got a fire going, we were running out of daylight. We choked down the gross Pad Thai, pumped some water, hung the food and went to bed. Having seen moose prints and moose scat every 50 ft, we knew they were around. No sooner had the sun gone down, we heard several very close moose [actually Elk, upon further review] calls – a very loud version of a yip that a coyote might make. Or a 1000 lb bull frog. We found it difficult to sleep. Our moose trespassing and altitude sickness headaches kept us both up until a 1 AM sortie to the food bag retrieved tylenol.

The thing about mosquitoes is that they force you to be in constant motion, lest 70 of them congregate around you at any given moment. Rain keeps them at bay, as it did this morning. Forced to evacuate camp rapidly ahead of the approaching gales, we were on the trail by 7:45. Two hours later we had crossed the 11,500 ft Rocky Sea pass, navigated a 30 meter snow field on the edge of a mountain and gotten down the other side. It’d be rainy, windy and frigid one minute, then temperate the next. After twisting my arm to climb again to Lightning Lake, we arrived at noon, around the same time the sun came back. It’s been a nice afternoon. We can see for 10 miles to 11, 12, 13000 foot mountains on all sides. Our site is perched near the edge of a 500 ft drop – it’s definitely a top-3 site for us. We had delicious pasta, olive oil, salami, cheese, salt and pepper for linner (dunch) around 3, and now Steve’s working on trout for dinner…and it looks like he finally got one.

7/22/10 – Before things get too distant, I’m going to write, on the computer, a stream of consciousness hindsight log of the last two days in the Uintas. My last entry was written at the shores of Lightning Lake – though there were far fewer mosquitoes there than either of the other sites, they were still driving me mad as I was writing. Steve did indeed catch a trout, the first of two that we had for dinner. Dinner was actually light, lunch, at 3 in the afternoon, was a full spaghetti, salami, parmesan, salt, pepper, and olive oil meal. I hard just plunged into the frigid water to bathe again, and we walked around exploring the waterfall dumping out of the lake. I urinated from spectacular vistas, 600 feet above a lake and stream filled valley. It was the high point of the trip, Lightning Lake. We went to bed a little later, having walked aimlessly around the highlands after dark picking fights with animals. We saw a few deer and had a bat dive bomb us several times, presumably aroused by Steve’s “Borg Light”. Though I always thought they were blind other than the sonar or whatever.

Anyway, the next day was a challenge. We got out by 8:45, and started what would be an epic day. We went all the way down Rock Creek to near to Stillwater Reservoir, then took a hard turn into nowhereland, trudging back up the West Fork to Granddaddy Lake. 8 and half hours, 18 miles and 2300 feet of elevation lost then regained – driven mercilessly by mosquitoes the whole way back up – I was done, finished, spent. It was just a little beyond what I could comfortably handle. I promised myself I’d jump in the water to clean off after we got there. I did, then the wind started howling as I stood mostly to completely naked on the shore. I spent the next hour and a half shivering miserably, hunched over in full goretex attire, surrounded by mosquitoes and almost completely apathetic. I choked down some food (same as the night before) and slowly recovered. By bedtime I was reasonably well constituted again.

Some highlights from that journey, let’s see. Well, we got to a fork in the river a few miles in. It was the first time we had to swap over the crocs for the day. Steve decided that instead of stowing his real shoes in his bag he was going to chunk them across.

“Think about this,” I, the perpetual Voice of Reason, said, “if you don’t make it, you’ll be walking the next 20 miles in crocs.”

“I’ll make it. You don’t think I have the arm for that?”

And he did. Plenty of arm. So much in fact that the tree limbs dangling twenty feet up swatted his huck right down into the stream. Now, stream means “rapidly gurgling creek, 25 feet wide and 1-2 feet deep”. His shoe landed about 5 feet from the opposite shore and was flushed downstream…until it miraculously got hooked on a rock 6 feet away. He is the luckiest person alive, always.

We saw our first person about 5 miles later – the first person we had seen (in person at least) in about 48 hours. Then they came rapidly, probably twenty of them in the next 5 miles. In the category of “things I wish I had a picture of” was the 35 year old hulk of a man carrying his 2 liter while his 8 year old son trudged uphill with what looked like a 35 lb pack. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It was borderline child abuse.

After we crossed the bridge, we were immediately out of people, we wouldn’t see them again until we got to the car the next day. The West Fork was wild, a bit overgrown, and decidedly off the beaten path. I’ve often thought that I prefer uphills to downhills, and this only affirmed my opinion – a gradual uphill is much easier on your body than any sort of downhill…which is good because the 10 miles down we already did had spurred several classic blisters.

Anyway, back off that digression, back to Granddaddy Lake. That night was all about mosquitoes. 200 of them stood guard outside of the tent screen, a couple dozen of which made it inside during our mid-night pee break. We smushed them, spending 10 minutes at 2 in the morning committing insect genocide inside the tent. Morning was no better, so we packed up and got the hell out of there. The trip back to the car was uneventful, we made it the last 5-6 miles in just under 2 hours, then back to the palatial estate of J’Ann and Scott.

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