Uintas 2015, part 3

I took lots of pictures of Dead Horse lake and the outlet stream, but very few after that, as we were just doing the same route in reverse.  This is my final batch of Uintas pictures.

Walking up to Dead Horse Lake the next morning, after sleeping in.

We were actually quite close to the tree line at this point.

Alex, refusing to smile, on the trail to Dead Horse Lake.

It's hard to call this rushing outlet stream the West Fork Blacks Fork river when you're so close to the source, but I suppose that's what it is.

Right here is where the Highline Trail, a future goal of mine to hike, crosses the West Fork Blacks Fork trail and joins it on the way to the lake.  Apparently, it also goes up and over Dead Horse pass, but I lost track of the trail completely at the lake.

Walls of the cirque.

Alex trying to get out of the frame.  The lake was just over the small rise.

The elevation of Dead Horse Lake is 10,878, while the cliff buttresses to the left are over a thousand feet higher, and "Dead Horse Peak" to the center right is 12,642.  Again; the camera shrinks them and refuses to offer any indication of scale.

Allsop Pass, still capped with snow.

Although I've never heard confirmation that the big boulder pile at the base of the cliffs is a rock glacier, it must be, since the color of Dead Horse Lake is obviously influenced by rock flour.

Alex went a little around the corner to snap this picture of me on the shore.

Looking back at the outlet stream.

The colorful foreground peak of Beulah.

Close-up of the (presumed) rock glacier.

Standing right below the pass.

This close up actually gives a bit of scale lacking in the bigger pictures.

A beautiful place to sit and think.

Or to swat at mosquitoes.  Although we were well prepared and didn't get any bites, they were all over the place and were extremely aggravating whenever we stopped moving.

My thought was to circumnavigate the entire lake, but scrambling on these boulder fields didn't seem as much fun when it came right down to it as it did in theory before getting there.  Plus, the other party--a guy and his three teenaged kids--was just on the other side.  So we kept our distance and stayed on the pass side of the lake.  That's probably my biggest regret; that we didn't explore the other side just a bit and go find Lake Ejod while we were there.

The lake gradually turning into the river.  This is where it starts.

I turned around for one final farewell shot.

From the lake, Red Knob pass looks tremendous on the other side of the valley.  It's still odd to me that this peak isn't Red Knob, since it looks a lot more like a Red Knob than Red Knob itself does.

Stream crossing.  I walked it, but Alex didn't feel comfortable on his feet.

Another view of distant Red Knob pass.

Back up the valley, from whence we came the day before.

At the footbridge the next day on the way out.  I was having serious pack issues, which contributed to me cutting the planned hike a few days short.

One of the final pictures I took was of this deadfall blocking the trail.  There was actually a lot of it.  I also like this, because it clearly shows that the road used to go further in, before the National Forest decided to forget it, call part of the road a trail, and therefore not need to work as hard to keep it maintained anymore.