Cloud Peak Wilderness

Although it's crazy to me that I might be hiking in August and it's July 2nd, and I still have no idea what I'm going to do, I... well, I'll probably be hiking in August for a week and I still have no idea what I'm going to do. What I'm leaning towards strongly now is the Cloud Peak Wilderness in the Bighorn Mountains of Central Wyoming for about three or four days followed by a couple of days of scenic roadtripping around the Bighorn Basin. (I had thought about going back to the Uintas, but I really want to branch out; I've spent way too much time in that range while other locations should have been commanding my attention for more diversity of experience.)

The Bighorns are kind of like the Wind Rivers little brother; on the other side of the basin, no grizzly bears, similar scenery, but just a tad more subdued. It also comes with the benefit that it hasn't become a hiker/climber magnet, so it's a place of likely solitude other than some hikers and fly fishersmen who are most likely locals. 

Another contender was the Lost Creek Wilderness in southern Colorado, which has a very unique look to it. That's a short-lister for a late September or early October hike, if the weather cooperates. Maybe even this year! (Sigh. I have two weeks of vacation that are unaccounted for and I don't want to waste it frittering away my time on the computer, or watching TV or something stupid at home. Especially if the rest of the family are going to be here all over the house anyway.)

Whether I take any of my sons with me remains to be seen, but it's looking somewhat unlikely, at least for this first trip. My oldest son will have a new baby, will be moving, and working. My next oldest will still be in NoCal on his mission. My youngest wants to come, but his availability due to his job is iffy. Plus, he doesn't really want to backpack so much as he wants to do the scenic roadtripping portion of the trip. Which is fine, because the two portions might end up being close to a 50/50 split. But his availability is still iffy.

Anyway, I have the Trails Illustrated map on order, but it will come in while I'm out of town, so I won't be able to look at it until about the 20th of July. Less than a month before I actually go hiking, I presume. Yikes. I tend to like to be more prepared than that, but then again, why? Why not show up with only a vague idea of where I'm going and do what I'm feeling like? What I really need to spend more time on is figuring out what to see while driving around in the basin. For the backpacking, I'll probably just head up to one of the "popular" destinations, like the Pouch Lake area or something, and play it somewhat by ear.

Anyway, while I won't be posting while out of town, I'll probably have some posts to make as I wrap up my preparations for the trip, and of course, after I come back. More activity on this blog is coming soon...

Uinta High Route

Lodging this link away for future reference...

https://danransom.com/2019/06/backpacking-uinta-high-route/

Checking in...

2020 was weird for everyone, no doubt, but I did no backpacking or major hiking trip the entire year. The Isle Royale trip, already documented here was the most recent that I've done. I'm not yet sure what 2021 holds either; we have lots of uncertainty about our schedule in particular and things we need to do. Although no doubt, I'll visit a number of beautiful outdoorsey locations, whether I get to hike in them or not is TBD.

To be fair, in 2020 I did that as well. I got to check a number of places off of my list that I'd never been before, some of them having been at the top of my list for the better part of 40 years. I saw Yellowstone. I saw the Grand Tetons. I saw Pilot and Index Peaks. I saw Mt. Rushmore and Custer State park, and much of the rest of the Black Hills. I saw Badlands National Park. I saw Promontory Utah and the Golden Spike area. I saw the Devil's Tower (I did actually do the inner loop hike there; it's small enough that other than the somewhat bigger outer loop, which no doubt doesn't look too much different, I don't have a ton of other options anyway.)

But in no case did I have the opportunity to do more than a few day hikes or drive up and look kind of things. The longest hike that I managed to talk my family into doing with me when I had them with me was a little beyond Inspiration Point at the Tetons. Everyone actually said that they liked the Tetons better than Yellowstone, which I think nobody expected (except for me, maybe.)

Anyway; it's been over a year since I've made a post, so I thought I'd just do a check in. I don't have any specific plans to announce, unfortunately. I'll be going out West at least twice yet this year, but I don't anticipate being able to do more than a few days of outdoorsy sightseeing while out there. We're actually trying to get all the way to the West Coast and maybe see the Redwoods, but when we do, it will likely be in the winter. In the summer, we'll head to Boise and maybe see some stuff either on the way or on the way back.

And it'll be "drive up to a place and maybe spend a few hours there" too, not backpacking for several days, sadly. But that's what I know for sure I can do. If I can fit another trip for me in, I will. I just don't know that I can yet.

Isle Royale

Well, the experiment was done.  It was successful in some ways, but less so in others.  Notably;

• I didn't like the big group hiking.  In part because I am very susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stress (something that would probably be much less of an issue were I less overweight, I agree—but not entirely.  My dad used to have this problem at boot camp in the 70s when he was still really thin, for instance.) I really kind of need to go my own pace.  I ended up getting locked into a schedule that was not at my pace, and it ended up being really difficult to keep up, because I did have to stop to cool down once or twice, and frankly, we had at least one day, possibly two, where we just had too many hard miles planned.  Nobody really much liked it, but I was one that had the hardest time with it.  Again, were I on my own, I not only wouldn't have over-planned, but I could have much more easily managed my pace and my timing.  This has never been an issue before for me on my own, but only when I'm trying to stick to someone else's pace in the face of a difficult trail.  Other than that, the social aspect of it wasn't bad, and in fact I often kind of enjoyed it.  But that said, we didn't get that much of it, because during the day we ended up stringing out into several groups moving at variable paces.  (I was always with the slowest group.)
• I ended up admitting defeat the last day.  I was so tired and sore after our longest day that I had no appetite for the last eight miles that we were to do on the last morning to get to the seaplane dock, so we hired a boat ferry to take us from the dock we were already at to the end.  My wife was even more defeated than I was and demoralized, so the two of us went back via boat—after waiting for several hours on the dock, which wasn't really all that unpleasant, to be honest.  So rather than the full 45 mile or so hike, we cut 7-8 miles off of the end.  Two long days in a row left me much more battered and bruised than I expected, but it was some of the younger guys that almost had worse injuries and soreness.  One guy in his late twenties, my friend's son-in-law, had an ankle swollen to twice its normal size.  My 17 year old son was limping on a gimpy knee.  It took several days for us to all be able to walk normally, and my son is still limping a bit (in some ways, so am I).  So yeah—I'm not the most aggressive hiker out there, but even the really thin, young and athletic people had a tough time with this itinerary.  It was way too aggressive.
• I really prefer hiking in the more wild national forests and wilderness areas than the more developed national parks.  Part of the reason for the overly aggressive itinerary was the need to hit certain campsites that are spaced as they are spaced.  Yeah; in a pinch, we could have just set up camp in the woods, but we weren't supposed to, and I don't really like that lack of flexibility.
• Also; eastern hiking just doesn't really appeal to me very much.  I like walking through the woods as much as the next guy, but when only two or three mediocre views are your entire payoff for nearly a week of almost fifty miles of hiking, that doesn't seem like a great experience to me.  I guess I'm just a western hiker at heart, and the more open spaces of real mountain meadows and deserts and badlands are what I love.
• My wife hated it.  She put on a good face most of the time, and didn't mind the hanging out at camp with our friends and our boys, but she didn't sleep well, hated walking with a pack on, was footsore and hot and sweaty all the time and hated that, she's convinced that she was "attacked" by a fox and that I was going to drop dead and die in the woods because my heat exhaustion got to the point at the end of the long day where I threw up.  At one point she said that it was like a nightmare that she couldn't wake up from, and while that may have been said a little bit in the extremity of demoralization, it does pretty much describe her take-away from the experience.  Even if it's a trip that I plan under better circumstances, I doubt I'll be able to talk her into ever going again.  On the other hand, my boys are up for some excursions in the mountains next summer, or the desert at spring break or whatever.  Of course, one of my boys will be leaving for his mission long before next summer comes along, so he won't be hiking with us anyway.  But meanwhile, maybe my older married son will be available to go in his place next summer, especially if we go hiking in the Wind Rivers, or go see the Tetons and Yellowstone, etc.

My biggest lessons learned are, therefore, twofold:  1) I really would do better if I were in better shape; I need to get serious about both losing some weight and developing more endurance, and 2) I really don't like aggressive death march type hiking anyway, though.  I want to relax, go out in the wilderness, and just enjoy being there, which means actually minimizing the backpacking, quite honestly.  I like backpacking because I like getting somewhere that I'm away from the roads, not because I like the backpacking for its own right.  My trip during spring break where I went hiking without backpacking and enjoyed it quite a bit was a big deal; I might well do much more of this kind of thing in the future.  After all, although I stayed in an official campsite at Colorado National Monument, there's no reason I couldn't have stayed in a hotel in Fruita or Grand Junction and done exactly the same thing that I did do except with restaurants, showers and sleeping in a bed at night.  Which means... maybe I'll get my wife to participate after all.

Having landed at Isle Royale National Park...

Windigo; our starting point for the hike

I don't actually know where this is, but here's the guys on the trail.  The last fellow with the blue camping pad is one of my sons.

Almost the full group; missing one person who's taking the picture

My boys on either side; my friend's son in the middle

Some of us.  I'm on the far left, my friend on the far right; our teenaged boys and his wife in the middle

My two sons looking at one of the few decent views on this hike.

On top of the Greenstone Ridge trail.  This is the long day.

The older of my two younger boys and one of my friends' older sons (who's about the same age and pretty good friends my oldest, married son, actually.)

My wife on the trail

Arrived at trail's end at Rock Harbor!  This picture is almost everyone except my friends' one son who ran off somewhere and couldn't be found for this picture.  He may have just been in the bathroom; I can't remember now.

On the other dock, waiting for the sea planes that will take us back to the mainland.

Isle Royale

We're trying an interesting experiment in a few weeks.  A local friend of mine has been talking to me for years about hiking Isle Royale, the national park out in the middle of Lake Superior.  It's a small park, but it also has the lowest visitation of any standard, regular National Park, in part because reaching it requires a costly (and time-consuming in the latter case) trip by seaplane or ferry to reach.  On top of that, it's kinda in the middle of nowhere (although that's not necessarily unique for national parks) and it lacks the scenic drama of many other parks in the mountains or the deserts. (Admittedly, that's partly my own bias there.)  Anyway, we agreed we were going to hike this this summer, and the time is fast approaching; it'll be at the end of the month.

He has a very outdoorsy family, and his youngest son is almost 18, so most of his family will be with him; his wife, three of his four sons, and his daughter and son-in-law.  In all, they're a seven person party, which changes the regulations for group camping for them somewhat.  I'm going too, and I had planned on bringing my own two younger boys (my older son and daughter in law are too busy to break away, sadly) but curiously, he somehow convinced my wife to come along!

I'm very surprised by this personally—she had told me for years that she loves hiking and being outdoors, as long as she can sleep in a bed at night, take a shower, and eat at a restaurant or otherwise some "real food" at least.  So I wasn't assuming she would go, and I wasn't going to ask her.  Maybe it's the family ties (we discovered that this friend of mine and my wife are fourth cousins, actually.)  Or maybe it's just the fact that he asked her and I wasn't going to—or maybe it's the fact that he asked her and not me, and she wasn't quite as comfortable saying no to him.  And it certainly helps that his wife will be there.  Most likely it was a combination of all kinds of factors that just tipped her over the edge.

Now, honestly—I don't think that she's likely to get into backpacking in a big way, and I'm not even convinced that she's going to enjoy this (although I'm doing my best to help her do so) but I'm very curious about the results nonetheless.  I have taken one of my sons backpacking before, and I've got another one who wants to go with me but it hasn't worked out yet, but normally I do my hiking and backpacking alone—and honestly, I kind of like it that way.  The solitude is part of what's appealing about the hobby to me.  Not that I don't like my family, of course, but I see my family every day and backpacking is kind of "my" thing, not "our" thing, if that makes any sense.

So, this trip will be an experiment in a number of ways, both for me and for my wife, and for all of us. 

1) Will I actually like hiking with this big crowd?  When I was a teenager, of course, my backpacking trips were with our youth group and our leaders, because I wasn't old enough or experienced enough to do them on my own.  But in the years since, I've gotten accustomed to doing things my own way and enjoying the solitude.  Technically, we're a group of four and the other family is their own separate group of seven, but of course, in reality, we all know each other, we have the same itinerary and we mostly plan on walking together, we may well feel like a traveling circus compared to what I'm used to.

2) Are the boys going to enjoy this?  My older of the two that's coming is the one who's been with me.  He thought it was kinda boring to be out alone just the two of us, but he's done other trips with larger groups of friends and family and really enjoyed them.  I don't know that he loves hiking for its own sake, but he enjoys it well enough when he has people with him that he enjoys being with.  The younger of the two hasn't ever really done anything exactly like it, but he's active and healthy, he's always liked camping and rafting and other outdoorsy things that he's done in the past, so there's no reason to suspect that he won't like backpacking too.  But again, for him, the people that he's doing it with may be more important than what he's actually doing.  Luckily, he's less likely to be bored just hanging around with the family than the older one is.

3) My wife?!  Is she going to enjoy this at all?  Even if she does, what will she be interested in doing in the future?  I'd actually really like to plan some hiking trips from a hotel base-camp with her, and I've noodled around some ideas. Maybe this trip will make those more likely to happen sooner rather than later.  Maybe I'm wrong and she'll actually think that the whole thing is really cool.  But I doubt it.  I mean, I've been married to her for twenty-five years for crying out loud.

I don't think this means I will be ushering in an era of backpacking with large groups of family and friends, but I think that we'll enjoy doing it this time, at least.  And I've got my eyes on maybe some fun trips to take with my wife and my youngest son in the next couple of years when it's just the two of us available to go.

The Videos

Grand Junction area hiking

Well, I'm done and I'm back.  Here's how it actually played out in real life.:

• Saturday, I drove from home to North Platte, NE.  I left a little later than I guess I've done in the past, although I didn't remember that.  In any case, I got in later than I would have liked, even after I skipped dinner and ate a gas station hot dog in lieu of.
• Sunday I had plenty of time to drive to the Curecanti National Recreation Area.  HOWEVER, there was a lot more snow than I anticipated still in this region (I had been in a hurry before leaving and didn't do the checks that I should have.)  Although the roads were open, and I was able therefore to drive around and see some stuff, I couldn't very well camp there like I'd planned, because the campground was gated and covered in a couple of feet of snow still.  I had fun seeing a few stops, but I couldn't do any walking, and my only Dillon Pinnacles views were from the road.  I ended up making a travelocity reservation in downtown Grand Junction for $45 or something for a hotel, so I was in town earlier than expected Monday morning.
• Monday I ended up doing what I thought was going to be Tuesday's itinerary (and then on Tuesday, I kinda did what I had planned for Monday.)  So, I went up Wedding Canyon to Independence Monument, and then followed Upper Monument Canyon to about the Coke Ovens where I turned around and went back to the Monument.  Then I took Lower Monument Canyon out to create a kind of small loop at the end of the hike back to the car.  About an 11 mile or so day with... 700-800 feet or so of elevation gain?  (I should put the route in Caltopo and see what it gives me for gross elevation gain and miles, actually.  I'm kinda curious.)
• Tuesday I drove the Rimrock Drive with lots of stops, including the Window hike, the Canyon Rim Hike, some time in the visitors center, some switchbacks down to Coke Ovens viewpoint and several other viewpoints (although most of these can hardly qualify as hikes) and then did an exploration of the Grand Junction entrance area, including hiking to and back from Devil's Kitchen and then Echo Canyon. Later in the evening, I hiked the Fruita Paleo Area for another mile or two. I estimate that I hiked about nine miles or so.  Maybe a little more.
• Rain came in on Wednesday and ended up hovering over the Monument and Black Ridge Wilderness area all day, so I spent the day elsewhere.  I don't know how much rain they actually got, but the campsite was still wet in the evening.  Meanwhile, I went up the road about 15-16 miles or so to Rabbit Valley, did the "Trail through Time" hike and Rabbit Ears Mesa.  Highly recommend both; the first for the easy access to exposed dinosaur skeletal remains and the second for the tremendous views and solitude.  Another 9 miles or so total, plus 800 or so feet of elevation gain.  Maybe more in gross.
• After the rain and lots of elevation gain, I was kinda tired and ready to be done on Thursday.  I juked my plan of stopping by Moab and hiking Fisher Towers (which ended up being a big mistake; unknown to me a local friend and two of his older boys were actually climbing one of the towers that day; I would have run into him!)  I also ditched my plans to hike Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyons; reports of rain all through the area made me leery of slot canyons, and I was kinda ready to just be done.  Did a bit of a long drive through some of the roads I'd never been on though and saw parts of southern Utah that I wasn't familiar with, including a dramatic crossing of Capital Reef.  Sadly, I didn't take any pictures of crossing the reef!  Got to the Provo area in time to eat a latish lunch at Brick Oven Pizza with my family.  Went and saw my brother and his wife and kids in the evening.
• Friday was family stuff in Provo and Salt Lake.  Saturday morning too (went and saw my sister-in-law's first General Conference performance as an official member of the choir), which meant that the drive home had to be compressed and rushed and we couldn't stop for anything.  Sunday late we got home.

Anyway, here's some pictures.  Later I'll make another post with the video I took, although fair warning—I talked too much and the videos are too long with me blabbing on about stuff while I'm out in the wilderness.  Or "wilderness" as the case may be; Grand Junction has lots of fun outdoorsy stuff to see and do, but unspoiled remote wilderness is not really ever exactly what it felt like.