Well Justin, Flounder and I got on the trail at about 8:30am and didn’t get back to camp until 3:30pm. Our intentions were to hike up to trail trail lakes and trout fish, we’ve heard the fishing is really good up there. It’s about a 4hr hike with 3000ft of elevation gain the whole way up. Most of the hike was switchbacks up the mountain with 4 river/creek crossings. This was flounders first serious hike and it was definitely difficult. Parts of the trail were overgrown and it was really rocky for majority of the way.
I attached bells to myself and flounder to warn any wildlife that lies ahead that we were coming through.our first river crossing was a little difficult as the water was flowing pretty fast from the snow melt, flounder was hesitant but I held him close to me and we safely crossed. We’re definitely out in bear country, a lot of bushes one could definitely be catching a nap in, Justin claps to make some noise, we both are also hiking with bear spray just in case. The next river crossing has a narrow log, I try to walk it and slip off, now my boots are soaked and we still have another 2hrs or so, plus the hike back. I said to Justin “it feel like I’m hiking in wetsuit booties”(he’s a surfer too so he understood what I meant). it was definitely not EasY doing the remainder of the hike with wet boots, socks and feet, my feet turned into prunes real quick. At one point Justin laughed and said “this is actually a difficult hike” I said “yeah I went on the alltrails app this morning and it’s rated just that, basically a black diamond hike” we both laughed and kept going up.
The higher we go the more snow we start to see. Finally we’re almost at the top and the trail disappears under the snow. We keep going because we really want to fish these alpine lakes. We’re now hiking on no trail on top of snow we don’t know how deep is anymore.up the side of a very steep mountain, we start slipping and sliding, I had to unleash flounder so he could better plant himself hiking up. It got to the point where we both looked at each other and felt this was starting to become really unsafe, we both have cold wet feet and we’re out here just us 3, hours away from camp. So we called it, hiked back down to big rock overlooking the valley and ate our lunch, most likely the lakes were still frozen or covered in snow.we’ll give it a few more weeks then try again. Although we didn’t get to fish up there, the hike was a challenge for all of us and I couldn’t be more proud of flounder. At 8yrs old he hung in there the whole time not slowing down once, he absolutely loved it. I’m so stoked to share these memories with him, 12 miles, 3000ft elevation gain, 4 river crossings, day 10 in the sawtooths
