Thanks Tea. I appreciate it.
August 2nd. Amphitheater Lake
I’ve been lazy in not getting in any workouts this trip. That’s typical for me when I’m on vacation. So I was planning a hike with a lot of vertical, and then top it off with intervals on the way up.
Jackson Lake (on the way to the hike).
The parking lot was jam full at 8:30 am and I was floored. We drove past 200 yards of parked cars to the trailhead, doubled parked, I got out, readied by pack, and bid Julie goodbye. (ok, so it was probably 15 mins of readying the pack.) I passed a few people right out of the gate, and met a runner going the opposite direction carrying a water bottle. Impressive.
Ok, so what am I doing? The hike is 5 miles and has 3000 ft of vertical. The typical thing is to get into a “kind of hard” pace, which the no-go zone for endurance athletes. So my plan was to hike fast or hike slow (intervals). I had the whole workout recorded on my heart rate monitor, but the monitor lost the data and I’m a bit bewildered why. Oh well.
After hiking a while, I started “blasting” for 5-8 minutes and then walking slow. As you might expect, when I was hiking really fast, I was passing people, and when I was going slow, I wasn’t. I’m sure some people wondered, “What the hell.”
Just before Amphitheater Lake is Surprise Lake.
I assume it’ll called Surprise Lake because it’s a surprise there’s a lake when you come across it. (I know I was.) There was ONE guy at the lake before me, which begs the question, where the hell was everyone else.
Amphitheater Lake
The way down.
I think I made it back to the car in four hours, and took longer to come down than go up. One the way down I asked a few people about the cars and I think they were from climbers and backpackers, not hikers. I guess this is a trail used for climbing Grand Teton.
I passed group after group on the way down, and some of these were large groups (on their way up). All this means there were not many photos during the hike. After the hike, we drove by Jenny Lake (wow, talk about cars).
Around camp
We did kind of the same thing around the camp site. Eat, take some sunset pictures, and drink 6 or seven beers.
I got out of bed a few hours after going to sleep and took some start pictures. It’s hard to get out of bed after 6 or 7 beers.
Ok, just kidding about the beers. We actually pulled beers out of the cooler after getting home. Anyway, this was my first time trying star photos. I was surprised that 15 second exposures were creating star trails, but 10 seconds was ok.
Jay