Glacier Park Chat
For awhile I've been thinking of going to the Wind River Range and doing some backpacking. This year seemed like a good year to do it with all that's going on the Covid closures in Glacier National Park and other places.
My plan was for a 7 day backpack which would give me a tour of the south central Wind River Range including both sides of the Cirque of Towers, Hailey Pass, Mount Hooker/Baptiste lake, and the Lizard Head Plateau. I ended up changing my route a couple of days into the trip because I wasn't feeling physically able to do the full trip mostly this was due to my issues with high altitude and hauling my heavy backpack over 11000ft passes.
Anyway here's my TR.
Aug 07 Fly to Denver from Boston then Drive to Pinedale WY
I thought I would save some money and reduce my risk covid if I got a direct flight from Boston to Denver and drove to where I would start my hike. This was a mistake. It was an exhausting day getting up at 4:30, catching a flight, and after all that driving for 7 hours to Wyoming. I think this sort of set me up for a tough first few days of trip.
Aug 08 Drive to Big Sandy TH and Hike to Marms lake
The drive to Big Sandy TH from Pinedale takes about an hour and half. It's not a matter of the distance but the terrible roads that you have to drive on. I'm glad I had and SUV because the last 15 miles of driving the road was very rough dirt/gravel and washouts. It was sort of like driving into Bowman lake.
The trailhead parking from Big Sandy was rediculous, there were cars parked 1 mile from the TH and people were parking their cars on the side of the road which left room for only one car to get buy in single direction. I had to back up twice because their were cars coming out that could get by. However, I lucked out and found a spot off the road about 200 yards from the Trail head.
I started my hike about noon and the skies were perfectly clear. So I put my rain jacket in my pack. An hour into the hike it started hailing on me. Thunder storms were on and off all afternoon. Nothing soaking just enough to make you put on jacket and put away your camera.
For first half mile or so of the hike there were tons of people hiking out in the opposite direction. It turns out they were all coming from the Big Sandy lake area. I think the what people so is hike to Big Sandy lake and then day hike to the Cirque of towers. Most of the people I saw coming out did not look like seasoned backpackers. Many of them had younger children and I remember seeing some pretty unfit people.
A little more than a half mile into my hike the trail to Dad's lake split from the Big Sandy trail. Once I got on this trail the traffic on the trail lightened up. In the first half mile I passed about 50 people, the rest of way I probably saw less than 10 people.
It's about 7 miles from the trail head to Marms lake, the trail heads up hill for awhile then hits some meadows followed by more uphill and you finally reach Dad's lake. Dad's lake is pretty and there looked like some good camping but I wanted to get farther in. Marms lake is only about a mile from Dads lake but that last mile sort of did me in. I started getting very winded and pretty dizzy. But I pushed on and finally made it to Marms lake.
Once I reached Marms lake I had to find suitable camping. As I surveyed the lake I could spot numerous tents. I noticed almost immediately some people were not really following the rules of camping 200 ft from lakes and rivers. I saw one site that people were within 10 ft of the lake. I always thought that you really want your camp to be out of sight of the trail and other campers.
So finding a site I wanted to find something that was private and not visible but also an acceptable distance to the lake. I finally found a site above the lake and on the opposite side of the trail.
My camp at Marms lake. The trail is below my camp between lake and me. The ground was a bit lumpy and it was a pain getting water, but I do think this was pretty good spot to be in. It was private, there was a nice breeze and it had a fire pit on the rocks. Someone had even setup logs with that acted as a bench. (not exactly leave no trace though)
You can kind of see the trail in the field below.
I didn't capture it hear very well, there were some mountains visible in the distance
Ut-oh Equipment failure on my first day!
As I was blowing up my air mattress it wasn't holding air well and I heard hissing noise. I discovered it had a hole and was losing air pretty quick. Oh boy this could be a show stopper. I thought I had checked this before trip so maybe something happened to it while going through airport baggage.
It turns out I had a patch kit with me and Thank God it worked!
Stay tuned for Day 2!
