This was the final night of my four day Larch rampage with Brian Kibbons last fall. I’d been wanting to get to this spot for several years now, but at just about every mention I made, he tried to…lets say “question”… my research on the level of epicness this little lake would offer. But I eventually managed to wrangle him over by mentioning there were supposed to be some Aspen groves on the road up to the trailhead (which kind of turned out to be shitty, but that’s beside the point).
So we hit the trail after having hiked something like 15 miles over the past two days (which, yeah, is really not that much), but this trail went straight. up. the damn mountain. Asses were kicked. Knees were inflamed. Shoulders were made sore. Backs were made sweaty. And while we could see some larch through windows in the forest here and there, not until we reached the high point of the hike – 3 miles and some 2400 feet of gain (2000 feet of which was in the first two miles) in – did we realized just how insane this basin is. There are some pretty nutty alpine Larch areas in Washington, but this might be second only to the Enchantments.
The down side was now finding a campsite. This whole basin is basically an enormous boulder field. Like small car sized boulders. Everywhere. We scouted for a good 45 minutes before we found the one campsite near the lake (and man is it nice), and then settled in, not expecting to get much in the way of sunset color since we were on the east side of this huge 2000-foot tall wall of peaks. But then clouds started rolling over right in time for the sun to start lighting them up, and we summarily reverted to our primate forms, hooting and hollering and air-fiving each other across the outlet stream at the shit that we just witness go down (the next morning was about as skunky as it gets, so it was quite nice to walk away from here with good color).
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