Well, we finally got up into the mountains this past weekend and crosses an item off the Must-Do list...hiking Cloud Peak. At 13,200 it was the highest that either of us had actually hiked. We compressed about 4 days of hikes into 2, and now that we're eating icecream on the couch at home, we're glad we did that. However, yesterday evening, during mile 26 of 27 over the 2 day adventure we weren't thinking it had been the best idea...
While hiking to the top of the Bighorns was nice, we both decided that we can have even more fun sticking to the valleys full of lakes and flowers...
If it wasn't so pretty, I probably would have been mind-numbingly frusturated that I didn't bring my flyrod along to save weight...next time Emily's solar-powered heat blanket will not be making the trip with us, andthe flyrod will....
On the way off of the peak, I had the bright idea to take an "alternate route" down...about 1800 vertical feet and 1.5 hours later we were at the bottom of the valley that had seemed ifinitely closer from the top of the 12,600 ft ridge. While it wasn't a true "short-cut", we did get to see 2 lakes that we wouldn't have normally, and instead of having a pretty tough downhill of boulder hopping, we had, well, a tough downhill of boulder hopping, but condensed the elevation loss into about 1/4 of the distance. I guess it added another 1.5 miles to the hike out though...I guess I really can't put any spin on it that makes it sound like it was the right decision....oh well.
Here's Emily during the "short-cut" decent. Julie, don't look...
Here's a shot from the summit.
This is day one decending to some beautiful lakes full of golden trout...
We had a great time.
