Tag Archives: backpacking

Ouzel Backpacking

It occurred to us the other day, that for some reason we haven’t been backpacking once yet in Colorado! Clearly this was unacceptable, so Kelly picked out a nice warm-up outing so we could get our backpacking legs under us for the season. We booked a spot at Ouzel Lake, which has an upper and lower site. The lower spots were filled so we settled for the upper sites. The upper site is a tad farther from the trail-head, though in either case the whole walk would have been roughly 10 miles round trip. Would have been…

We’ll return to that thought in a bit. Before all of that, we travelled over a gently climbing and well maintained trail that hugs the St. Vrain and then the Ouzel Creek, through sparse pine forests, over several aesthetically appealing timber bridges, past raging cascades and eventually onto a thinly treed ridge offering 360 degrees of views, at least 270 degrees of which are spectacular.

…And as you can see above, the trail was ultimately smothered by an expansive blanket of snow. The well traveled bits and the sun baked parts were plenty supportable and we hardly needed our spikes. In fact, all was well until we lost the trail somewhere after the lower camp area. No worry; we’d just use Backcountry Navigator and the USGS tiles I just downloaded for the region that morning. We navigated back toward the trail and followed it up hill and into the woods through increasingly deep snow and steep terrain until we found ourselves standing atop a snow-bridge under which the Ouzel Creek roared savagely in the spring melt.

After Kelly briefly dipped a foot in the water we agreed to follow the trail as closely as we could without crossing any buried water. We bushwhacked further up a convoluted pine forest that would have made for an absolute playground of midwinter tree-skiing: constant pillowy undulations, and perfectly spaced trees. We navigated off trail through cliffbands and around snowy canyons until we were approximately to the location marked on the map as the upper campsite. After a solid hour of travel, we had covered only one mile. Bushwhacking in shin deep snow is no joke!

A second, third and maybe fourth look at the map revealed that we should have been standing in the creek. Indeed, we were standing on a small ridge running east-west. The creek emerged from a cliffside roughly to our north, and traversed under us to the south. We pondered this paradox briefly before concluding that we were standing on a massive snow drift (25 feet deep at least!?!?!) with running water below.

We realized that the campsites were essentially no more find-able than the trail, so we backtracked down toward the lower site. The lower site was in a similar state of affairs. No gargantuan snow drifts, but all low lying, flat terrain was buried in who knows how much snow. At least it was flat. Somewhat indifferent with defeat, we settled on the first level spot, threw down our packs and made camp.

#ouzel lake #backpacking with @kellyahowie stay tuned – there’s a lot more where this came from! #nofilter #gopro #hero5black #rmnp

A post shared by Brian Sweeney (@briangsweeney) on Jun 4, 2017 at 6:01pm PDT

Backpacking in our backyard at Ouzel Lake #lovewhereyoulive #rmnp #backpacking

A post shared by Kelly Howie (@kellyahowie) on Jun 4, 2017 at 6:50pm PDT

Turns out, the spot we arbitrarily settled on could hardly have been better. Water was close at hand, and the views in either direction were great. We feasted, set up some time lapses, shot photos, strolled about and crawled into bed as soon as it was acceptably late. A nocturnal bathroom break yielded absolutely still air, a brilliant half moon, and surprisingly good visibility – no headlamps needed really, even though it was the middle of the night.

It must have been below freezing for most of the night, because the snow firmed up as soon as the sun set. Around 3 or 4 in the morning my 45 degree back became a little bit inadequate so I pulled on a down jacket snoozed happily until the sun woke us both in the morning.

When we crawled out of bed, our boots, socks and packs were covered in a light frost, which evaporated almost as soon as the sun hit them. The hike out was fast and cool in the morning air. In a couple of hours, backpacking number one was in the books and we were on our way to après-hike Mexican food.

Pemi Loop

Summer 2014 came and went with nary a rugged mile hiked the entire season! Not really sure what happened, but Kelly and I managed to get roped into everything aside from hiking. No regrets really – just no mountain climbing in 2014.

In May of 2105 we uncorked our bottled up zeal for arduous mountain adventure by doing what we do best: biting off way more than we can chew and getting ourselves good and committed. Of course we invited everyone we could think of (the final roster included Deb, Ruthie, Ben, myself and Kelly) and sallied forth into the Pemigewasset Wilderness armed with a smorgasbord of untested backpacks, unbroken boots, and ill-conditions legs.

Our original plan as proposed by Deb was to go summit Katahdin, but we learned at the last minute that Memorial day in Baxter closely resembles winter. Thusly, we aborted that plan and pivoted back to a known quantity: the Pemi Loop. We opted for a more ‘leisurely’ pace by splitting the circuit across 3 days and 2 nights. In hindsight I’m dubious that the 3 day pace is any easier than the overnight, simply due to the spectacular amount of gear that must be hauled to make multiple overnights comfortable. Anyway the hike was ultimately fun, if not a rude awakening for a first-outing-of-the-season.

The Crew

Day one was the longest and most difficult day: we walked from Lincoln Woods Campground, over Franconia Ridge, all the way to the base of Garfield where we camped for the night. Franconia Ridge was hallmarked by spectacular winds and beautiful, clear skies. On day two we dragged our achy selves over Garfield (I’d say we all had some choice words for that mountain – both up and down), and then up and down a whole bunch more gnarly mountains which finally taper into the plateau-ish Bond Range where we were able to skulk into camp at Guyot Tentsite. We were among the last to arrive that night and were relegated to the lean-to shelter. Tents were uncalled for, but earplugs might have been nice. Day three was by far the easiest. You ease into the day with a gentle traverse of the Bonds featuring spectacular views of the Pemi and Franconia Ridge and eventually begin the long slow descent back toward Lincoln Woods. The hike from the bottom of the Bonds along an abandoned logging railway feels simply interminable and the monotony steadily builds toward a bursting point when suddenly you waltz out of the woods and into the parking lot. We wasted virtually no time in trading our boots for flip flops and hastily made our way back to town for some non-freeze-dried victuals. The Woodstock Inn Brewery, pre-ordained about 3 miles after we started hiking on Day One satiated our respective hungers and thirsts as well as ever, after which we sleepily traipsed back toward home, leaving behind a Memorial Weekend well spent.

Classic White Mountain scramble

High on the ridge, the winds howl

Garfield Pond

Camp 1

Home sweet home!

So wait, what are we supposed to do here?

Seriously?

Spikes would have been nice…Garfield, grrrrrrr…

Camp 2
Photo Credit: Deb

Sunrise

This picture pretty much sums up everything about backcountry travel…

Photo Credit: Deb

Back Two Backpacking

After a recent series of hikes, it feels about time for another post. We’ve been doing some “fun” backpacking trips lately, also known as hiking in, camping, and hanging out, rather than pushing all day until night falls and unpacking in the dark. There’s a time and a place for long grueling backpacking trips, and the past few weeks were not the time. We also did a great hike with some friends last weekend, which I’ve combined into this one big post covering the end of August and early September!

Summit Lake

Our first trip, a few weeks back now, was to head south towards the border of MRNP, and camp at Summit Lake. The trailhead lies more than six miles up and into the mountains at the end of a somewhat rough forest service road, though the rangers assured us it was ‘far from the worst’. Since dogs seem to be banned from campgrounds in the NP Summit Lake drew a lot of dog owners hiking in for the night. We made a relatively quick ascent, heard there was a sweet overlook campsite, and bee-lined for that.

The rest of the day was spent taking in the views of Mt Rainier, and hanging out at Summit Lake proper, lounging until a dinner of re-hydrated food. Mmmm. The evening and morning lighting made for even better photos.

In the morning we packed up, headed out and got a great breakfast nearby in an old Saloon.

Olallie and Talupus Lakes

The following weekend was labor day weekend, and after plans for a larger three day surfing trip fell through, we opted for another fun, easy backpacking trip, this time near Snoqualmie Pass. The forest road up was much smoother and the lake views were great, especially with some weather patterns moving through creating interesting clouds. Dylan joined us as well for the relaxing afternoon in the lake basins.

The morning fog rising off the lake was a nice treat. On our way back, we stopped at the Falls, since Dylan hadn’t been.

Heliotrope Ridge

Our friend Ian suggested we do a hike together, and because of his love for glaciers, opted for Heliotrope Ridge. After staring at topos all last winter, reading TRs and debating when the best time to ski it was, it was awesome to finally make a trip up from the valley that’s one of Mt. Baker’s main melt outflows. Ian, Tanya, their daughter Lily, Catherine and I all met at the trailhead and started up. It was a gorgeous day for hiking and sightseeing.

All in all an awesome day! Ian was a champ carried a sleeping Lily both up and down the trail. The trail itself was more taxing than one would’ve expected, moderately gaining elevation throughout, and included several fun creek crossings. I can’t wait to head back this winter. The trailhead is also the starting point for one of the main climbing routes, so we encountered more than a few mountaineers making for the summit.

15 Miles

Last weekend Ziehl and I pulled off our multi-day Bigelow Range / Flagstaff Lake excursion, as per our plan discussed earlier. Our party unfortunately unraveled towards the last minute, with the final roster consisting of just the two of us. We made some quick logistics adjustments (less cars, less boats) and went for it. As it turned out, our shortened roster would actually be the least of our troubles before the end of the trip! The full trip report follows. Friday We decided it might be prudent to get started as early as possible on Friday. The original plan called for a Friday afternoon/evening departure with a goal of accommodating most people’s schedules, but now that our team was down to just two, we amended the plan and hit the road around 10 AM. Ziehl swung by my place with the Pathfinder, I threw all my gear in the trunk, and we were off and running.

I swear, we’re only going to be gone for a few days…

We had two scheduled pit stops on the way to Maine: once at Ziehl’s family’s house to retrieve some extra dry bags and a carbon fiber paddle, and once at my family’s house to pick up the boats and life jackets. Stop number one went just fine, stop number two on the other hand marked the first official mishap of our adventure. We pulled the kayaks out of the basement, and got ready to throw them on the roof with the Thule J-bars when we realized that I had left half of the hardware in the back of my car in Boston. Instead of going all the way back to Boston, we went back to Ziehl’s house and took the hardware from his mounts. Even with this major blunder on my part we still managed to hit the road around 1 PM. With Ziehl doing the driving this time, I took charge of the co-piloting for the weekend. When Tripp and I did this trip last fall, we had a Hell of a time finding the campground in the dark with no cell service. With cell service we could easily have used the GPS in my phone to figure out exactly where we were, but without cell service the navigation software can’t download the map tiles for the given region. This time around, I made sure to pre-cache map tiles in advance. Just because I love redundant systems, I used Google Maps Labs to cache tiles in the Android Google Maps app, and I pre-cached the same region in Backcountry Navigator Pro. All of this may seem slightly excessive, but we felt a lot better about travelling on roads of dubious condition in the dark in unfamiliar territory with the ability to scheme up a Plan-B in a pinch. The next order of business, was getting the GoPro squared away for use with the Kayaks. This was pretty much the maiden voyage of the GoPro, so I wanted to make sure that I had all of the settings dialed in before we got out in the woods, where I’d likely be too busy or tired to take my time and do it right. This was actually a non-trivial activity. The GoPro is pretty incredible from an industrial design standpoint, but the UI leaves a bi to be desired. Given the circumstances (only two hardware buttons to work with), they actually do a pretty good job. Anyhow, I set it to take one hi-res photo every 60 seconds for the duration of the trip. It seemed to me that video of 7 hours of paddling might be a bit tedious, but tons of still photos might yield a few cool shots. After a few stops for gas and sandwhiches we rolled onto the access road to the Round Barn Campground where we would drop our kayaks. By now it was about 7 PM and not yet totally dark. We found the waterfront day use area of the camp ground and prepared to unload the kayaks in the fading light. Right then, we ran into a crazy old Irish guy watching the sunset from his VW Eurovan. We end up telling him our plans for the weekend and were excited hear that he had just run into two other people doing the same loop as us, but in the opposite direction. Until then, we were worried that we might be planning an overly ambitious trip. The next thing he said was cause for concern; we told him how we intended to get from Round Barn to Trout Brook and he informed us that last time he was down that road a bridge was missing and that the only option was to ford the stream with steep embankments on either side. We decided to take a shot at it anyway – if it was really in bad shape we’d have to find another way around. The series of setbacks ensued, summarized best in this map:

View Flagstaff Adventure in a larger map

Here’s what happened. We headed west from Round Barn down East Flagstaff Road, which according to the map connects with West Flagstaff Road and eventually goes straight past Trout Brook Campsite, where we intended to camp. This was supposed to be about 15 miles long and we expected it to take an hour or so. East Flagstaff Road was in pretty rough shape, but Ziehl’s Pathfinder was up to the challenge. After about an hour of plodding through the woods in 4-wheel drive we came to a huge red steel gate. We’d only come about 3 miles. After swearing a whole bunch we looked at the map and realized that we must have taken a wrong turn about a mile back. We turned around, found the turn we missed and instantly recognized why we’d missed it in the first place. The road was totally grown in with 10 year trees. We ended up backtracking the the entire three miles and finding a road to the south of the range called Carriage Road. Carriage Road was another route of dubious quality. We passed it on the way to Round Barn and it was just a dirt path through the woods. We had no idea if we might encounter similar troubles. The only other alternatives would have taken us significantly out of our way. The Carriage Road turned out to be smooth sailing and we quickly popped out of the woods at Rte. 27/16, which apparently had been destroyed in several places by Hurricane Irene. In many places it was still down to one lane. We arrive in Stratton around 9 or 10 PM in search of Trout Brook Campground which should have been a convenient spot to spend the night. All we could find was a large, swampy, clearing full of dead trees and brush. Maybe more evidence of Irene? In any event, we decided to just drive to the trailhead and camp there. According to the map, the trailhead was at the end of Reservoir Road in Stratton. We found Reservoir Rd. easily and quickly found that it was gated off by a sparkling new, chain link fence. Starting to run out of patience, we jumped out of the car, GPS in hand and followed a snowmobile path around the back of the fenced off property to the trailhead. From the trailhead parking area, we were able to backtrack out to the road and back to the car via some dirt road, not on any of the maps we’d looked at. It was at least 11 PM and we were anxious to try out the Gritty’s Halloween Ale we’d picked up, so we grabbed our headlamps and threw together a hasty campsite in the parking lot. Turns out the view from the parking lot wasn’t too shabby…

Nearly a full moon.

Saturday We rolled out of bed at 9 the next day, had some oatmeal, loaded our packs and were on the trail by 10. The day called for roughly 15 miles of hiking over 4 peaks.

View Flagstaff Adventure in a larger map There would be a lot of elevation change and we had overnight gear, extra layers, food, water treatment equipment, the cameras and other gadgets, and shell pants and jackets. We had no idea what the weather would be like this time of year. As it turns out the weather was basically perfect: 60-70 degrees, mostly sunny, light breeze. We could have skipped the extra layers and shell pants, and probably should have, because there were a lot of steep climbs. The hike turned out to be long and fairly difficult, but well worth it.

From this panorama you can actually see most of the hike and the paddle!

Looking north west – the ridge we just came over is to the left.

You can see how steep the ridge is – it falls away sharply to both sides.

We refilled our water at this MATC camp site.

Scoping out Sunday’s activities…

One of the last big climbs of the day.

The view immediately after the final summit of the day. The moon was out and the sun was just about to dip below the mountains behind us. It would be totally dark in about an hour!

Photo Credit: Ziehl

We reached the final summit about an hour before sunset. We still had about 3 miles of steep downhill before we were back at Round Barn, and we ended up completing the last hour or so of it by headlamp. It was nearly a full moon but the foliage prevented much useful light from reaching the forest floor. When we got back to Round Barn, we spent about an hour locating the kayaks in the dark and finding an unoccupied camp site. We wasted no time in consuming the first PBR (strategically stowed in the Kayaks on Friday night). With that out of the way, we put up our tents, started a fire and sat around eating for about 2.5 hours before going to bed. Sunday Day two turned out to be another exceptional day. We pulled our food down, threw together a quick breakfast and started taking down the camp.

Whitecaps on the lake!

Rigging the kayaks. The GoPro is right behind my hand. We stowed the trekking poles with the deck rigging. Most of the overnight gear was stowed in the main hatch. We were able to keep extra layers in the rear external stowage using bungee cords. My two solar chargers are clipped to the bow deck rigging along with the trekking poles.

Under way!

The wind was gusty and the water, choppy at 10 AM, when we departed.

The portage: the road was nearly completely submerged, which worked great for us! We only had to pull the kayaks out of the water for a few feet. The western bank of the isthmus was difficult to deal with. It was mostly flooded and full of weeds and bog-like vegetation which mostly too thick to paddle through and mostly not firm enough to stand on. The windward bank was a tangled mess of driftwood and dead trees.

View Larger Map

The first portage: a thin isthmus where a road (of red steel gate infamy) crosses the lake. The road is mostly submerged here.

Reconnoitering…

Finding our way through the second portage.

This may be our best option…

After a lengthy search, we decided to just haul the boats over this mangled pile of driftwood and dead vegetation.

Portage number two.

Hauling the kayaks – they’re way easier to handle when they aren’t full of hiking gear.

Portage two: not so bad after all…

Considering our options…

Checking on the solar panels.

A pit stop…

Now, right around here I must have whacked the shutter button on the GoPro. So here concludes the GoPro footage. Fortunately Ziehl, has plenty of still photos from his point and shoot, which I imagine will surface on his page shortly… Anyhow, be sure to double check that your camera is still recording from time to time! After the portage fiasco was resolved, we encountered pretty smooth sailing for the rest of the day. We followed the Lake as it wrapped around the Bigelows back toward Stratton. Eventually we spotted the Boat Ramp across the street from Stratton Elementary School. We landed the boats and hid them in the bushes while we walked back to the car, about a mile and half away off of Main Street. Reunited with the Pathfinder, we collected the boats, unloaded them, put them back on the roof and went straight for the White Wolf: the only bar in town. Neither of us had ever been to a bar which was ‘the only bar in town’ and we wanted to see what such a place might be like. We were pleasantly surprised by the limited yet carefully selected draft list (Long Trail, Carrabassett, Shipyard, Gritty’s) complemented by a none-too-shabby list of bottles. We had a quick feast, a couple of beers and then set off in search of a camp site for the final night. We settled on Stratton Brook Pond. Monday We skulked out of our tents, ahead of schedule for the first time of the trip. After a quick look around, to see what we’d missed in the dark, we tossed our gear in the trunk, rigged the kayaks for the highway and hit the road in search of breakfast. The Looney Moose in Stratton turned out to be just what the doctor ordered.

Our camp, with the Bigelows in the background.

Sunrise at Stratton Brook Pond.

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