Hiking to Hairpin Lake

We tent camped the night before… got an early start on the trail…  

Amazing view from the jeep trail that we took up the mountain. 

the trail up the mountain ...

Stopping for a break - the road was so rough, it took an hour to go 7 miles. 

Looking across the steep, deep valley to the other side - another road going up. 

View from the jeep trail - you can see the original road that we started on down below. 

The start! 4 miles of steep down/up hill. The flowers were beautiful. 

View from hiking - there were LOTs of little high mountain lakes up top.
We hiked by and around them, going higher to "our lake". 

We found a snowpack cave thing - the creek was running through the snow.
It was really cool. The guy in the pic walked through it and over it. 

Hiking across the little valley—
The tundra was super soggy and there was still a fair amount of snow - even in July. 

Final destination: Hairpin Lake, a long narrow like that lies turned in and out of a boulder field.  

The five of us ate lunch, fished and messed around for a couple hours by the lake. 

But then giant storm clouds started rolling in and we started the 4 mile hike back to the vehicle. We made it back JUST in time - literally as the last one of us climbed in the vehicle and shut the door, the storm clouds caught up to us. There was a HUGE downpour and hail, thunder and lighting. It was really cool - being up so high, right in the middle of the storm…. The roads did get slick on the way back down, so it took another good hour on the seven mile long jeep trail back to the camp ground. :) *good memories*

-GB