Wind River Range Day 2: Chutes and Ladders

I slept in relatively late on the second day of my backpacking trip in the Wind River Range and got on the trail around 10 AM. I continued to work my way out of the valley that I had hiked up the day before and eventually came to an amazing land of alpine meadows. The wildflowers in the morning were simply stunning:



As I continued, the scene became more and more open, rugged, and ridiculously beautiful. Ludacrisly beautiful. The high alpine practically nudges the peaks only a couple of hundred vertical above the basin. At some point I dropped my pack and bagged a random unknown peak. It was there.

I continued my merry way through the alpine in an incredibly cheery mood when my first tactical mistake was made. I'm relatively used to the trails in the NorthEast that romp their way over peaks, but most of the high points around this area are too cliffy for trails; I had managed to practically mentally flip the up/down hiking of the rest of the day in my mind. What I thought was going to be a steep valley became a mountain pass:



I would continue down to that little Lake (way the heck down there) where I would see another bull moose tromping away from me. It was 3:30 and I discovered that I had only gone 3.5 miles out of my projected 11 or 12 for the day. I had stopped so frequently to take pictures and bask in the views that I was going stupidly slow. Not only that, I had another flip where I expected to go DOWN a valley where my direction would actually go UP the valley. It was time to crank on the gas. But I want to take piiiiiicturess......

I hiked hard up the valley for about 3 miles before coming to a junction where I turned West into a region known as No Name Lakes (most of them actually have names). I was back above treeline (with a few pine tree exceptions) and climbed in and out of what felt like dozens of little basin with random lakes (probably more like five).



It felt like the lakes would never end when finally I came to Palmer Lake and decided to call it a day (ok, it was getting dark and I was exhausted).

I settled into my bivy only to watch lightning across the mountain ridge. I had to get my head around this.... If it rained, I would probably get soaked and the lightning made me think too hard about wildfires (a serious issue...) Finally I dozed off after another indescribable day.