Sheppy Quest 2005

This is me at the Trail Head at about 8:00 Friday morning.  I slept Thursday night off a Forest Service road about an hour away so that I could get an early start.

Anyway, the trail does go up and away from the creek eventually.  The scenery is very nice.  Here I am standing on a rock about an hour into the hike.

Here I am standing in front of one of these buildings.

This is some rocks in Goose Creek.  The creek obviously gets higher than this because the rock I am standing on is worn sort of smooth.  I almost felt like I could have slipped off (that would have been a bad deal since I was holding my camera)

The rock formations around here were just amazing.  I took lots of photos here.  None of them really did the area justice.

This picture is looking North from one of the boulders that I climbed.  Some day, I might come back here and spend the whole day around here.

Eventually, I decided I had to move on.  If this had been one or two miles further in, I probably would have stayed in this area, but it just was not right for this trip.

After setting up camp, I grabbed the camera, a water bottle and some stuff in my lumbar pack and headed further up the trail. 

This picture is looking South East from the trail.

The Wigwam trail is one that Tracy and I backpacked on a couple of times back before we had Tyler and Connor holding us back.  Goose Creek Trail intersects Wigwam, so I thought it might be cool to see my old "stomping grounds" again.

I didn't quite make it to Wigwam before deciding that I had better head back to camp if I wanted to get there before dark.

In every direction, as far as you can see, there is wilderness.  The green trees with spots of yellow aspen starting to pop through and the granite rocks and mountains all around were just awesome to behold.

I think this spot was the highest elevation I got to (10,200 feet or so)

The next day, at about 7:30, I headed back up towards the Wigwam trail, but this time decided to take another intersection trail, "McCurdy Trail".

I got to the trail intersection at about 8:00 and pretty soon after that came to this overlook of the valley.  It looked very cool with the shadow off the rocks to the left.  A very pretty sight.

All of a sudden, out of the woods off trail right in front of me, a bobcat was running right at me!  I stopped.  He stopped.  My heart stopped.  We looked at each other for a split second and then he took off in the other direction.  I only saw him briefly, but WOW!!! 

This was pretty exciting for me.  It is the first predator I've ever seen in the wild.  My heart was pounding for several minutes after that.  I was so happy to have seen a bobcat.

I thought this was just too cool.

Little brook trout swam around my feet.

I didn't get all the way to the other side because of a somewhat deep pool right in front of where I took this picture.  If I didn't have the camera, I probably would have gone all the way, but it was not worth risking the camera.

I spent a long time in this area just enjoying the view and listening to the water.  It was also sort of fun to watch the brook trout swimming around.  There were a ton of them.

Eventually, I tried to figure out which way the trail goes from here.  I followed three that came to quick dead-ends before I finally found the one that I was supposed to take.

It was a bit more difficult to get down to this side.  If I were with someone I probably would have climbed down and gotten a closer look to this side, but I decided that the chance of getting hurt was just a little too great being alone.  I had not seen anyone since early Friday morning, so for all I knew, no one would be by for weeks.

I headed up into the mountains again, but not much further and none of the pictures I took from this point up ended up on the web page.

I took my time and took a bunch of side trails on the way back, enjoying ever minute and every view.  It is so beautiful in this area, I think I could spend weeks down there just looking around.

But again, I made it back to "base camp".  It had been another 9 hour day of hiking (more sitting and resting this day than the previous day, but still).

Again, I had one of those yummy freeze-dried suppers and went to bed early.

This is a shot of the mountains as the sun is rising behind me.  It looked much prettier in person.

I got back to the Blazer at about 8AM.  My pedometer tells me that I walked 86465 steps in the three days.  That is close to 43 miles of hiking.  The trails were a lot of up and down, but for the most part this was the easiest hiking terrain I've done on any of these Sheppy Quests.  Still, that is a lot of walking.