Red Pine Lake

This weekend I was able to get out and do my first overnight camp as an adult. I did a lot of camping as a scout, but it's a whole different experience when you grow up you're the one that's responsible for surviving the night and not getting lost. My sibsprother (wife's sister's husband) Shawn and his son (my spephew) were able to come along and I'm glad they did; it's nice having someone out there who knows what he's doing.

When we first talked about wanting to backpack someone together Red Pine Lake came up early in the conversation. I had never been there, and Shawn hadn't been in a long time. It's a little lower in elevation than a lot of lakes so there was a chance that we'd be able to get to the lake without hitting too much snow. I think we were about 2 weeks too early for that, but it was a lot of fun anyway.

To get to Red Pine Lake head up Little Cottonwood Canyon to the White Pine trailhead. (Yes, I know my colors. Just trust me.) There's a pretty big parking lot there and more parking on the street if you get there later in the day. There were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot when we arrived Friday about 5:00pm, but there were cars lining the street when we came back down around 11:00am Saturday.

The first mile of trail is easy. Really really easy. First you go downhill to the river, then gradually gain elevation on a wide, mostly smooth trail. You don't even have to stop for people going the other way because the trail's so wide. After about a mile the trail splits; the trail to White Pine Lake goes off to the left, and the trail to Red Pine Lake goes off to the left. Yes, that's right. They both go to the left, but there's about 20 feet between the turnoffs. 

We took the second left to Red Pine, and soon came upon the bridge over the creek. I tried to get a picture of Shawn and Mikey going over the bridge with the water rushing beneath it, but the screen on my camera doesn't work and this is how it ended up. Just imagine a raging river mere inches below the bridge.

As we wound around the ridge to get to Red Pine Canyon there were many great overlooks of the canyon. This is one of the many pictures I took on our way up. You can see the windy road all the way down the steep canyon.

As we rounded the corner up into Red Pine Canyon the trail got much, much steeper, and we started seeing our first patches of snow. At first it was sort of fun to climb up over the snow banks and slide down the other side, but after awhile the snow got so deep and so frequent that we started doubting we'd make it to the lake.

About 2 1/2 miles in we reached the bridge that goes over to Maybird Gulch. We weren't going there, but it was nice to see the bridge. We knew the bridge was pretty close to the lake and we didn't have much farther to climb.

Unfortunately, not more than a couple hundred feet past the bridge we ran into an impenetrable snowfield. Okay, so it wasn't that bad. It was, however, enough to make us stop and think. At this time it was about 7:30pm. We still needed to find a place to camp and cook dinner before the sun set. It's a new moon so we knew it would be dark quickly after the sun went down. We calculated that we could probably make it to the lake, but that it would take us so long that we'd be scrambling to get ready for bed, and we still weren't guaranteed that we'd find a dry place to camp if we kept going.

So we backtracked to the bridge and checked both sides of the creek for a level camp spot. We found a place overlooking the trail and the river with an old fire pit (fires are currently not allowed in the canyon). We immediately set about getting camp set up.

On this trip I wanted to test out my backpacking set up. It's all easy enough to set up and make work in the backyard, but I wanted to make sure I could do it all out in the middle of nowhere. It turns out that I was able to. Not surprising, really, but reassuring.

The sun dipped below the trees about the time dinner was finished cooking. For dinner I brought up a Mountain House meal. It was Teriyaki chicken and rice, or some such thing (I could zoom in on the picture or walk ten steps to the garbage and tell you for sure, but it really doesn't matter). I heated up 2 cups of water with my homemade alcohol stove and dumped it into the bag, then blew up my sleeping pad while waiting for it to rehydrate.

It was a tasty meal, and I think it still would have been tasty even if we hadn't just hiked 3 miles up the canyon.

One of my big fears of this trip was that I would be cold at night. I was asleep by 10:00pm and at 1:30 woke up completely covered in sweat. I spent the rest of the night with my upper body completely out of the sleeping bag and the bottom half of the bag unzipped. It was plenty warm. The above picture (with my foot) is the view from inside my tent. It was a perfect spot to camp.

In the morning we got out of bed around 8:00am, reassured ourselves that we had indeed survived the night, ate some breakfast and packed up to head home.

There were just as many great views on the way down as the way up, There seemed to be a bit more water on the trail going down though.

We made it back to the truck by around 11:00am (again, I could check the time for sure but it doesn't really matter) and went home.

We hiked just under 6 miles, climbed nearly 2,000 feet in elevation (most of it in the last mile), saw a lake's worth of water on the trail in both liquid and solid form, and didn't get eaten by any bears. This trail is one of the prettiest I've been on (I know I say that every time). Maybe we'll try to get up to White Pine Lake later this year when the snow's gone.