Have a look at part 1 if you missed it.
The third day in long trips is always interesting because that’s when I start losing my connection to the calendar. Each day stands by itself and I don’t have to concern myself with anything other than packing in the morning, walking and then setting up camp when I reach my destination. A lot of times I don’t even have a specific destination planned and just hike until I’m tired and have reached a good camp.
Day 3
I packed up and made my way down into the Redfish Creek valley. After stopping for a snack at the creek, I started going up the other side.
After hiking up from the valley for a few hours (including a long break at Alpine Lake), I went over the pass and headed down to Baron Lakes. I camped on the isthmus between the upper and lower lake, which is just visible in this photo.
At 8 miles, this was a relatively short day and I had plenty of time to look around and read. One thing I noticed was the granite in my camp. There are two types of granite in the Sawtooths. The older is granite from the Idaho Batholith which formed around 90 million years ago. The gray rocks embedded in the ground are Idaho granite. The pink one in the foreground with the quartz vein is from the Sawtooth Batholith, which formed about 50 million years ago when a magma plume pushed into the Idaho granite and cooled. That granite is more brittle and forms most of the spires in the Sawtooths.
My dinner was almost inedible (some sort of weird noodle dish that had the taste and consistency of paste), but I at least got a nice sunset.
Day 4
The agenda for the rest of the day was to head down to the Baron Creek valley and then turn south to go up the Payette river.
I stopped for lunch at the end of the valley and then crossed Baron Creek on this log. This was a good sized log, but long and sloping down (hard to see from this angle). The water is much deeper than it appears in the photo and was moving fast.
I ended up stopping at this waterfall because it was the first camp I reached during the whole trip up the valley and didn’t know if or when I would pass another. There was actually one other, but the only water was full of an algae bloom and I didn’t feel safe drinking it. This made my day a little over 14 miles. I had been hoping to make it to Elk Lake at 18 miles, but I didn’t know if I could make it before dark and didn’t feel like night hiking on a rocky trail. There were a few camps next to this waterfall, but it was super loud. I found one above it to the left behind a long that blocked out some of the noise. Lot’s of ants.
This was a pretty difficult day. 14 miles is typical for me, but the trail up the valley was very rocky and hard to walk on. One bonus is that I heard wolves howling at one point when I stopped for a drink. I listened for about 5 minutes until they stopped. What a sound from beautiful animals.