A Beautiful (and necessary) Fall Hike

Since I have done very little mountain hiking this year (the 35 mile Wyoming Trek with our ward youth notwithstanding), I decided I had better take a day and do some because it is definitely getting cooler and winter will be upon us soon.  I needed to do this!! When I came home and put the pictures on the PC and then checked last year's blog I found out, to my surprise, that I did this same hike exactly one year ago today  (Sept 15, 2010).  Amazing!  I did not plan that.  Maybe that's because it's a fairly easy hike.   You start at Brighton at the top of Big Cottonwood Canyon which is about 8900 feet in elevation and in  less than 3 miles you can hike to four mountain lakes that are all fairly close.  The highest, Catherine Lake is just barely below 10,000 feet.

Well, one year makes a big difference.  Last year at this time, it was very dry.  Lake Mary was just a "pond", most of the shrubs and greenery had wilted and the leaves of the Aspen were turning colors.  (You can see the pictures on the blog of Sept 15, 2010).  This year, everything is still lush and green, including all the aspen trees.  The flowers in the meadows and on the slopes were amazing. 

The only problem with this hike is there were just two many people out hiking on a Thursday.  I must have run in to about a dozen or so along the way and at the lakes.  Way too many for a 6 mile round-trip.  I'm used to more solitude than that in a middle of the week hike in the upper parts of the wasatch mountains. Too many people in my mountains!

So, a few pictures to "document" this little hike.

On the left is looking back across Brighton and Big Cottonwood Canyon after only about a half-mile climb.  On the right is just one of the typical trail scenes along the way.  It was wonderful.

This is the stream that is coming down the canyon from the flow out of Dog Lake and Lake Mary combine.  It's a pretty amazing flow for this late in the season.

Two views of Dog Lake.  The left picture (sorry it is so blurry, I didn't notice till I downloaded it to the computer) is taken from the trail on the way to Lake Mary and I was about 300 feet above the lake (it is shaped like the profile of a running dog).  On the right, at the lake elevation, you can barely tell there is a lake there at all.

Lake Mary is a big lake (as high mountain lakes go).  About a half-mile long and couple hundred yards wide.  If you look at last year's picture you will see that almost everything in this view is mostly completely dry - all you see is rock.  And, even in this view, the lake is down about 15 feet or so from it's high point.  I probably should have gone up in early August to see this lake completely full, because if you looked at my blog from my hike in July to Red Pine lake, there was still lots of snow at this elevation.  Below

you see the water coming from Lake Mary through the opening in the dam on the east side of the lake.  Last year, same point in time, no water was flowing from Lake Mary.  Based on the opening size and the water velocity and trajectory (it was spraying out about 30 to 40 feet) I did some quick calculations and estimated it was flowing at about 400 gallons per second.  (for the math impaired, thats 24000 gallons per minute or about 1.4 million gallons per hour).  That's a lot of water for one small mountain lake in mid-september.

Throughout the hike there were amazing fields of wild flowers everywhere.  On the right is Lake Martha, much smaller than Lake Mary.

It was very evident that with the right conditions, it doesn't take a human gardner to create a beautiful arrangement of flowers.  They were spectacular.  You might expect something like this in the spring, but this late in the fall it was astonishing. Gorgeous fields of flowers were everywhere.

This is Lake Martha from above, and in the upper center right you can also see the south end of Lake Mary (I think you can click on the the pictures to enlarge them - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  I don't know why?  Must be magic).  These Lakes are all very close.  My total roundtrip hike was less than six miles.

This little side canyon was so filled with flowers that I walked up it a little ways on my way to Catherine Lake.  And, yes, that is snow that you see in the upper center of the picture.  This is at about 9700 feet elevation and there was still snow in shaded areas on north-facing slopes - in September!

This is Catherine Lake, it is just below 10,000 feet.  I took several pictures but I liked this one that shows the reflection of the mountain top and the sky in the middle of the lake.  You can also see a fisherman just to the right of the tall pine on the far shore line.  He was catching (and releasing) small, about 6 inch trout every few minutes.

I ate lunch here.  It was an overcast day and quite cool (probably mid 50's). Before I finished eating I had to put on my sweatshirt to stay warm.  It also started to sprinkle just a little and from the cloud formations it was hard to tell if it was going to clear up or gradually get worse.  So I decided to start back rather than climb that last half-mile (and about 400 feet in elevation) to Catherine Pass that I went to last year. It looks over into the Albion basin and Alta ski area at the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Oh yes, I had one other fascinating experience on my walk back down.  I could hear a "thumping noise" on the trail ahead of me and couldn't figure out where it was coming from.  As I got closer, I could see pine cones were dropping onto the trail and surrounding rocks.  They would hit the ground and then bounce high into the air.  I thought, who is throwing pine cones at me.  Looked around - no one else was there.  So, I stood and watched for several minutes to figure out what was going on.  One of the really tall pine trees seem to be "releasing" his (her?) pine cones almost all at once.  They were falling at the rate of 2 or 3 every couple of seconds.  I watched for several minutes and it just continued.  I had no idea they did that.  By the way, there was no wind, no rain, nor any other outside influence that I could see that was causing this.  It was as if the pine tree was just releasing those pine cones in a very controlled, closely timed way.  I was amazed.  I have never seen that before.