Wind River Mountains 2021

When I was considering places to go camping for Labor Day this year, high on my list of concerns was finding an area that was unlikely to be on fire. As it happens, the north slope of the Wind Rivers had a little pocket where the drought level was not extreme, unlike the rest of the West. To sweeten the deal, I had done a couple of solo hikes in the Fitzpatrick Wilderness back in 2003 and it looked like a pretty cool area. I put a trip on the WMC schedule and hoped for the best.

As the date approached, I got a bit worried about finding a campsite amid the Labor Day rush. I arranged to arrive on Thursday, so that I could nail down a site before the sites were all overwhelmed. Bob and I carpooled up from SLC on Thursday morning, and we managed to snag part of a a large camping area at the outlet of Trail Lake. We arrived just in time, because sites filled up rapidly, and our own site was visited many times by people looking for a place to camp.

The site was located on a ridge about 50 feet above the water and it had a lovely view. Bob and I erected his canopy and as the afternoon went on, all of the other participants showed up. A storm also showed up, with some wind and rain around dinnertime. It quieted down before bedtime, with blue sky filling in from the southwest.

A couple of hours later, a huge storm crashed into the area, with lighting, thunder, downpours, ferocious wind — the works. I huddled in my tent and tried to get some sleep, realizing that all of the gear that we'd set up was going to blow away. I couldn't persuade myself to go out into the rain and wind to salvage the gear.

In the morning, Bob's canopy was a mangled mess. My tables and benches and camp chair were scattered around the site. Bob and Stanley disassembled the cold, wet remains of the canopy frame and piled it in a heap next to a big rock.

There was a little good news — the weather was clear and calm. I decided that we could do the Bomber Falls hike, up the East Fork of Torrey Creek to a 600-foot cascade, and then on to the top of the falls for a view up the next section of the canyon. The trails were muddy and full of puddles, but we were (mostly) spared from sloshing through thick wet vegetation. We started out on the Glacier Trail, which climbs a few switchbacks and then crosses to the east side of Torrey Creek on a bridge above an impressive gorge with many waterfalls and cascades. We followed the trail up over glacier-polished slabs and traversed into the valley of the East Fork. The trail alternated between meadow and forest, and we got some nice views of Bomber Basin below the falls, and eventually got a distant view of the falls themselves.

At this point we came across a sign pointing left to the Glacier Trail. I was hoping to see an official sign pointing to the Bomber Falls trail; instead, the sign had scratches on it pointing to the right to “BOMBER” and a faint trail through a meadow. My instincts failed me at that point — I decided to follow the main trail instead and look for an “official” trail junction. Oops. We ended up thrashing down a slope through deadfall to reach the “BOMBER” trail that I had cavalierly ignored.

Once we were back on the correct trail, it was much easier going. We did lose the track in a swampy spot next to a big gray bluff above the creek, but we picked it up again after crossing a talus pile. We met Greg as he came back from scouting the falls area. We followed him to the base of the 600-ft knob that the creek pours over. He and Bob elected to cross a talus field to try to find the base of the falls, while the rest of us went up the steep trail to the top of the knob. The trail goes up and down and sideways, like playing Chutes and Ladders. It's not too hard to follow if you look for cut logs and account for deadfall, but it could use some improvement.

When we reached the top, we decided that we would try to get a view down to the falls. We contoured around the west side of the knob on wet rock, made very slippery by mushy lichen. We were able to inch close to the edge for a view down — the falls roared down through a narrow gorge just below us. We started to have lunch, but then realized that it might be less windy near the top of the knob, where we had already agreed to meet Greg and Bob.

Naturally Greg and Bob were already there. We lounged around on the rock, finding nooks that protected us from the wind and exposed us to some sun. I admired the seriously special view up the canyon, with sunlight glittering off wet granite slabs. After a while, I noticed some different glittering through the trees on the other side of the creek — we had spotted the bomber wreckage, about a hundred yards up from the top of the falls.

The story goes that on August 14, 1943, a B24E bomber was on a training run from Pocatello with eight crew members. It was seen turning up Torrey Creek. Apparently it couldn't quite clear (what is now) Bomber Falls, but even if it had managed to get above the falls, it certainly couldn't have made it out of the canyon. The locals saw a forest fire, and found the wreckage when they responded. The cascade has been known as “Bomber Falls” ever since.

Back in camp, I noticed a huge osprey nest in a tree on the other side of the Trail Lake outlet. One osprey was perched on a nearby branch that bounced around in the wind, while another one was busy with something in the nest. The nest was so deep that both birds could disappear into it, and sometimes we could just see heads or wings bobbing above the rim. It looked like they were busy on some important secret project. Watching the ospreys was a fun pastime in camp.

go to the Bomber Falls gallery

For Saturday, I had originally planned an insane cross-country loop up the West Fork of Torrey Creek from Lake Louise to Ross Lake. The area is gorgeous, but it's so rugged that it probably would have taken us all day just to get halfway through the route. The clincher was the soggy lichen that we were slipping on on Friday — I didn't want to expose our group to exposed scrambling on the wet granite.

So instead we took the trail to Ross Lake. It's a 12-mile out-and-back hike that avoids the scrambling by staying high on sandstone ledges, only dropping down when approaching the lake. The route starts out on the Whiskey Mountain Trail, climbing from the Glacier Trailhead to a junction at 10,200 ft. The switchbacks aren't particularly steep, but they seem to go on forever. The scenery is excellent — there are fantastic views out over the Torrey Creek drainage, and closer in, the cliffs and forest are also very nice. We could see the Continental Divide ahead of us, with its distinctive uniform arc (the old erosional surface after the Laramide Orogeny that originally built the Rocky Mountains).

When we reached the junction with the cut-off trail to Ross Lake, a chilly wind was blowing hard. A couple folks decided that they'd had enough, so after lunch in the sheltering trees, we split up, with some of us soldiering on and the others heading back down. I put on multiple layers of wind protection, which predictably I then took off 10 minutes later.

The trail runs through alternating meadows and forest with gentle ups and downs. Eventually we reached a long meadow with a small pond in it, overlooked by a huge pile of rocks that reminded me of a grandstand. At that point, the trail cuts sharply to the south and descends on steep, rocky switchbacks. We stopped in multiple places to admire the view. After wandering through a delightful woodland, the trail pops out near the north end of Ross Lake.

Ross Lake is surrounded by amazing cliffs and towers cut out of the granite. There is basically no place to camp at the lake — the terrain is granite slabs and talus piles. This was going to be a problem for the multiple groups of backpackers that we encountered. Their dogs were very friendly; at least the dogs wouldn't have much trouble sleeping on the bare rocks. We did see a handful of places to camp along the trail below the switchbacks, none of them close to the water.

While I was wheezing my way back up the switchbacks, Greg came out at the top and encountered a couple of black bears. They were unsociable and camera-shy. I hope the backpackers didn't run into them at night.

On the hike back, the air got clearer and clearer. The smoke got pretty much completely blown out, and the views were spectacular. We could even see the Absaroka Range across the Wind River Valley to the north.

At the trailhead I had to inflate a tire on my 4Runner; that turned out to be a bad omen.

go to the Ross Lake gallery

I got some pushback against doing a big hike on Sunday. Instead, I put together a few shorter adventures.

In the morning, we went to look at petroglyphs. We heard from other folks that there were cool petroglyphs spread out all along the Trail Lake road, and specifically that there were some very nice ones right across the Trail Lake Road from our campsite. I had done a short recon to our local petroglyphs on the previous morning, and I led the group around to the highlights.

The petroglyphs were exquisitely weird and detailed. Some people wondered if the petroglyphs could be very old if they were so sophisticated; however, you could see lichen covering parts of some petroglyphs, so I'm guessing that the petroglyphs are in fact pretty old. A number of the petroglyphs looked vaguely like animals or human figures, but some of the big ones were impossible for me to categorize. Your guess is as good as mine — take a look at the photos and see what you think.

We then piled into our carpooling vehicles and headed for the trailhead, to hike to Lake Louise. Lake Louise is probably the most popular (and shortest) day hike destination from the Glacier trailhead. The trail is surprisingly erratic and poorly graded given its popularity, but that adds to the fun. We hiked across bare rock and through forest, next to some impressive waterfalls and cascades. Occasionally we had to follow cairns across the slabs. There was a massive logjam on the cascade just below the lake, which made some of us wonder if the logs would work as a bridge to get across the creek.

The trail ends at some boulders on the far eastern shore of the lake. We had lunch and enjoyed the awesome view. The lakeshore is quite cliffy in places; we watched people working around a cliffy section on the far shore. It looked like a tough route to take without getting wet. On our (north) side, the cliffs also dropped into the water; however, we could see people camped on the far side of the cliffs, so there was obviously a way to get there.

We were curious, so we decided to do a little bit of my crazy scrambling route. Greg led us up onto the granite dome to the north, then down steep slabs to a brushy draw, which we descended to the campsite. The campers were in the process of pulling down their camp. It turned out that some of the people at the camp had hiked over the slabs, some had waded, and some took a packraft ferry (!).

We walked over to the narrow strait that divides the eastern bay from the main part of Lake Louise. The shoreline gets steep again here, not quite a cliff. It looked to me like there was a class 3 route around the obstacles but it was hard to tell whether it went very far.

Stanley climbed up on some boulders to check it out. It was tempting to go further, but some folks in the group wanted to head back and I didn't want us to get separated when going cross-country, so we turned around. The slabs were an absolute blast on the hike back. We were having so much fun that we walked right past the trail and didn't realize it, and had to backtrack.

On the way back down the trail, we bumped into a small group with a big and playful Irish wolfhound. One guy was wearing a kilt. Yi asked him whether he was wearing anything under the kilt, and he cheerfully demonstrated that he was not. Some things you only see on Labor Day weekends.

Stanley's truck had at least one low tire now, as did Michelle's Subaru. All of us but Greg drove into Dubois (DOO-boyce, pop 971) to get gas and inflate tires. After visiting the gas station, we walked around the business district, such as it is. There is a boardwalk on both sides of the main street with people's names carved into it. A western wear shop was undergoing a bank-organized liquidation sale; Michelle and Bob tried on boots, but didn't buy anything. We stopped at the honey shop, which had zillions of different containers of honey, collected from hives all around the Wind River valley.

Back at camp, Rick and Reba came over to visit. Rick had been camping near us in a very rustic truck camper, and Reba was his 14-year-old border collie mix. Rick had worked for the Forest Service and other organizations in the Winds for 20+ years, and he had some fun stories about living in Wyoming and hiking in the backcountry with his “pack” of dogs. He's not a fan of wolves, but he did have some interesting experiences with grizzlies and moose. The next morning, he was taking off up the Glacier Trail to see if he could find the spot where he had met Bigfoot.

As for us, we packed up and joined the holiday traffic back to Utah. The smoke was thicker on Monday, and I was really happy that we'd had a few clear days in Wyoming.

go to the Lake Louise gallery